How's that for click bait? But it's actually true.I didn't know what the SDI of Samsung SDI actually stood for. So I tried to discover. It is harder than you think to find out, partially because the answer is a bit too cute, and so I guess they stopped pretending it stands for anything. But back at the end of the last century, they said: The new name, Samsung SDI, stands for Samsung with the initial letter S, 'Display' and 'Digital' with D and 'Interface' and 'Internet Component' with I. I said you wouldn't believe it. In fact, Samsung SDI actually makes displays and, more relevant for this post, "energy storage solutions." Batteries for Electric Vehicles There are multiple changes going on in the automotive industry simultaneously (for example, see my post Triple Witching Hour for Automotive ). The result of this is that sometimes all the trends get mixed up together. But the big driver(!) of the switch from ICE to electric traction is battery technology and the charging infrastructure that goes with it. (In our industry, ICE usually means in-circuit emulation, but in automotive it is internal combustion engine, just in case that isn't obvious.) Unfortunately, battery technology does not have it's Moore's Law with fast exponential growth or we could run our cars on a AAA cell by now. As an aside, hard disk devices (HDD) have managed to grow even faster even though they only depend secondarily on Moore's Law for the electronics, but luckily smart people kept working out new ways of writing bits onto rotating media, which is just as well, or until SSDs (flash disk drives) came along we'd have been stuck with computers with gigabytes of RAM and tens of megabytes of disk for permanent storage. At the Ludwigsburg Congress, Hanho Lee of Samsung SDI presented on The Future of Electromobility and Automotive Batteries . He is the leader of product planning, market intelligence and communications, which sounds like he has lot on his plate. Anyway, that day he was in communication mode. Some of what he talked about is what Samsung is doing, but he had a huge amount of interesting data of wide applicability. Drivers to the Growth of Electromobility The chart above shows the hurdles to electromobility (so lower on the graph is good, "down and to the right"). Initially a mixture of high gas prices and big government incentives (both in the forms of subsidies for electric cars, and, in Europe especially, very high taxes on gasoline). But initial vehicles were early adopter products for people who were especially green (and really wanted other people to see it). Then various premium vehicles such as the Tesla Model S entered the market and were reasonably successful. If the cost of electric traction is a fixed cost, mostly batteries, then it is easier to support that in a premium vehicle. We now have many vehicles, since every manufacturer knows it has to have a product in the space, and has to find out the issues first hand. Today we are at the blue star in the middle, which Hanho considers an inflection point in the short term. Two headwinds are the increase in the price of the metals that go into batteries, and scheduled removal of many government subsidies. So he sees two trajectories to the same end point: an increase in the barriers short term, before electric traction wins, or the barriers keep gradually falling. Purchasing a car, just like any product, has a sort of funnel. For electric vehicles, it is: Awareness (96% of US consumers, versus 100% for ICE) Familiarity (50%, versus 100%) Consideration (29%, versus 96%) Purchase (4%, versus 73%) So what puts people off: Driving distance (23%) Charging issues (32%) Price premium over ICE (21%) Fuel saving compared to ICE, this one is a benefit (10%) Driving Distance There is a big gap between driving range and expectation. It turns out that the average daily driving distance is 43.3km. If you ask consumers what an acceptable driving range is for a single charge, you get a big range(!) as in the chart below: I have seen this sort of analysis before. Indeed, despite being in the "aware" stage only (I've never ridden in an electric vehicle), I've done it myself. My average driving distance includes days when I work from home, or weekend days when the only places I go are ones I walk to, so 0 km, which can make the average be 43.3km even though my driving is (say) 80km on the days I use my car. But more to the point, I think people worry not about the average, however calculated, but how they will manage on the days when they need to do a lot of driving. I like going to Yosemite, and there are days when I have to drive to San Francisco and back, and maybe go and drop something off at my daughter's house in the East Bay. Of course, those are only very occasional trips, and it wouldn't cost that much to rent an SUV every time I go to Yosemite, but it would for sure be a hassle. As a battery manufacturer, Samsung SDI has obviously done a lot of research on what the real numbers are, and the peak of satisfaction/utility seems to be at 350-400km (200-250 miles). That covers average daily range per fuel-up. Average long distance trip is 450-500km (in US, over 500km) and the top of the range is sort of the limit on how far you would want to drive in a single day on a trip. But things are improving every year, as shown in the graph below (this one is "up and to the right" means good): Making a Simple Battery Is Easy—Making a Good Battery Is Very Hard I'm not going to go into all the details of battery chemistry that were presented, but it is good to understand how a modern battery is built (this does not apply to lead-acid batteries in ICE cars, for example). There are really three parts, an anode, a cathode, and an electrolyte. Typically these are all thin films of material that are laid on top of each other, with some separator layers. Then to make them a reasonable shape, these are then rolled up like a Swiss roll (no idea why the Swiss get credit for these) into typically a cylindrical shape. Your computer battery may be square but if you are foolish enough to break it open you'll find it contains several cylindrical cells. I said I won't go into the details, but if you want to sound intelligent at parties (what sort of parties do you go to?) then here is the way to bet: Nickel-rich cathode Artificial graphite with silicon for the anode (but silicon swells up as it holds the lithium ions causing mechanical issues) Prismatic and pouch cells replacing cylindrical ones, since the density of battery stuff to inert stuff is higher Charging The first thing to know about charging is that charger coverage is actually high. And the reason is obvious: I bet you don't have a gas pump in your garage. However, most EV charging is done at home or destination (office, hotel, shopping center). Not surprisingly, almost everyone with an EV has a charging system at home, and so 96% of users make use of at (or near) home charging. Only a limited amount of charging for long-distance driving is required, compared to the number of gas stations. It seems that only 19% of users charge "on the road". Less than half of users also charge at destinations, the two big ones being public spaces, and at work. See the graph below: By the numbers, things look pretty good. In Germany, there are 3,000 cars per gas station (I think this actually means per gas pump but I'm not sure), but only 34 per electric vehicle charging station (yes, really: there are 43,212 cars and 1,254 charging stations). The US number is 140 (289,770 cars and 2,070 charging stations). But that ignores one critical factor: it takes three to five minutes to fill up a car. Fast charging takes over 30 minutes, normal charging is 10+ hours, but since that usually means overnight when you are sleeping and not using your car, that is fine. But if you are on the road, and you need to "fill up" your EV, you don't want to have to slowly drink a cup of coffee you didn't even want while your car charges. So there is a lot of demand for fast charging. The crucial thing is the resistance in the cell, since that causes heat, which has to be dissipated, and this is the limiting factor. The Future of Electromobility There have been huge changes in the price and energy density of lithium ion batteries since they were first introduced 25 years ago. This was driven by their use in computers, of course, not primarily by EV technology. But further advancement is needed to affect the critical $/Kwh point. Future battery packs soon to be launched should achieve the magic 750Wh/litre (now there's a unit of measurement that I bet you've never seen before) and thus achieve a battery pack at around $6,000 and a driving distance over 350km, which is the magic (down and to the right) quadrant in the graph below: At around this point, the total cost of ownership to consumers between EV and ICE achieve parity, which is the holy grail for mainstream takeoff of electric vehicles. Sign up for the weekly Breakfast Bytes email:![]()
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