Tesla Model S Goes 752 Miles [1210 km] with a Prototype Battery from a [Pakistani-American] Michigan Startup

[Hamartia Antidote]

Tesla Model S Goes 752 Miles with a Prototype Battery from a Michigan Startup

This 'proof of concept' was meant to show that very long-range, environmentally sustainable battery packs can exist—and ONE, Inc., is about to start building one.

www.caranddriver.com

Imagine an electric car that covers 752 miles on a single charge. You can't buy it today, but a modified Tesla Model S drove that distance across Michigan last month. It was the work of a two-year-old Michigan startup, Our Next Energy (ONE), which says it is aiming to make safer and more sustainable batteries. ONE retrofitted the car with a battery holding twice the energy of Tesla's original—while fitting entirely within the same space. It's a proof of concept for the company's own future battery design.


Faster Charging, or Bigger Batteries?
Two ways exist to assuage range anxiety among EV buyers. The first is ubiquitous, reliable, nationwide DC fast charging, like Tesla's Supercharger network. Unfortunately, only Tesla offers that today. Every other EV relies on a mishmash of private networks of varying reliabilities.

The second is to improve the range of EVs by a combination of large-capacity batteries and improving their efficiency. That's the approach used by the Mercedes-Benz Vision EQXX, an ultra-efficient concept EV that was just unveiled Monday. Its goal is to provide 620 miles of range in a luxury sedan.

ONE's project didn't mess with anything to alter the Model S's efficiency, but employed a much higher-capacity battery. "We want to accelerate the adoption of EVs by eliminating range anxiety, which holds back consumers today," said ONE founder and CEO Mujeeb Ijaz. He's a battery engineer with more than 30 years' experience, including stints at Apple, A123 Systems, Ford, and others.

ONE put its higher-capacity prototype pack into a Tesla Model S Long Range Plus, providing nearly 90 percent more range than its original 402-mile EPA figure. The demonstration car is actually the same vehicle (before ONE modified it) that won our EV 1000 long-range trip last spring. In our own highway range test last May, that car achieved 320 miles at a steady 75 mph, the farthest distance we've recorded. (That model has since been supplanted by the Model S Long Range, rated at 405 miles.)

The original Tesla battery had a capacity of 103.9 kilowatt-hours, while the prototype ONE battery that replaced it in the same space has 207.3 kWh. CEO Ijaz confirmed to C/D that ONE used "a single pack retrofitted in the same space as the original battery." So it's far more energy-dense, but delivered consumption (in miles per kWh) roughly equal to that of the original battery.

ONE's drive took place in mid-December in Michigan—with chilly winter temperatures working against range maximization—where the company drove up and down the length of the mitten state for nearly 14 hours, averaging 55 mph, before winding up back at its Novi headquarters in southeastern Michigan with the trip odometer showing 752.2 miles. Later, in a much less taxing test, the company put the Model S on a dynamometer at a steady 55 mph, where it ran for a staggering 882 miles on a charge.

The company dubs its prototype a proof of concept. The point is to show that real-world ranges far longer than an average driver's endurance (pit stops, ahem) can be achieved in the near future. The next step is for it to evolve into a new battery called Gemini, intended to go into production after 2023.

ONE says it focuses on battery chemistries that are "safer" and "sustainable," using a "conflict-free supply chain." In practice, that means lithium iron-phosphate (LFP) chemistry, which historically has energy density 30 percent lower than cobalt- or nickel-based chemistries (and, unfortunately, reportedly cold-weather issues). Its first product, Aries, will go into production late this year. It's a battery using prismatic LFP cells in a structural cell-to-pack architecture without separate modules, packing more cells into the pack to lower the energy disadvantage against cobalt cells.


One Battery, Two Cell Types
For Gemini, the company plans to supplement the lower-cost LFP cells with a range-extender portion of the battery for extreme power needs, to reduce stress and deterioration in the bulk of the pack. Range-extender cells will use an anode modified to eliminate graphite, which the company says "makes more volume available for the cathode" to boost the energy density of the range-extender cells.

The cathode will be made of a proprietary material rich in manganese that ONE says can be sustainably sourced at low cost. (The company has so far applied for 14 patents related to the Gemini pack.) The LFP cells cover 99 percent of the vehicle’s duty cycle, Ijaz told C/D, and the range extender is used for just 1 percent.

