Exploring the 1000 Mile Car Battery - Aluminum Air Hype?

But what do you think? Would you want to drive an EV that required battery swapping? Thanks Morning Brew for my daily news briefing - sign up for free here bit.ly/mbundecided And if you liked this video, be sure to check out Exploring Massless Energy Battery Breakthrough https://youtu.be/7rJf_n3bc0I?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7UWp64ZlOKUPNXePMTdU4d

If they are super light with super high energy density, but require specialists to swap out, then they sound like they are perfect for aircraft.

Biggest elephant in the room: what's the roundtrip efficiency? How much energy is needed to recycle the battery for each kWh of the battery?

I'd like to see a hybrid approach using both the aluminum air batteries for long-term storage and, perhaps smaller, lithium ion batteries. That way if you run out of aluminum air battery, you can still recharge. It's always good to have some recharge capability on board for regen. This hybrid approach would be way better than what we call hybrids today!

We'll have growing pains like this as we move forward. My Dad grew up in the 1950s and 60s. Because of poor lubricants and tolerances capable in the cars at the time, he was used to cars needing an engine rebuild every 50-60 thousand miles or so. The 100, 200, 300 thousand mile car engines today still are amazing to him. We'll probably experience something similar with EVs. We'll have range anxiety while our kids will wonder how we became so traumatized.

The obvious thing to do is to build a vehicle with 75 miles of range on lithium ion & 500 miles on aluminum air. Then all your daily driving can be rechargeable, & you dip into the aluminum for long trips. Battery changes are minimized down to once or twice a year.

First off, I’m a marine engineer, and the thought of replacing the huge fuel tanks with stacks of shipping container sized aluminum air fuel cells in the same space would be great. Fuelling would be fast with no worries of spills probably using cranes and it would eliminate the diesel or heavy fuel generator side of the diesel electric setup. Win win… even if only shipping were to benefit from this tech. Big thing is price per battery change. It’d have to be much lower than overall cost of fuel and engine replacement. Here’s hoping.

9:03 Imagine missing the fact that your long range gas tank is almost empty and you run out of gas. How much harder is it for a service to deliver a battery than to deliver a can of gas? And recognize, delivery of a battery is like delivering a complete full-up of gas, not just a gallon or two of gas. If this is implemented, the infrastructure will adjust and running out of aluminum will be no different than running out of gas. And if I’m designing a system for a car, it would have two “cells”, exactly as shown in the video, so you could swap out half your capacity while running on the other half. That way, the half way point is your trigger to find a new battery pack, not the empty mark. When I started driving many decades ago, my dad stressed that it costs the same to keep the top half of your gas tank full as it does to keep the bottom half full, so I already see the the half way mark as time to refuel. It’s not a difficult concept to learn or follow in your daily life.

It sounds like a good alternative for city buses. They could figure out how long between swaps and do it back at the motor pool. Especially for places that might lack good power infrastructure.

This looks like a better option for Electric Airplanes. High Density for point-to-point locations, then swap at the other side. All the infrastructure for swap + storage of the pack would be at the airports/terminals. Hopefully the recycling/manufacturing would happen nearby as well. Battery swap for cars would be a no-go for me, it could possibly make sense for long-haul trains or trucks, but I don't think regular cars need the range as much.

At first I thought it is stupid to loading up the swappable batteries onto trucks and carrying them to swap stations because it is a waste of resources, but then I remembered we have been doing the exact same thing with Petrol. Therefore I think it will boil down to the energy density. With a 1000 mile capacity, I would roughly be making a visit to the swap station every 3 months, which is awesome actually. As long as the proposed solution instructed a significant increase in energy density it is a strong candidate.

Wow! My first job was research in Al-Air batteries almost 42 years ago. The exact same problems, especially with regard to corrosion of the Al. We approached it by playing with alloying agents. This worked to a degree, but not nearly as successfully as the MIT approach. The video really took me back. Thanks for making it.

Yes, a recyclable battery swap every few thousand miles instead of daily charging… count me in! Many people would be interested in this after all conventional ICE cars need periodic oil changes and people put up with it.

It could work, though I think a combination of Aluminum and Lithium batteries would be best. You could recharge your lithium pack normally, but insert an Aluminum pack for road trips.

The idea of it being like a aux tank for current lithium batteries isnt bad. If you plan to go on a long trip, throw one in, get there and swap it out when you are heading out again.

"When you run out of juice " have you heard of roadside assistance, 😉 they can bring you a module (I presume the batteries will be modular) to get you to a swapping station. ICE vehicles don't need to be towed to petrol stations either when they run out of fuel. 😊

If the "refueling stations" are just a machine that does the swap in a few minutes, then the not-rechargeable thing doesn't sound so bad. Didn't Tesla hype that idea at some point?

I think this would be a great addition to a lithium ion battery as a sort of range extender. For 90% of your driving you just have a small lithium ion battery, but if you want to do a long trip you get one of these installed before you leave and suddenly you have like 1000km of range.

This seems like an excellent option for things like planes, trains, and boats- where they all come to dedicated ports. Seems like it would be easy to build a swapping/recycling infrastructure for those. For cars, it seems like it would make for a good Emergency charger for ev's, but unless the whole auto industry went that way and they were available as quick swap universal batteries all over the place, I don't think it's a good general auto-option. I would absolutely keep one of these in my car for emergencies though (as, it would be easy to keep the aluminum separate from the electrolyte until you needed it. it would be like the E-version of a spare gas can. Also seems good for camping and such, provided there was somewhere to get it recycled/refurbished. I wonder how hard it would be to just make it so you could pull out the aluminum plate when not in use? that would help with the degradation issue, it seems like.)

I think it's interesting that an oil company is taking the plunge into electric vehicles. It seems like a smart move as it theoretically would keep the company relevant, especially since their model involves swapping out batteries at their already existing petrol bunks