Remember last year's eleven small holiday outings, those new energy car owners who were stuck in the road and sadly urged? During the just-concluded Spring Festival holiday, did friends who drove home on a pure tram relive this horror scene again?
Especially in the winter, the battery performance itself will decline faster, not to mention that the air conditioner will consume more power, and the remaining 200km will begin to calculate where to charge. Arrived at the service station, looking at the long line of students loveless, the last turn of the line has no temper, most of the piles are cast several years ago, the power is called 120kW, and because of the increase in self-driving demand, the daily peak power is limited, the actual barely reached 40kW, further exacerbating the problem of slow charging queues.
Although the precedent of charging on National Day has allowed many high-speed service areas to formulate emergency plans for charging problems, a large number of charging facilities are likely to be idle because the utilization rate of high-speed charging facilities during the daily period is not high, which will cause waste of resources. Therefore, if you want to solve the problem efficiently, you must eventually return to the technical level of electric vehicles.
For example, further improving the pure electric mileage of new energy vehicles, reducing the frequency of energy replenishment to a certain extent, developing a more powerful supercharge technology, alleviating the queuing problem of slow charging, and greatly improving efficiency through the power exchange mode, these three schemes are the consensus reached by the industry to solve the charging difficulties.
The first is to improve the endurance, if you can run the whole distance at one time without charging, it can naturally greatly alleviate the problem of queuing for charging. In recent years, the leap-forward improvement of the endurance standard of the pure electricity market is obvious to all, from the mainstream 300km in previous years, to the current no 500-600km endurance can not be placed on the "right seat", and then the leading companies have successively launched models with more than 1000km endurance, which has greatly reduced the charging frequency of a single trip.
However, everything has two sides, electric vehicles want to improve the endurance, in the current technical path, is nothing more than through the combination of various materials to increase the energy density of the battery. Simply put, it is to allow the same volume and weight of the battery to store more power.
However, the high energy density and safety of the battery is an eternal contradiction, the unit volume capacity and cycle life, safety, multiplier into a strong correlation factor, the battery capacity for each 10%, will reduce the cycle life of about 20%, reduce the charge and discharge rate of 30-40%, while about 20% of the temperature will be increased, and geometric rise. Therefore, the higher the energy density, the worse the stability, and the greater the safety hazard.
At the same time, due to the high cost of new technologies, the current high energy density batteries will also be mainly applied to high-end models, fantasy mainstream electric vehicles generally exceed 1000km endurance, and the days of mature technology, reliable and high safety are still relatively distant.
The second is the improvement of charging efficiency, and major new energy vehicle companies are trying to make the charging efficiency gradually align with the efficiency of fuel vehicle refueling.
Taking Tesla's latest V3 supercharger as an example, the peak charging power of 250KW allows the Model 3 to be charged for 15 minutes and has a range of 250 kilometers. Another example is Xiaopeng's 800V, 480KW fast charging technology, which can replenish 200km endurance in 5 minutes. At this rate, basically a trip to the service area to the bathroom, eating, resting in the gap, the vehicle can be filled to the next stop of the endurance, has not been more than the fuel car into the service area to spend more time.
Of course, the current fast charging technology is not without drawbacks. On the one hand, long-term use of fast charging will greatly reduce the battery life. Excessive currents during fast charging can cause lithium ions to be unable to safely embed the negative electrode, while overheating the battery and reducing the number of cycles of charging. If it continues to overheat, it may even put your vehicle at risk of spontaneous combustion or explosion.
And when it comes to holidays at the peak of travel, too many fast charging devices will make the demand for charging power reach dozens of times or even hundreds of times that of daily, so we will encounter the situation that the charging pile during the Spring Festival mentioned at the beginning of the article cannot reach the ideal power. And if a large number of fast-charging sites are built, it is also a great test for the power grid itself. So we also need to expect that over time, these problems can be slowly solved.
The last one is the same as the fuel vehicle refueling power exchange mode, directly by replacing a battery pack, so that the vehicle is instantly full of blood resurrection, to Weilai replacement power station as an example, the time spent is about 3-5 minutes, the speed is really comparable to refueling.
In this way, the power exchange mode should be the most efficient way for new energy vehicles on the market, is it the final solution of the new energy market in the future? In fact, it is not so ideal.
On the one hand, the dynamic allocation of batteries in the substation is a very big problem, just like sharing bicycles, you will see the scheduling of shared bicycles running east and west with the entire truck every day. In the process of operation, there will also be a large number of aging and damaged batteries that need to be collected and processed, which is not an easy thing to solve.
On the other hand, car owners do not need to worry about the expensive cost of establishing a power exchange model that requires a large number of redundant batteries, because the car companies that currently carry out the power exchange model have passed on to themselves through brand and service premiums. However, car companies also need to consider costs, such as Weilai's financial report, the construction of substations and the cost of batteries account for a large proportion of the cost. And with the increase of future users, the battery capacity will increase, and the cost will be higher.
Therefore, although the power exchange mode is fast and convenient, it is an extremely difficult test for funds, management capabilities, and power exchange networks behind it. From the current point of view, this technology is likely to become a special service for future high-end new energy vehicle owners, or a means to complement super fast charging.
New energy vehicles are still growing, and the diversification of the market and consumer inclusion, as well as the efforts of enterprises themselves, are constantly exploring various experiences and possibilities for the promotion of electric vehicles. So even though the three mainstream endurance solutions still have their own pros and cons, we can't easily deny any one option now. Which model can be laughed at to the end is a comprehensive test of technological path breakthrough, infrastructure construction, and market recognition. I believe that the day of charging freedom will eventually come with the continuous progress of technology and the market.
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