Toyota Aims to Eliminate Combustion Cars from their line-up by 2050

Not enough lithium to support it? That's like people in the early 1900s saying there wasn't enough lead for all the gasoline cars lithium might not be in use for much longer (dual-carbon batteries seem like a great technology), and both longer-lifetime batteries and recycling will reduce the need for it.

Some EVs have air-cooled batteries like the Nissan Leaf, and IIRC the BMW i3. I think all use liquid cooling for the motor and inverter/controller.

The electric grids will have to be upgraded eventually, but for the near future an excess of daytime power and chargers at offices could be more than enough to take care of demand.

In reply to GameboyRMH:

So we have 600M cars worth of Lithium out there? That's a pretty big find. Finding that is quite a bit different than oil, and more appropriately iron or aluminum ore.

There's enough aluminum and iron to be able to build planes, trains, buildings, bridges, etc. along with cars.

Maybe by 2050, fewer people will need this kind of personal transportation, but I still be there will be nearly 1B cars out there by then.

I don't know if there's 600M cars' worth, but that much probably won't be needed, there are battery types that use less or no lithium. Zinc-air batteries are already used in larger EVs and aluminum-air batteries are among the most promising new designs.

From what I'm seeing right now, I would bet that much earlier than 2050, you won't be able to find a gasoline fueled combustion engine in any dealership. The technology is already there, now it just has to be packaged for mass consumption.

Yet another reason to keep my old car. The sound and feel of ice is one of my favorite parts of cars. I dont even like quiet cars.

Barring some sudden leaps and bounds improvements in batteries I'm still betting on electricity getting cheap enough (or oil getting expensive enough) that we start stripping CO2 out of the air and making synthetic gasoline out of it.

Li is slightly more abundant than Pb in the earth's crust, and we extracted 100 times as much lead as lithium last year. Li metal cost is a low single-digit percentage cost of a Li-ion cell today.

Forget anything you learned about electric cars in the pre-lithium days. It's different now. The hit from a Tesla Model S 85 is very LS1 Corvette like.

I have already embraced EV.. but not in a car (yet). I have one of these sitting in the basement for my sailboat.

Meh...I'll be dead by then.

Kenny_McCormic wrote: Barring some sudden leaps and bounds improvements in batteries I'm still betting on electricity getting cheap enough (or oil getting expensive enough) that we start stripping CO2 out of the air and making synthetic gasoline out of it.

Whether this happens doesn't have anything to do with battery technology - it has to do with oil prices, electricity prices, and whether we're willing to run this planet into the ground. There are already working prototypes of the technology needed to do it.

trucke wrote: The future is so predictable. I'll just leave this here.

This just reminds me how cool that Mosler guy is. Building oddball supercars and flying stuff too??

Mosler is the supercar guy, Moller is the flying car guy.

GameboyRMH wrote: Mosler is the supercar guy, Moller is the flying car guy.

Yup, and Moller is the guy that invented the SuperTrapp muffler. He then sold the company to Dreison International, where I worked for 4 years.

chaparral wrote: Li is slightly more abundant than Pb in the earth's crust, and we extracted 100 times as much lead as lithium last year. Li metal cost is a low single-digit percentage cost of a Li-ion cell today. Forget anything you learned about electric cars in the pre-lithium days. It's different now. The hit from a Tesla Model S 85 is very LS1 Corvette like.

Did not know that. But there is a good increase of lithium over lead in hybrid or electric cars.

Curious that the batteries cost so much. One can get Li-ion batteries to replace their lead-acid batteries- but the cost is really high, relative to lead-acid.

GameboyRMH wrote: Mosler is the supercar guy, Moller is the flying car guy.

Ohhhh.

In reply to GameboyRMH:

Everyone just wants to talk about batteries, I'd rather toss my proverbial resource dollars at the Japanese engineer who is working on harnessing magnesium as a fuel source. Seems to be infinitely renewable(in theory from seawater), emmisions are water vapor and magnesium(for reuse), and the guy is making magnesium using only lenses focusing the sun's light emissions.

Seems to me a much better idea than using E36 M3loads of energy to make things that will never recoup the energy that it took to make them.

I read a while back about some students at MIT that developed a way to remove and replace the electrolyte in batteries so that you could pull up to something similar to a gas pump and recharge your electric car in a matter of minutes. The article said it worked, and I remember thinking that as far as infrastructure goes, this sounded like a great idea. But then I never heard about it again.

