Electric Vehicle Battery Efficiency Improves
The Electric Car may be in for a performance boost as the technology behind the battery packs sparks into life. Manufacturers have been erring on the side of caution and limiting their performance to increase the life span.
The massive pack of batteries in Electric Vehicles is probably the most expensive component in these new forms of transport and this has put the breaks on their performance to increase their usable lifespan.
Lithium Ion batteries, the same material that is used in your portable devices like cameras and notepads, does degrade under extreme usage. The main factor here is what is called the “Deep Discharge”, using the batteries until their capacity is nearly zero.
Electric Vehicle Manufacturers have implemented limits on the amount of discharge the Lithium Ion battery is allowed. While the life of the battery is extended this means the performance, and specifically the driving mileage is reduced before you have to pop in to the nearest charging station. Can you imaging filling up your combustion engine driven car and only being able to use half a tank of gas before you need to fill up again. This is the situation for electric.
That is the bad news, there is good news of course. Using the data from the usage of the current electric cars manufactures have realized that they can release some of the limits imposed on the battery packs. The outcome is two fold here, the first is that using the same battery pack, your electric vehicle will be able to vastly increase their range. Secondly if range is not a factor then the size and weight of the battery can be perhaps halved.
The packs are costly and heavy, being able to reduce cost means much cheaper cars on the road and the added bonus means less eight that your car has to carry around. Those early generation vehicles like all first generation goods will lead the way to much better descendants. We just have to think about the performance and size of recent electrical devices like television screens and computer specifications. The battery packs will improve vastly and who knows how far our electric car will take us in the next decade.
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