Hopefully this means they are thinking of making an all-electric minivan.
I love my Honda minivan, but its biggest issue is that 95% of the time I'm doing a short drive which is just killer on the engine and the environment.
Next year there are a bunch of electric minivans coming out, but they are all of the "2nd tier" vans, ie not the Toyota or Honda, which are sort of the gold standard of minivans.
The moment either of them drop an all-electric, I'll be like that meme with Fry shouting "take my money".
As much as I dislike domestic minivans, I've really liked our Pacifia Hybrid. It covers that "95%" just fine in the summer (in the winter the resistive heat (and general cold temperature impact) takes a toll on range).
We looked at the Pacifica hybrid when we bought ours, but that year (2017) it was brand new and the mechanic recommended against it until Chrysler had a chance to work out the kinks in their hybrid technology.
If I had to get a new van today, I'd consider it (or their all-electric next year).
The seats in the PHEV are nicer than the folding seats in the gas model and the pop out pretty easily. We have the passenger one out full time, easier to get to the kids in the back and allows for more storage when travelling.
Yeah, if it was a pure EV I suspect that's the route they would have gone. As a plug-in hybrid, it matters a lot less (since you only have ~30 miles of battery range anyway).
Minivans seem like a great fit for PHEV. Short trips could be all-electric, and the longer ones powered by an ICE running efficiently at highway speeds.
Is there no PHEV in the minivan space? I drive a PHEV Prius with a 40k electric-only range and it's great for guilt-free short trips without being a 2-tonne brick of batteries.
Yes, merely a 1.75 ton brick of batteries, among other parts
Which is actually pretty inline with a typical midsize sedan. People really underestimate how much cars weigh. But EVs are indeed pushing it up even higher. A breakthrough on reducing battery weight would be enormously beneficial all around.
Yeah, I was being a bit hyperbolic (and metric) and the a PHEV is only about 15% difference in curb-weight between comparable full-EVs, but that's not nothing.
Currently Toyota and Nissan plan to have solid state batteries in 2027 and 2028... and Honda is planning sometime after that.
Honda currently has 0 EVs for sale.
These guys dont give af about EVs... touting Panasonic's research while they twiddle their thumbs and do the bare minimum.
Currently Honda is planning to have solid state batteries at the same time as the rest of the industry. So they make a lot of noise about this, but they're exactly as far behind as it appears.
Honda is a very Japanese company internally - they have their 30 year vision (all electric fleet) and they take slow incremental steps to achieve it.
The reality is they’re a fairly small automaker and 99% of their current sales are IC cars. They believe they will do more for the environment to keep spending a large portion of their R&D budget getting gains out of their existing cars than completely pivoting to something people aren’t currently buying. In the meantime, a lot of the fundamental issues with EV cars will iron themselves out.
Westerners want results tomorrows but the Japanese will take incremental steps that maximize the chance of success over an incredibly long time horizon. Very different mindsets.
Trouble is that all automakers selling in North America seem to have no interest in making EVs that ordinary people can afford, it is all about luxury and behemoth vehicles.
When Chinese manufacturers reach our shores I think domestic, Euro and Japanese carmakers will get an unpleasant surprise.
Given what we already see playing out in Europe and America's existing history of trade policy with China, I suspect politics/trade policy will likely be very unkind to allowing imports of cheap chinese cars to the US any time soon.
European and Japanese manufacturers are already getting that nasty surprise in European markets competing with Chinese EVs like the MG4 etc.
MG is a Chinese native brand in my eyes and a lot of European consumers - it's widely known it's a Chinese product even if consumers don't know of SAIC. This isn't like they bought 51% of some European car company and kept the same management, workers and factories; none of the cars are made in Europe, they are largely made in China and sold around the world with the logo of a failed UK car manufacturer SAIC acquired decades ago etc.
Certainly very few customers think they are buying a British product! It also hasn't prevented the MG4 from picking up a lot of critical acclaim/car of the year awards in Europe too, and virtually every review of the car mentions its Chinese origin, usually in the context of it offering more EV for less money in several regards than a European ID3 etc.
Sure, then what do you think explains such a high disparity between MG's and local Chinese brand's EV sales in EU? The best selling Chinese EV brand, BYD, has 0.6% of regional market share.
