Written by | Chu Yunwen
Image source | Internet
For new energy products, safety and endurance can be said to be the most vocal product force, for this, we will definitely think that the power battery is absolutely the top priority, but with many other areas of technological breakthroughs, this concept seems to be being broken.
Take the power battery leading enterprise Ningde era, the frequent hot search is not to meet the big good things, or to encounter the bad things that make people frown.
On the day before the May Day holiday, CATL announced the financial report for the first quarter of this year, with a net profit of 1.493 billion yuan, down 23.62% year-on-year; deducting non-net profit of 977 million, down 41.57% year-on-year.
Such a headache performance made the big men of the Ningde era appear at the performance briefing on the first day after the festival to explain many issues, such as raw material price increases, foreign factories, production capacity and other related key points.
Although CATL believes that this is a short-term phenomenon caused by the rise in raw material prices, it will continue to strengthen the supply chain in the future to create an ecosystem with power batteries as the core, and will also launch new products in the market to increase its share.
However, with the development of the market, more and more car companies into the field of new energy, power battery research and development will also enter a new era, self-developed products or more new products in the future may show concentrated growth in the future period of time.
Speaking of new products, CATL said on the 5th that a new Kirin battery will be launched in the second quarter of this year, which will apply the third generation of CTP technology to achieve a higher level in the industry at key technical points such as battery system weight and energy density.
In fact, as far as the products that have been listed so far, there have been car companies that have independently come up with products with strength, ANDD's blade battery is a good example, especially the very famous acupuncture experiment at that time, so that its main safety features are very popular among consumer groups.
In fact, in the minds of many people understand that the new product is a power battery product that can break through the existing technology, like the layout of sodium-ion batteries in the Ningde era, because the global reserves of sodium are more than four hundred times higher than lithium, has the price dropped significantly? In addition, the solid-state batteries that many companies have begun to develop have raised the convenience of trams to the level of fuel vehicles?
Therefore, at present, in addition to the two mainstream battery routes of ternary lithium and lithium iron phosphate, the difference in power batteries is usually in the internal structure and form of the battery pack, and the ultimate purpose is nothing more than to improve the capacity of the battery, energy density and other indicators, thereby improving the endurance of the vehicle.
There is no doubt that the biggest pain point of new energy vehicles at the consumer level is the various anxieties they bring, such as charging anxiety and mileage anxiety, and the best way to solve these problems is either to let the product have a long mileage to reduce the frequency of charging, or to achieve a short time like fuel vehicles.
The latter is obviously more difficult to achieve at the moment, so people will pin more hope on the former, so for the improvement of battery life, can only rely on the development of battery technology? Is there any other way to achieve this? To briefly sort out, there are currently two main solutions to this problem.
The first point is to improve the capacity of the battery, almost every natural year compared with the previous year, the endurance ceiling of new energy vehicles will rise by 200-300 kilometers compared with before, from the initial 300 kilometers of endurance to meet the round trip, to 500 kilometers to meet the week without charging, and then to 700 kilometers to achieve the same as the mainstream fuel vehicle endurance.
This year, this standard has been raised to 1,000 kilometers, GAC AION and Weilai have taken this as an absolute highlight in the promotion of products, and with it, a power battery with a larger capacity has been placed at the bottom of the vehicle, which is indeed the development trend in recent years, with greater capacity and higher power density.
This approach is simple and crude, but it does not seem to be the "smartest" solution at the practical application level, because not every car can get a longer mileage after being put into a large battery, after all, the weight of the battery pack is proportional to it.
Like the Humve EV battery pack reached 212.7 kWh, corresponding to the weight of 1.326 tons, to know that the net weight of a compact car is this value, the ultra-high weight makes the car's endurance of only more than 500 kilometers, not to mention, even in the field of new energy Hummer still continues the "glorious tradition" of high energy consumption of the fuel version of the model.
It should be admitted that the development space of the new energy market with a good future prospects for power batteries is still very large, after all, it is just needed for new energy vehicles. However, the current development growth rate of the new energy automobile industry is obvious, and higher requirements are also put forward for related industries, which makes many car companies not only focus on the single component of the battery.
