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From The Mobilist Inbox This Week
Super-duper fast-charging, battery days, apartment dwelling
Faster than superfast: Fast-charging is the biggest thing in batteries and electric vehicles at the moment. The subject was central to Volkswagen’s Power Day on Monday, and, along with cost parity with combustion, is the singular must-have if ordinary motorists are to seriously consider buying an EV. So it is that, in a new paper in Nature Energy, a group of 10 researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Texas A&M, and Brown disclose a “faster than superfast” battery, as CMU’s Venkat Viswanathan, one of the authors, puts it.
The proof of concept, led by MIT’s Yet-Ming Chiang, combines a lithium metal anode coated with a sodium-potassium alloy, the result of which is to allow 10 times the charging speed ordinarily achieved with lithium metal, all at room temperature. “We have to redefine what is superfast with lithium metal,” Viswanathan told me.
Who’s next: Tesla invented “Battery Day” last September. In the subsequent months, GM, QuantumScape, and, on Monday, Volkswagen have held their own events to crow about battery accomplishments big and small. To this, BloombergNEF’s James Frith tweets: “How about an EV/battery day from Apple next? Surely it’s got to be getting close.” The Mobilist seconds that.
The apartment-dweller’s guide to EV ownership: Do you desperately want to be a first-mover and buy an electric now, even before the big price sticker drops coming in the middle of the decade? In a piece on the Medium platform, Robert Planz navigates what to do if the answer is yes and you are lacking a garage.