That's clearly because making and selling EVs don't make a ton of financial sense. EVs that do are ridiculed and criticized to death. It was almost solely because of Tesla selling vehicles at loss for literally a decade that EVs became recognized as wastefully expensive but viable option.
EVs that do or almost do make sense without strong subsidization by investments, such as Nissan Leaf, Toyota bZ4X, Honda e[1] are still ignored and/or trivialized for disappointing product value propositions.
1: Why is the e sometimes considered a compliance car? There's no gas variant or shared platform or body panel, it's all-custom all-new ... garbage. But not a factory engine swap like MX-30 EV or e-Golf.
> Westerners want results tomorrows but the Japanese will take incremental steps that maximize the chance of success over an incredibly long time horizon. Very different mindsets.
This may be true, but unfortunately the timeline we have created for ourselves with regards to climate change is unyielding. The scale of the problem is that we need to take as many IC cars off the road as fast as possible and put as many electric cars on the road as possible if we want to avoid disastrous climate scenarios.
This rings true for Mazda as well, which has eventual plans but nothing immediate. I'm sure once they have their EVs, they will uphold to the same reliability as their ICs.
Honda isn't even doing incremental steps, they are sitting it out still hoping EVs fail. That was a "safe" bet 10 years ago but completely insane now. Car companies just can't pivot on a dime, you have to ramp up your supply chain over a few years which the the Japanese OEMs are NOT doing.
In the early 2000s Toyota and Honda did hybrids right while the US OEMs sat out the first 10 year. Japan OEMS are doing that failed US OEM stragegy now for EVs... and they'll unfortunately pay for it.
Yeah between this and Toyota's similar talk about amazing tech just around the corner (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36833836) it feels like this could be a concerted effort by Japanese car manufacturers to create some FUD to keep people out of EVs while they get their act together.
Nope, sorry that amazing car with 140mi range for almost $40k that was only sold in the EU and Japan was discontinued and Honda already shutdown the production line. For some reason, this car that was introduced 2 years after the Model 3 had poor sales.
Really bad HN title "Same Energy Density at Half the Weight". That is nonsensical; "density" should be elided in the title. The actual goal is to double the energy density so that the battery can provide the same energy at half the weight.
"Simply, the energy density would be doubled. So same energy, same volume base, kind of half [the weight]," Aoyama said.
Could "energy density" not refer to energy-per-volume rather than mass? Then that headline might make sense per this quote from someone at Honda: "Simply, the energy density would be doubled. So same energy, same volume base, kind of half [the weight]"
Although the author himself confuses the matter, suggesting volume is also reduced: "If Honda's solid-state batteries truly do cut weight and size in half without reducing performance, there could be quite a bit more space in the floor of future Honda vehicles."
Fixed. That bogus headline came in through the RSS feed, I did look at the article but I should have taken a third look at the headline. (Looks like management revised the headline again!)
> One direction the company may take is to build smaller, lighter cars, with longevity on a full charge similar to EVs at present.
I'm still angry at discontinuation of the Honda Fit in the USA.
It's not just Honda of course, the subcompact hatchback is largely gone from the US market. Cars are more efficient such that larger heavier 2023 cars are nearly as fuel efficient as (eg) a 2013 Fit... but obviously a 2023 Fit would be even more efficient (and _is_ in other markets, where it's sold as a jazz). In the US we take advantage of greater efficiency to make bigger and heavier cars with the same mileage, instead of actually more efficient cars.
This is not news, but whatever USA regulation and legislation is trying to do encourage actual increases in fuel efficiency aren't working.
The US does not buy exclusively giant mega-cars because of some poorly implemented regulation.
A giant car is a status symbol in America, and basically necessary if you don't want to be made fun of by your more conservative friends, oddly, seeing as the EPA and other environmental regulation was explicitly a conservative effort.
It is interesting that literally the opposite of solid-state batteries is happening. More cars are being sold with LFP batteries which have lower density but are cheaper and have longer life cycles.
BYD is selling a bunch of Sodium Ion batteries in China. They are near half the price per KWh but they are bigger and heavier than lithium Ion and LFP. At that price however the cars get cheaper for the same range but the maximum range comes down a bit. Sodium Ion is going to dominate in home storage batteries in a year or two I suspect and mid and low range EVs.
I have been passively following sodium ion for home and grid. Any reliable data on their lifespan? I thought LFPs still retained an advantage of recharge cycles.
Not really, it just has such a long cycle life that staying at 100% means a lot less.
