All you wanted to know about batteries but were afraid to ask

8. YOUR BATTERY; YOUR ANXIETY.

I love my electric vehicle, or EV, as we affectionately call our electric cars here in California. I love that it is quiet. I love its fast pickup from a stop. I love that it requires practically zero service: no oil change; no transmission service; no timing belts. Of course, I love too that it is eco-friendly and driving in the carpool lane. I am bullish on the future of electric vehicles, but first, the technology has to evolve a little more to give the consumer less anxiety, the topic of today's writing.

No, it is not a Tesla. It is not a Leaf. I am one of the early adopters of a Ford Focus Electric. It looks like a regular Ford Focus so it does not stand out in traffic. I nominally get about 80 miles of range which includes a lot of freeway driving...my normal daily commute. Slower driving in stop-and-go traffic increases my range to about 100 miles. Shave 10 or 15 miles during our mild California winters.

My vehicle is powered by a 24 kWh lithium-ion battery pack that is manufactured by LG Chemical, but in reality, only about 19 or 20 kWh are available to me. That's because to provide a 100,000-mile warranty, the battery has to reach 100,000 divided by 80 miles = 1,250 cycles minimum. So battery manufacturers and car makers choose to reduce the capacity of the battery to gain cycle life. Remember the whack-a-mole strategy from earlier posts. Using the water analogy, if you don't fill up the water bucket to the top, you can fill it more times over its life. Tesla Motors, Leaf and virtually every car maker employs this strategy. For the time being, it's ok, but that has to be addressed over time in order to make electric cars more affordable for the broad population.

When I first bought my car, my range anxiety was high. The car dashboard displayed how many miles of driving I had available in the tank, ehem, battery. I charged my car overnight, and I started my morning with about 80 miles. By the time I got to work, the dashboard showed less than 60 miles. I was nervous every time my dashboard dropped below 50 miles, so I charged as frequently as I could. That's range anxiety.

Now, nearly a year and half later, my behavior has changed drastically. I drive my car down to 10 or even 5 miles left in the battery. I plan my route. I know my destination and I know my return route. Keeping 50 or more miles for insurance does not make any more sense. I became comfortable with the given range of 80 miles and I use it effectively. I consistently get about 80 miles, and in the time since I bought it, my comfort level increased and my trust in my dashboard's range estimate has increased. Of course, my maximum driving range was still limited to the greater Bay Area. I cannot drive my car to, say, Los Angeles, but I do use nearly every mile available to me in battery.

However, my range anxiety got replaced with something else: Charging anxiety. You see, if I am comfortable taking my battery down to nearly zero, I need to know that I am close to a charging outlet when I stop. Good news here! The San Francisco Bay Area has lots of charging outlets. But the problem is the speed of charging. If my battery is near zero, it takes a whopping 20 hours to charge it at 120-Volt, and a mere 4 to 5 hours using the 240-Volt chargers. Ouch! That is not acceptable. That is at the core of anxiety in battery-powered cars, phones, or anything else. We need to charge them fast, and I mean really fast....As fast as filling up your gas tank at the gas station.

If you look at what Tesla Motors is doing and what Elon Musk keeps advertising, none of it is about extending the range of their cars. Their publicized priorities are about building cars for the masses (in other words, lower price point) and secondly about charging their cars fast, in half an hour or so.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

8. YOUR BATTERY; YOUR ANXIETY.