I don’t know much about batteries and charging, but I do know a thing or two about bold pre-product claims at CES press events.
Please let this make ev motorcycles more viable for anything besides buzzing around town
Lots of questions remain. Fast charging is 1 of them. But if it charges in 5 seconds and costs $40k and only lasts 3 charge cycles, it’s completely pointless.
If it were legit they’d be screaming at the top of their lungs for people to come and test them, and they’d be handing them out to journalists.
They claim it lasts for 10k or more cycles. Lithium free and good across a wildly bigger temperature range than li Ion. Density beyond the best of li ion. 400Wh/kg. They will supposedly start delivering the first bikes with the battery next month. More test results next Monday. A lot of bold claims,some substantiates with these current tests, some apparently deliberately not. Like density could easily be determined if they only weighed the battery under test. But regardless, the truth will be revealed soon enough. I am enthusiastic, but I’m not investing, so I have nothing to gain/lose. We shall see.
They claim it lasts for 10k or more cycles.
They claim all sorts of things. AFAIK only 1 of those claims have been validated.
They are also very slow with the testing. The institution they use for testing (a Finnish state laboratory) is OK, but they are publishing things slower than necessary, and failing to ask the lab to include obvious details (e.g. mass, volume).
One can hope various things, but I have doubts about this company.
True, not much of the claims have been validated. But regardless, they’re saying they are releasing the product within a month, so if it is only hype to attract investors, they are either too late or they will be delaying the launch of the bike. Cause, the truth will soon be revealed.
It’s still very early days for all batteries that are not Li-Ion or Li-FP. Plus there’s a political aspect. Some countries, like China, have invested heavily in lithium and cobalt mining, increasing influence in Africa. CATL is a big innovator in batteries, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chinese government pumps the brakes on CATL developing solid state or sodium on the scale of lithium.
In the end, it’s inevitable because both lithium and cobalt are finite resources. Lithium especially is becoming increasingly difficult to come by. We are in need of new tech, but it could still take 10 years for it to be fully developed and adopted. What we need now is devices that just cannot be powered by lithium, so that they will require something more dense like sodium sulfur. The lack of need for graphene, cobalt and lithium is a huge pro.