The reason manufactures like you to charge to 100% semi-frequently is because LFPs have a fairly flat voltage curve. There's not a lot of difference in voltage between 20% and 80% which means predicting how full the battery is can be tricky for the charge controller. (nothing worse than seeing your car go from 40% to 17% in a heart beat because the controller was off).
Charging the car to 100% is the best way to calibrate the charge controller.
Coulomb counting has issues with accumulated error in any system. LFPs just make things worse. Consider that if the counting is off by only 0.1%, then if you only use coulomb counting to determine state of charge, you will accumulate a 10% error after only 50 charge and discharge cycles. Voltage based readings to "reset" or calibrate the maximum/minimum set points are extremely important. For LFP batteries, they need to be very close to the 100% state of charge to accurately measure. Regular lithium ion can be measured at much lower states or charge (70-90% usually, to my knowledge).
LFP has other desirable properties as well, such as higher power density (great for acceleration), requiring no cobalt, and being much safer when punctured (doesn't start a fire).
There's a right mix of density/weight that can push things in favor of solid state. For example, if they need less or no cooling and have LFP like lifecycles, then you could see really interesting things in terms of the range. All the sudden a 50kWh solid state battery might compete in range with a 80kWh LFP due to the massively reduced weight.
This all remains to be seen though. CATL I think is one of the only manufactures signalling mass production of solid state batteries but it's sort of a "believe it when I see it" situation. (Ditto with sodium batteries).
Reducing weight is always useful alin improving efficiency and electric cars are really heavy compared to gas cars. But that's not going to make that much difference in range per batter efficiency. They should focus on the efficiency of the drivetrain, the cars aerodynamic properties. Tesla has a more efficient drive, train and better aerodynamics than most other vehicles, that leads to much better efficiency per battery power.
I imagine that getting a heavier car up to speed in stop and go traffic would be more energy intensive. Also driving it uphill has to use up a lot more battery since it's so much heavier. The weight reduction should improve [1] tire longevity and reduce maintenance costs. Overall I think it could help with range and costs so it seems like a worthy thing to focus on.
Yeah weight also has all sorts of knock on effects on other components. Suspension, tires, brakes, frame all need to get beefed up for extra weight and/or wear quicker.
Unless it's a steep grade you'll recoup a lot of that uphill energy going down hill. The energy used going up the hill is just stored potential kinetic energy.
You don't need to do regen to get that energy back. Your car gets significant air and rolling resistance going down the highway, its having to put in energy to keep the car going 40+mph. Using that stored kinetic energy of just going down the hill is extremely efficient so long as you're not having to do any braking, which unless you're rolling down a mountain you probably don't need to "ride the brakes". Hence my "unless its a steep grade".
The energy does not need to go back into the battery. It offsets the energy needed from the battery to keep the car going at speed.
Regen efficiency makes no difference in most hills, because you probably won't be using the regen for it.
Regen breaking should in theory help mitigate that. A lot of that energy is recaptured when you slow down. Heavier vehicles have more energy to recapture, assuming the drive train is up to it.
Reducing weight sure is the most effective way to improve efficiency.
The best Tesla model 3 uses 25 kWh / 100 miles and weighs two tons.
A top of the line cargo bike like the Tern GSD is capable of carrying passengers and luggage using only ~1 kWh / 100 miles, because it weighs only 75 pounds.
Slightly reducing the weight of the battery pack in a full sized car is missing the forest for the trees when it comes to lowering transportation emissions. As long as we're supply constrained for lithium battery cells, those 50 kWh of batteries going into the Tesla would be better going into 50-100 e-cargo bikes that each take a car off the road.
It's not going as fast as the tesla. iirc the wind resistance goes up as the square of the speed (I need to find a ref for this, I read it all the time, I guess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_equation).
Anyway, you can't compare a bike going much slower than a vehicle. If we were riding bikes, at much lower speeds than 70, then no doubt we'd be getting vastly more distance for energy used. But that's a separate argument from the impact of weight on energy usage.
That's true they they are both vehicles that move you, but a bike vs a car are in very different classes, unless your car only goes 30 mph in normal use, like in a congested city.
I'm surprised the article doesn't point out that a lighter battery (all else equal) makes a safer car.
Beyond the obvious stuff like reduced braking distance and improved handling, a lighter car means less energy to dissipate during a collision which allows safety products and features to work more effectively.
