Meet the typical Tesla owner: A white male homeowner with a household income over $130,000
www.businessinsider.com
Tesla owners are overwhelmingly men, and the most common occupations are engineer, software engineer, and manager of operations, one study found.

Tesla owners are overwhelmingly men, and the most common occupations are engineer, software engineer, and manager of operations, one study found.

  • Hobovision@kbin.social
    4·
    1 year ago

    If we’re talking approaching fundamental limits, Hydrogen fuel cell is not a great comparison. A high pressure tank can only get so light, even with linerless ultra high strength carbon fiber pressure vessels, the mass of the vessel is maybe 6-10x the mass of the hydrogen it carries. To increase specific energy there you need to go to cryogenics which is a whole technology leap and has its own set of challenges.

    Battery tech has been improving more than you have seen, clearly. Since '08, lithium batteries have increased energy density by 8x (https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1234-april-18-2022-volumetric-energy-density-lithium-ion-batteries). The best LiPo batteries are around 0.9MJ/kg right now, but there’s no fundamental reason a battery couldn’t achieve 9MJ/kg. Lithium-air batteries could theoretically achieve way higher energy density than that even (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93air_battery), and have already been demonstrated in a lab to achieve more than 5x what current commercial automotive batteries are doing.

    • Hypx@kbin.social
      11·
      1 year ago

      Except those fundamentally limits are far higher. The fact is that hydrogen stores energy at 120 MJ/kg. Even at 5% weight efficiency, that’s 6 MJ/kg. Or 1,666 Wh/kg. Far beyond any battery.

      Your link is seriously lying. 8x is the gap between lead-acid and li-ion batteries. The claims are simply impossible. The author must be unknowingly comparing lead-acid battery powered cars to li-ion battery powered cars. I cannot see any other way his claim is true.

      A lithium-air battery is literally a fuel cell. In fact, what did you think hydrogen fuel cells were this entire time?