As a proof of concept, however, the prototype pack used in the demonstration was powered by different cells. The capacity of more than 200 kilowatt-hours was provided by high-energy cobalt-nickel cells, while those intended for the Gemini line are still under development.

The point of this test, then, wasn’t about ONE's future plans for new cells. Instead, it was to show that it's possible to pack considerably more energy into a battery the same size as today's—without, for instance, double-stacking a pair of packs, as GM is doing in its 2022 GMC Hummer EV.

Headlines about EVs with 752 miles of range, or the EQXX's target of 620 miles, or the 520 miles of the 2022 Lucid Air version now being delivered, should go a long way to reassure nervous buyers. People will start to believe that EVs capable of very long ranges are possible—even if they end up opting for a more affordable 300-mile alternative in the end.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Apple veteran Mujeeb Ijaz wins Bill Gates’s backing for Michigan battery startup

Battery startup Our Next Energy or ONE said Monday it has raised $25 million in a fresh fundraising round.

www.seattletimes.com

Amid a boom in electric-vehicle production and a race for innovations that improve these new cars’ range and cost, battery startup Our Next Energy said Monday it has raised $25 million in a fresh fundraising round.

The investment in ONE, as the company is known, was led by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The year-old startup, based in Novi, Michigan, says it has engineered a way to eke out higher ranges from lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, a more stable but less powerful chemistry than the nickel-based batteries used by most automakers today.

“The whole foundation of the industry right now is being built on nickel-cobalt,” said Mujeeb Ijaz, ONE’s founder and CEO. “Because range was so important to the end customer, that was seen as the only way to get there. We’re offering an alternative.”

ONE’s innovation lies in the way it designs battery packs, which it plans to build a factory in Michigan to assemble. Ijaz, a veteran of Apple’s secretive car project, said he’s landed his first customer, an EV startup that makes medium-duty delivery trucks. He declined to name the customer but said production will start in November 2022.

The growth of the electric-vehicle market has brought challenges for the industry, including a shortage of batteries and soaring prices for raw materials such as nickel and cobalt, the latter of which is fraught with ethical issues. Nickel, the metal the auto industry largely relies on today to provide power and range, is prone to fire, a risk the industry is spending billions to control.

That’s driving automakers, battery manufacturers and startups — including ONE — to seek less costly alternatives.

ONE uses lithium-iron-phosphate, or LFP batteries, which are cheaper and less fire-prone than nickel-based chemistries. Typically, that approach would mean sacrificing power and range for stability, but the startup claims it’s solved that problem.

“We think he’s ahead of the curve,” said Libby Wayman, who leads the transportation team at Breakthrough Energy Ventures and sits on the board of ONE. “This is the beginning of a trend where people will look to alternative chemistries to achieve energy density, safety, supply-chain optionality, and supply-chain redundancy.”

Also investing in the latest round were Assembly Ventures, BMW iVentures, electronics-manufacturing company Flex, and Volta Energy Technologies. Gates is Breakthrough’s chairman and investors include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Michael R. Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent company Bloomberg LP.

A typical battery in an electric vehicle stores a lot of energy — enough to power the average U.S. home for about 2.5 days. So it’s a formidable engineering feat to ensure these cars are safe, even as large amounts of electricity are used to charge them or propel them around town.

To mitigate fire risk, manufacturers use filler material that helps ensure the battery doesn’t heat up too much, along with electronics to ensure all the cells charge equally. ONE’s innovation has been to find ways to cut down on the filler material, which enables them to add more cells, and thus store more energy, without increasing the size and cost of the battery pack.

Ijaz has spent three decades focusing on powering EVs. He conducted battery research at Ford and was chief technology officer at battery manufacturer A123 Systems until he was poached by Apple in 2014. He returned to Michigan last year to launch his startup and hired former colleagues from A123, saying he felt the auto industry had reached an inflection point with electrification.

EV batteries are made of cells, which are bundled into modules, and then arranged in a pack to optimize power while mitigating fire risk. ONE is using a simpler and cheaper engineering approach called “cell-to-pack,” which skips the need for modules.