For this matter is actually easier to understand, we can compare it to the most commonly used electronic device mobile phones every day. Like the Android camp, which usually carries a larger battery to ensure the battery life of the phone, Apple uses a smaller battery to bring the same battery life through software and hardware optimization.
The optimization of hardware and software is actually analogous to new energy vehicles, which corresponds to efficiency and energy efficiency, just like the fuel consumption data of traditional internal combustion engine models.
Like Mercedes' VISION EQXX concept car, the power battery pack has a capacity of only 100 kWh, but in actual tests, it has a range of 1008 km, and shows that the range can be about 140 km, and the energy consumption reaches 8.7 kWh per 100 km.
The capacity of this battery pack is not large, compared with the 150 kWh battery pack equipped with the domestic model to achieve 100 km endurance, of course, its test environment is not an ideal environment, but a complex road condition, including high-speed cruising, which is one of the more expensive conditions.
Although it is only a concept car, its design concept is definitely worthy of reference for future pure electric models, such as lightweight, low wind resistance, low rolling resistance tires and so on. In fact, more and more car companies are now beginning to pay attention to the energy consumption of electric vehicles, which is much more practical than simply working on batteries.
Like pure electric family cars, vehicles can not be so large in size to put into a large capacity battery, and for home consumers, it does not have so much budget, after all, the current battery in a car cost ratio is still relatively high.
Therefore, how to save electricity is obviously more practical than buying a large battery.
Like the aforementioned Mercedes-Benz concept car, its lightweight use of a large number of carbon fiber and technology from Formula One, although the price of carbon fiber is not available to civilian products, but more and more composite materials can also be replaced while ensuring the strength of the foundation.
And not only on the body, but also in the interior parts of the vehicle, there are many places where weight can be reduced, such as Toyota's use of new materials to reduce the weight of the seats and so on.
Another point is the reduction of wind resistance, pure electric vehicles in the high-speed driving when the power will drop significantly, at this time is also a large wind resistance of the working conditions, because the pure electric model to get rid of a lot of large components of the internal combustion engine, so in the body design for low wind resistance has a greater space to play, which has become the core of many product design.
In addition, low-roll-drag tires are no longer the traditional perception of only focusing on performance and losing performance of products, BMW's i8 many years ago is a good example, and for family and city cars, its performance is enough to support daily use.
At best, it will be visually lost, but if you choose between appearance and endurance on new energy family cars, I believe that the vast majority of people will put battery life in front, after all, this is just needed.
And at present, the battery thermal management system is more mature, many pure electric models in the winter will encounter obvious endurance discounts, which also leads to the cold area of new energy products are difficult to promote, different from the previous system split thermal management system, the current is more to open up the links, the formation of a higher efficiency, can make the various systems cooperate with each other thermal management system.
All in all, for such a new energy area, there are still many unknown areas, with the deepening of technology, there will be more and more new technologies emerging, especially for the solution of consumer pain points, the market will also play a role behind the technology.
For battery manufacturers, simply stacking power may be able to solve the current problems in the near future, but in the long run, the need for breakthroughs in battery technology is obvious, and solving the pain points of the car does not only depend on battery manufacturers, many fields can achieve a common goal.
The continuous improvement of efficiency is actually an absolutely good thing for the new energy market, and the future development of power batteries is not so clear, but the improvement of efficiency and energy efficiency is beneficial and harmless no matter what power source is placed.
Why are many new energy brands now launching a lot of "new tricks", in fact, compared with traditional fuel vehicles, it has been reduced in terms of just demand, so it needs to be made up from another angle, just imagine if the electric vehicle can be replenished for 5 minutes on the day, which car company will also let the fancy auxiliary function to grab the limelight of this advantage?
Multi-party technology to improve the endurance efforts, let us see the positive side of the future development of this type of products, in fact, we are not here to belittle a party, multi-party efforts to bring satisfactory products are not what we most want to see? 【iDailycar】