Tesla's Million Mile Battery

Hi, welcome to another cold fusion video previously on this channel. We’ve covered the current battery revolution extensively, from Samsung’s graphene battery promising 5 times faster charging coming to phones as early as 2020, to recent battery research breakthroughs, to an exclusive interview with an industry expert in battery recycling. In all of this, the company that has come up the most is Tesla. Love them or hate them, they were The Pioneers of the latest iteration of the electric car. They forced innovation from industry old guards like Porsche and Jaguar, which is great. This isn’t to mention their batteries used in industrial settings such as balancing power grids. Elon Musk last year claims something especially outlandish, a new battery that could last for over 1,000,000 miles. Critics thought it was impossible, but a new study may prove that it is possible, and indeed is coming. In this video we’ll learn about what’s going on. You are watching cold Fusion TV In April of 2018, Elon claimed that Tesla would soon have a battery that can last for 1,000,000 miles, or about 1.6 million kilometres. The current battery pack is about maybe 300 to 500,000 miles of the new battery pack, probably going to production next year, is designed explicitly for 1,000,000 miles of operation. The entire vehicle, battery pack inclusive, is designed to operate for 1,000,000 miles with minimal maintenance maintenance. After this amount of use, it will still have over 90% battery health remaining. To put that into context, that’s two times the current lifespan of Tesla’s contemporary batteries. We’ll get to the details of the battery in a second, but if it’s claimed, this could put electric cars in general in an interesting position. According to NBC News, a regular petrol car lasts for about 150,000 to 300,000 miles before something breaks that makes it not worth repairing. When you think about it, a regular petrol powered car is actually pretty complicated. It needs regular maintenance to keep it operational and it’s unavoidable that some parts just wear out after a given amount of time. Problems like a slipping automatic gearbox or a blown head gasket can be expensive to repair and can take a car off the road permanently. Electric cars are much simpler, with the only major moving parts being the electric motor and usually a single speed transmission. With these new batteries this all means electric cars could last longer than their petrol counterparts. It goes further than this though, as you’ve previously seen in the battery recycling episode, Rob, the industry expert I interviewed for the piece, stated that electric vehicle batteries have much more life after being used up in the car. They can then be used in power management to support a grid, and after that, lower and lower power consumption requirements until they can finally be recycled. With a battery with twice the state-of-the-art lifespan, this opens up a whole new world of opportunities. OK, so let’s take a look at the battery itself. A physicist by the name of Jeff Don led the research of the new battery, which was vastly superior to any other lithium ion battery previously seen. Jeff is already a leading expert in lithium ion research. Him and his team at Dalhousie University has an exclusive licensing agreement with Tesla. This suggests that this technology could appear in the company’s cars. The details of the paper are pretty extensive. It includes the full cell design, including electrode compositions, electrolyte mixture additives and more. The team’s results show that these batteries could be charged and depleted more than 4000 times, and after this they only lose 10% of their original energy capacity. To put this into perspective, a 2014 paper showed that similar lithium ion batteries lost half their capacity after only 1000 cycles. According to the study headed by Jeff, which was published in September 2019, the 1,000,000 mile figure is equivalent to two decades of Ingrid energy storage. What’s interesting, though, is that the authors of the paper don’t herald this all as a new breakthrough. They’re presented as a benchmark for other battery researchers. This is the opposite to common practice. Usually, battery designs are often a closely guarded secret within the EV industry. Providing this information to everyone aims to help other companies improve their own designs for the future. Here’s a quote by the authors of the paper. Quote full details of the cells including electrode compositions, electrode loadings, electrolyte compositions, additives, etc. Have been provided. This has been done so that others can recreate these cells and use them as benchmarks for their own R&D efforts. End Quote I think this is great news. This research was done to further the progress of battery technology, not just for one group, but as a whole for everyone. And I think that’s a noble goal. Generally speaking, there’s usually a trade off between energy density and battery lifetime. If you want more of one, you get less of the other. Jeff’s group was responsible for doing the seemingly impossible that overcame this trade off. Now you can have increased energy density and battery life. Interestingly, the materials used in the paper aren’t new. The huge performance boost was achieved through a great deal of optimising already common battery ingredients. They also tweaked the nanostructure of the battery’s cathode to increase performance. The new nanostructure is less likely to develop cracks when the battery is charging. Cracks in the cathode material cause a decrease in the lifetime and performance of the battery and this happens during repeated charging cycles. Basically the new cathode and this new battery will be able to resist more wear over time. Jeff Don estimates that most EV users use only about 1/4 of a charge per day. But to make something like a fleet of robo taxis or an empire of long haul electric trucks, Tesla would need a battery that can handle full discharge cycles each day. This could really make electric long range or long term transport of many kinds much more feasible. So with so many stories of battery research rapidly coming forward, it seems like we’re at the start of a new age, an age different from the previous decade where battery technology stayed stagnant. If you do want to see my previous battery videos, including the state of battery cycling, I’ll leave a link to my battery playlist below. And just a quick update, while making this video, some other battery news just broke Researchers at the University of Illinois in Chicago have made a new carbon dioxide battery that holds seven times more charge than current lithium ion methods that publish their findings in the Journal of Advanced Materials. So if this video does well and you do want to see a video about this new tech, I’ll be sure to make it. So thanks for watching, I really appreciate it. Don’t forget to check out the Cold Fusion podcast and also follow me on Instagram and Twitter. Anyway, this has been to go go and you’ve been watching Cold Fusion and I’ll catch you again soon for the next video. Cheers guys. Have a good one Cold Fusion. It’s new thinking.