WOW Really Paul? wrote: In reply to GameboyRMH: Everyone just wants to talk about batteries, I'd rather toss my proverbial resource dollars at the Japanese engineer who is working on harnessing magnesium as a fuel source. Seems to be infinitely renewable(in theory from seawater), emmisions are water vapor and magnesium(for reuse), and the guy is making magnesium using only lenses focusing the sun's light emissions.

I guess you're talking about this. It's renewable alright, but it produces energy in the form of heat and hydrogen, does that really make sense for a small vehicle? We'd need engines all over again, putting the middleman back into turning electricity into kinetic energy.

WOW Really Paul? wrote: Seems to me a much better idea than using E36 M3loads of energy to make things that will never recoup the energy that it took to make them.

That's a myth. The production of a li-ion battery requires about 2% of the energy it can store and expend before it wears out.

There's a similar myth about solar panels. It's true for the panels used on satellites, but not those we use on Earth.

bravenrace wrote: I read a while back about some students at MIT that developed a way to remove and replace the electrolyte in batteries so that you could pull up to something similar to a gas pump and recharge your electric car in a matter of minutes. The article said it worked, and I remember thinking that as far as infrastructure goes, this sounded like a great idea. But then I never heard about it again.

The technology's still around:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery

The problem is that batteries that keep their own electrolyte are getting close to flow batteries in recharge times, negating their one big advantage. Flow batteries have lower energy densities and are VERY high maintenance as batteries go. Also a fuel that can be transported through wires has a lot of advantages over one that still needs tanker trucks.

In reply to GameboyRMH:

I'm not surprised by your overreaction to be honest. The point is, can magnesium be harnessed in a way that could eliminate the battery?

WOW Really Paul? wrote: I'm not surprised by your overreaction to be honest. The point is, can magnesium be harnessed in a way that could eliminate the battery?

I'm not sure what my overreaction is.

Magnesium can't be used as a direct substitute for a battery. It's basically a renewable way of storing energy that can be used to power a steam engine.

You could look at it as an alternate way of powering cars with electricity. As an alternate form of EV, it carries the disadvantage of complexity: the car would have a steam engine on board to maintain, and it would have a water tank to keep full. The potential climate effects of the higher levels of water vapor released by steam-powered cars would also be worth looking into. It would likely also be less efficient than an EV, suffering from mechanical losses in the steam engine, generating losses if used as the APU for a series hybrid, and likely greater waste heat production.

In reply to GameboyRMH:

All valid issues, but if overcome, wouldn't that be better than batteries filled with toxic substances?

Do you have a problem with gasoline powered ICE cars that carry toxic and highly flammable substances everywhere you go?

Most people complaining about battery issues tend to drive around with bombs in their cars with nary a care in the world.

Just sayin'. There's less risk with Li-ion batteries than with what we have now. But yes, there's promising new tech that will make Li-ion batteries obsolete, like lithium-air and aluminum-air.

I don't see any problem with well-contained toxic substances...as Chris V pointed out, ICE cars run on a big tank of toxic and flammable substances using a machine that uses lots of other toxic (and mostly flammable) substances, and at least one of them gets burned off into the atmosphere in large amounts. An EV's toxic substance typically stays contained and then gets recycled.

Chris_V wrote: Do you have a problem with gasoline powered ICE cars that carry toxic and highly flammable substances everywhere you go? Most people complaining about battery issues tend to drive around with bombs in their cars with nary a care in the world. Just sayin'. There's less risk with Li-ion batteries than with what we have now. But yes, there's promising new tech that will make Li-ion batteries obsolete, like lithium-air and aluminum-air.

Want to point out that the "bomb" nature is a little different.

When designing a battery, one must make sure that by shunting + and - together that all of the charged energy can't be released all at once. Gasoline and diesel, as it's used in cars won't do that- they will burn, and burn spectacularly. But even if it all burns, the time it takes to release all of that energy is harmful in a well known manner. To the point that unless you are pretty close to the flame, you are not likely to be hurt.

A battery needs to be able to release it's potential energy the same way, under an accidental emergency release of it's energy. I'm not up on them to know if that's a problem or not, but I do know it's a concern.