That's a great point, battery electric cars are heavier than gas cars and so hard to stop them. I can agree with that and I'm an EV proponent. Another thing that makes electric cars potentially more dangerous. They have way more instant acceleration AKA torque.
It's hard not to think that both Honda and Toyota are just trying to convince EV buyers to delay their purchase since something "much better" is about to be released, or at least until they have time to release competitive EVs. Both companies are in the press talking about huge improvements possible with their solid state batteries, with no current production to speak of.
Technically speaking, batteries do get lighter when discharged! But not in any useful way, and entirely unlike the situation with aeroplanes, of course.
Do they technically actually do get lighter? Since it's a solid-state battery, nothing is actually moving outside the battery (the ions move from one electrode to another, but they remain within the battery while charging/discharging) and because of law of conservation of mass, the weight should stay the same.
But I'm no battery expert, maybe someone knows better.
I think even with a 50% weight reduction for the same amount of energy, it still doesn't come close to the energy density of jet fuel.
And furthermore, there are more things to consider than just the energy itself, if we want to deploy it widely. Things like charging time, changing existing infrastructure, costs for R&D and development and finally all the regulatory approvals you'd have to go through. Of course not impossible but I think we're still really far away from making it happen.
In regards to charging time, I would think physically switching batteries to a charged one (or many) would make a lot of sense. Just a new form of the current refueling process airplanes go through now.
Most batteries have ~1C charging time (Which translates to being able to go from 0% SoC to 100% SoC in 1 hour).
For most flights, you are looking to anywhere from 1 to 2 hours to get a plane ready for the next flight. Plenty of time to plug it in and charge it up.
The bigger problem would be delivering the massive amount of juice needed to charge a plane up in that time frame. For that, maybe it would make sense to swap batteries and have some on reserve.
The problem is that airplanes cost energy to stay in the air. There’s a well-known relation that an airplane operated at best economy (most are) costs ~0.4kWh/ton-km [1]. That per ton of total mass in the sky.
So the problem is that, with current battery technology, the total weight of a battery electric plane is around 3x that of a fossil plane[2]. Taking into account typical efficiency, that means a battery plane requires more energy to move a given amount of cargo a given distance.
And that’s with using relatively ancient fossil fuel engines. Unless batteries get markedly better, you’re better off just synthesizing liquid hydrocarbon fuel from atmospheric CO2 and solar panels.
[2] I’ve seen battery conversions of a Cessna 208 and a Cessna 337. After conversion, they have roughly the same payload of a Cessna 182 and Cessna 172, respectively. The gross takeoff weight of the battery plane ends up about 2.5-3x that of the smaller fossil plane, assuming same payload and fuel to fly equivalent distance. In both instances range drops from ~800 miles to ~200.
For another example, look at the Pipistrel Velis Electro: with daytime VFR reserves, range is less than 70 miles (my estimate, because Pipistrel actually doesn’t quote a range estimate, stating that endurance for training sorties is “the appropriate parameter to quote”). A Cessna 162 has the exact same gross weight (both are LSAs), but a 38% higher rate of climb, and roughly 5x the range with same payload. Pipistrel also had to make other compromises: 162 has a 20% shorter takeoff roll and 20% lower stall speed, too.
> Would this be something that might make electric aircrafts practical?
Electric will never replace jet fuel. It simply can't compete for long haul heavy airliner flights. But we only need ~1000wh/kg (cheaply, mass produceably) for general aviation to go electric. A 50% increase from current average LiPo specific energies gets us about half way there.
>I look forward to the announcement some day when they figure out how to make them so they won't burn.
There may be a solid-state battery chemistry I am unaware of, but the vast majority of them do not burn.
That's not strictly true, ANYTHING can burn. But on a human scale using reasonable metrics, solid state batteries are less flammable than the plastic in the interior of the car they are powering.
solid state battery technology is a huge field of research at the moment, right? It seems strange to bury the lede here -- is Honda saying they have made a breakthrough in solid state batteries that no one else has?
I love my Honda minivan, but its biggest issue is that 95% of the time I'm doing a short drive which is just killer on the engine and the environment.
Next year there are a bunch of electric minivans coming out, but they are all of the "2nd tier" vans, ie not the Toyota or Honda, which are sort of the gold standard of minivans.
The moment either of them drop an all-electric, I'll be like that meme with Fry shouting "take my money".