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The first EV with a lithium-free sodium battery hits the road in January
(www.engadget.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Curious how it'll perform in real world conditions. Sodium batteries are supposed to have much better charging times and don't degrade the way lithium batteries do, both of which would be huge. Fingers crossed they live up to expectations.
(Also obligatory "expand and improve public transit damnit!")
As some used to "gotchas" and things aren't free, I'm wondering what kind of shortcomings[1] these batteries have that others do not.
[1] for example acid batteries can push a lot of power, but they are heavy and contain lead and well... acid. The nickel cadmium doesn't contain lead and acid, but has memory so you should follow discharge them before charging again. They are lighter, but still not light. Lithium ion are light, don't have memory, but can explode, also lose life if they are kept fully discharged or charged for long periods of time. They also slowly discharge when not in use, mainly due to protective circuit needing electricity to run.
Their only downside is having a little less energy density than lithium ion ones. You need a larger battery for the same capacity basically. Everything else is a positive - they are even non-flammable and the materials to make them are abundant and easy to obtain.
Thanks. That's awesome to hear.
Interested to know about durability also :-)
Where I live they recently bought a bunch of electric and hybrid public buses.
Hope they simply bought trolley buses and didn't waste money on battery buses
It's such a waste to put batteries in inner city buses
Yeah, and the cables would install themselves automatically.
That's better than the buses breaking down.
https://youtu.be/B78-FgNqdc8?si=1dMORMc1EYhA6abL
Sorry but youtube experts and their google research are not a reliable source of information for me. It's entertaining but it's the last thing I would base city planning on.
Lol
" i refuse to engage with content that says i am wrong"
So some dude on the Internet says I'm wrong. Guess what? I'm also a dude on the Internet and I say he's wrong. Checkers!
Yeah but this dude has this thing called common sense, try acquiring that first.
Maybe then you can think about the implications of BE buses more than " cables need to be installed therefore Be is better than trolley"
You might think about stuff like extra weight extra purchase cost, decreased capacity, more expensive road maintenance cost, less uptime due to charging, less efficiency due to weight, decreased range in cold or hot when AC is needed that makes everything worse
Show me a town that recently switched to trolleys and done a cost/benefit analysis after couple of years that confirms they saved money and I will absolutely agree with you.
Why don't you show me a town that switched from trolleys to BeBs and saved money ?
I don't have data, you don't have data. All we know is that lots of cities choose electric/hybrid buses while no cities choose trolleys. If you think it's because everyone working in the public transport departments is stupid and only some youtuber is super smart that's fine. I'm sceptical.
Literally the first city I checked is switching gas powered buses to trolleys and new bus purchases are going down to 0 and Brno unlike many cities has an excellent public transport system
https://www.idnes.cz/brno/zpravy/dopravni-podnik-brno-financni-plan-uspory-zvysene-naklady-rozpocet.A221213_696580_brno-zpravy_azu
You checked one city at random and they were switching to trolleys? Amazing. Anyway, good for them. Let's hope it will work and in a couples of years we'll have some hard data to base policy on.
Not at random, I lived there for 9 years, so it's a city close to my heart.
Trolley buses are a weird niche. They require permanent overhead cable infrastructure like trams do but don't have the other benefits of trams - higher capacity, greater speed, better ride and no tyre pollution. I figure if you're going to install a trolley bus route you probably might as well install rails at the same time and get the benefits of trams. (Aka streetcars for the North Americans out there)
The City of London did assessments on trolley buses and found that the added capacity of trams made them the better choice pretty much anywhere trolley buses were proposed, despite the slightly higher install cost.
Actually electric buses make a lot more sense, as the utilisation and environmental impact would be much greater compared to normal EV cars.
Plus you are conveniently omitted mentioning the energy losses of the cables, the maintenance cost, the installation cost, etc.
Not to mention how unbelievably ugly stringing that shit all over the service area is. Electric buses make a ton of sense.
id be genuinely surprised if the energy losses of the cables are more than the energy losses of charging the batteries even if they are they are more than likely offset by the weight difference of batteries vs the weight of the cable connecting mechanism.
Then there is the issue of range and the uptime of the vehicles while you can use a trolley 24/7 you have to charge the bev buses
Then there is the issue of extreme weather cold or hot where due to AC and or heating and the temperature itself affects the range a lot
Then there are the maintenance costs of the battery the power capacity since you need space for the batteries
So all in all you exchange a bunch of negatives for the benefit of not needing overhead cables
A trolley with a small built in battery for those last few miles you might need to connect but don't want to pull cables is the best of both worlds.
Hope that was a comprehensive enough dismantling.
Source for your claims?
Plus do you know how expensive it is to support the whole cable infrastructure, including personnel salaries, etc. I am not convinced your math is right, but feel free to prove me wrong.
My city recently decided to pull down the existing overhead cable network in favour of 'local' batteries in buses (was aging and needed a lot of maintenance which they were allergic to)
Unfortunately, that doesn't really argue either way, as same city is now seeing the issues of not maintaining it's water infrastructure for the last recent decades... They do some dumb shit
What do you think cables are made of? Gold? Lol
What do you think is more expensive maintaining the cable infrastructure or the road surfaces under the extra heavy buses?
Here is a good youtube video on the issue
https://youtu.be/B78-FgNqdc8?si=fIy93Q8QPqTwRorV
I am sorry but since when do we consider YouTube as a credible source? I am looking at scientific peer reviewed proof, not someone's video on the matter.
Currently living in Shenzhen and you'd be surprised that you can actually have it both ways. You can get around via transit quite easily, but also driving isn't too difficult. The problem with US cities is mostly just single family homes, which waste a bunch of space. If everything is less dense, you have to drive further to get to where you want to go, and building public transit makes less sense since it needs to service more areas to reach the same amount of people