The 500-Mile EV - Volkswagen's Eberhard Says It Is Coming Soon
By John O'Dell August 13, 2010
If Martin Eberhard is right, the 500-mile electric car is a lot closer to reality than many in the EV industry think.
----------
VW's E-Up! small electric car could come to the U.S. in 2013.
----------
Eberhard, the co-fonder and former head of Tesla Motors, is now doing battery development work for Volkswagen at its Electronic Research Lab in Northern California's Silicon Valley.
At Tesla, he advocated and helped direct development of a battery pack that used common commercial lithium-ion cells - the kind that look like AA batteries and are widely used in laptop computers and wireless telephones.
At VW he's doing the same and in a recent interview with Britain's AutoCar magazine he dropped a stunner.
VW, which is developing several electric-drive vehicles for the market, is following the Tesla model for its battery packs, concentrating exclusively on so-called consumer or commodity batteries, which the industry calls 18650 cells, rather than on lithium-ion batteries developed specifically for automotive use.
Because those cells are the basic engine for the portable electronics industry, they are constantly being improved, Eberhard said, predicting that they'll have sufficient power density by 2020 to enable development of an automotive battery pack that can deliver more than 500 miles of range on a single charge.
Today's Tesla, using a liquid-cooled battery pack made up of 6,831 of the 18650 cells, has a maximum range - under moderate driving conditions - of around 240 miles. Most other EVs are bigger and heavier and use smaller packs to keep the cost down and thus can deliver only 100 miles or so of range on a single charge.
We've sent a copy of the AutoCar piece to VW's North American headquarters for comment, along with a request to interview Eberhard. While we're waiting for a response, we though we'd go ahead and share the important parts of the magazine's Q&A.
Eberhard is quoted - although we think there might have been some paraphrasing going on, see the note in parentheses - as saying that the idea is to "benefit from state-of-the-art technology straight away" (that's a bit of British phraseology for "right away" and it that doesn't really sound like Eberhard).
The 18650 cells "develop faster than any other kind of battery because there's more demand for them; the industry is already making two billion of them a year."
The lithium-ion 18650 cells Eberhard's team is working on at VW, he said, contain 2.9 amp-hours of power, more than double the 1.4 amp-hours that the best 18650 were providing five years ago when work began on the Tesla battery pack, he said. And more powerful 3.4 amp-hour cells are on the way.
"That rate of development has already had an impact on the cars we're working on. The batteries we used in the original Audi e-tron prototype, for example, gave it 60 kilowatt-hours of power and a range of just over 150 miles. But with the 3.4 amp-hour cells we're about to take delivery of, it should have 100 kilowatt-hours and do close to 300 miles on a charge."
If the current pace of progress continues in the commodity battery world, said Eberhard (right, with Tesla Roadster), the 500-mile EV ought to be in production "within 10 years."
And that, he said, should end EV range anxiety "because how often do you drive more than 500 miles in a day?"
We should point out that while Eberhard's theory is exciting, most automakers have eschewed the 18650 cell, maintaining that stringing enough of them together to make a usable battery pack is a complex and costly job that may work well for a hand-built, limited-production $110,000 Tesla, but isn't all that economically feasible when you have to deliver 100,000 cars a year and price them at under $40,000.
Still, if the industry can deliver a 500-mile battery pack and get the price down through manufacturing efficiencies and economies of scale, all those "optimistic" predictions of 10 percent EV penetration in the global market by 2050 may be transformed into the pessimistic point of view.John O'Dell, Senior Editor
LEAVE A COMMENT
Nice. Hope to see it soon. What's that? 2020?? Guess I'll have to start saving.
The capacity numbers are off. Eberhard is quoted as saying an e-tron with a 60 kWh pack gives just 150 miles range, yet a Tesla Roadster with 53 kWh gives 240 miles range.
Based on the Tesla's approx 200 wh/mi energy consumption a 100 kWh pack, which Eberhard is quoted as saying gives on 300 miles range, would actually be fairly close to the magic 500 mile mark.
He's also quoted as saying the current price for 18650 cells is EURO 200/kWh. Meaning a Tesla pack costs only EURO 10,600 right now!
If VW are looking to build 100 kWh packs with only the next generation 3.4 amp hour 18650 cells we won't need to wait a decade for EVs with 500 mile range on a single charge, it'll be available next year!
The idea of using commodity 18650 cells for a major manufacturer as opposed to a small concern like Tesla is nuts.
They are not going to remain the cheapest option by the time Nissan ramps up to produce enough for 550,000 cars a year, as the volume of that swamps use for laptops etc.
So VW will end up with complex wiring of not particularly cheap batteries which were never designed for the purpose and suffer overheating problems.
And Tesla have criticised Nissan batteries as being primitive?
Here's how Panasonic package their batteries into modules:
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/10/panasonic-20091001.html
140 at a time, in 7 rows of 20.
ADD A COMMENT