Electric vehicle trends: wireless charging and lithium-air batteries?

    Rob Enderle, president and chief analyst of emerging technology consulting firm Enderle, recently published a signed article on the American technology information website DigitalTrends, saying that battery capacity has been the main problem plaguing the development of electric vehicles since their emergence at the end of the last century. Today, many technologies on the market will help them find solutions and achieve further development.

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    The first generation of electric cars came out earlier in the last century, but they were largely aborted because the battery energy could not match the gas tank. The second generation of electric cars, led by automaker Tesla, emerged a decade ago, but even though batteries had improved significantly earlier, they continued to hinder the development of electric cars. At the same time, the fuel economy of cars has also improved significantly, further exacerbating the difficulty of electric cars competing with fuel-powered cars.

    While third-generation electric vehicles will have many improvements, the most important one is the energy problem that needs to be solved urgently. However, there are many technologies on the market that can eventually help electric vehicles kick gasoline-powered vehicles out of the game.

Inductive Charging

    Whether it is a smartphone or an electric car, inductive charging technology allows devices to charge without being physically connected to a power source. Interestingly, although Tesla launched its electric car in 2003 and was ahead of its competitors in every aspect, Nissan and Infiniti were the first car manufacturers to offer this charging function. You know, the inductive charging technology for cars was first known to everyone through Tesla's Tesla Roadster, but it did not seem to attract much interest from Tesla.

    Qualcomm also has its own inductive charging technology, called Halo, that can be used in parking lots and on interstates. It requires the car to be in close proximity, but not touching, which is a big improvement over plugging in a car. Part of the improvement is that the device can be completely buried, greatly reducing the possibility of being vandalized or damaged by a "dummy driver." In most cases, all you have to do is park your car, and any energy your car consumes is free, and you get a bill for your energy consumption at the end of the month.

    Qualcomm is now promoting this technology, which will not solve the battery life problem unless it is installed on the road, but it can reduce the occurrence of related problems and make charging more transparent and reliable. However, inconsistent technical standards will also cause problems, which have plagued the entire electric vehicle industry for a long time. Inconsistent standards mean that you have to find a parking lot where your car can be charged, and road charging solutions will not be feasible. This may be the reason that has stopped Tesla's progress.

Lithium-air battery

    IBM and other companies are working on a promising technology: lithium-air batteries, which could handle the energy density of a gas tank. Over the past few years, major advances in metallurgy have made it possible to build batteries based on lithium-air technology within a decade. If a battery with the same energy capacity as a gas tank, in the same size, could replace the giant battery pack in a Tesla S, you could drive the car and quadruple the range. You wouldn't have to worry about the charging plug as much when you get to 1,000 miles. More likely, engineers could use a smaller battery, making the electric car lighter and cheaper. Combined with more ubiquitous charging plugs, this could be a game-changer for electric cars, showing greater energy efficiency than gasoline.

Supercapacitors and ultracapacitors

    Supercapacitors are an alternative to batteries and are already in commercial vehicles. Capacitors are solid-state and have a nearly infinite life cycle, able to charge and discharge thousands of times faster than lithium-ion batteries without breaking down. In a way, capacitors and regular batteries are like flash memory and hard drives. Flash memory was better at first, but more expensive than hard drives. Even the iPod had a hard drive at first. But as flash memory prices fell, it took over the market, and now hard drives are being phased out.

    Unfortunately, capacitors are still in the early stages of the transition. Today, capacitors are very expensive, fail after a while, and have lower energy density than batteries. As you can see, capacitors may not solve the energy problem of electric vehicles in the near future, but like flash memory, their price is expected to drop significantly, their energy density will increase, and their self-discharge rate will improve. However, capacitors are already being used in hybrid powertrains, where users can quickly charge the capacitor in minutes, and the capacitor will automatically charge the battery while the user is driving.

Where is the next Tesla?

    I’m not talking about Tesla the company, I’m talking about Tesla the man, who died young, probably because of a mysterious death ray, and who studied broadcast energy. Intel and others have been trying to get into this space, but it’s a long way from working on personal electronic devices, and it may be decades before the technology can be used in cars. But once it’s developed, it will solve the battery problem of electric cars forever, and we will live in an electric world, and we will have some health problems to solve: while the idea of ​​glowing in the dark is cool, we need to avoid the “death ray” part. Regardless, I think broadcast energy will herald the eventual arrival of the eternal era of electric cars.