ONE isn’t the first or the only company to take this approach. It was pioneered in China by players like SVOLT Energy Technology. The world’s largest battery supplier, China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology, or CATL, sells it to customers today, including Tesla.

Ijaz says ONE’s technology outperforms what other makers have been able to accomplish so far. He pointed to an internal analysis of how much energy is stored in the battery pack per unit of volume — a crucial consideration because EVs have limited space for batteries. Higher energy density for the pack means an EV can theoretically have long driving range.

ONE’s analysis showed its packs are made up of 76% cells and yield 287 watt-hours per liter (Wh/L) of energy density. By comparison, the analysis showed the pack from a Tesla Model 3 using LFP chemistry was made of 49% cells and yielded 173 Wh/L.

As nickel prices climb, other automakers are looking at using the cell-to-pack approach to get more power out of LFP batteries, said Jim Greenberger, executive director of NAATBatt, a non-profit trade association for advanced battery technology in North America.

“If the nickel crisis never comes, I’m not sure much will come of LFP chemistry, because it’s not as powerful,” Greenberger said in an interview. “But if nickel prices do prove volatile, or automakers don’t want to take the risk of nickel proving volatile, you may see more people using LFP technologies.”

 

[CodeforFood]

Tesla Model S Goes 752 Miles with a Prototype Battery from a Michigan Startup

This 'proof of concept' was meant to show that very long-range, environmentally sustainable battery packs can exist—and ONE, Inc., is about to start building one.

www.caranddriver.com

Imagine an electric car that covers 752 miles on a single charge. You can't buy it today, but a modified Tesla Model S drove that distance across Michigan last month. It was the work of a two-year-old Michigan startup, Our Next Energy (ONE), which says it is aiming to make safer and more sustainable batteries. ONE retrofitted the car with a battery holding twice the energy of Tesla's original—while fitting entirely within the same space. It's a proof of concept for the company's own future battery design.


Faster Charging, or Bigger Batteries?
Two ways exist to assuage range anxiety among EV buyers. The first is ubiquitous, reliable, nationwide DC fast charging, like Tesla's Supercharger network. Unfortunately, only Tesla offers that today. Every other EV relies on a mishmash of private networks of varying reliabilities.

The second is to improve the range of EVs by a combination of large-capacity batteries and improving their efficiency. That's the approach used by the Mercedes-Benz Vision EQXX, an ultra-efficient concept EV that was just unveiled Monday. Its goal is to provide 620 miles of range in a luxury sedan.

ONE's project didn't mess with anything to alter the Model S's efficiency, but employed a much higher-capacity battery. "We want to accelerate the adoption of EVs by eliminating range anxiety, which holds back consumers today," said ONE founder and CEO Mujeeb Ijaz. He's a battery engineer with more than 30 years' experience, including stints at Apple, A123 Systems, Ford, and others.

ONE put its higher-capacity prototype pack into a Tesla Model S Long Range Plus, providing nearly 90 percent more range than its original 402-mile EPA figure. The demonstration car is actually the same vehicle (before ONE modified it) that won our EV 1000 long-range trip last spring. In our own highway range test last May, that car achieved 320 miles at a steady 75 mph, the farthest distance we've recorded. (That model has since been supplanted by the Model S Long Range, rated at 405 miles.)

The original Tesla battery had a capacity of 103.9 kilowatt-hours, while the prototype ONE battery that replaced it in the same space has 207.3 kWh. CEO Ijaz confirmed to C/D that ONE used "a single pack retrofitted in the same space as the original battery." So it's far more energy-dense, but delivered consumption (in miles per kWh) roughly equal to that of the original battery.

ONE's drive took place in mid-December in Michigan—with chilly winter temperatures working against range maximization—where the company drove up and down the length of the mitten state for nearly 14 hours, averaging 55 mph, before winding up back at its Novi headquarters in southeastern Michigan with the trip odometer showing 752.2 miles. Later, in a much less taxing test, the company put the Model S on a dynamometer at a steady 55 mph, where it ran for a staggering 882 miles on a charge.

The company dubs its prototype a proof of concept. The point is to show that real-world ranges far longer than an average driver's endurance (pit stops, ahem) can be achieved in the near future. The next step is for it to evolve into a new battery called Gemini, intended to go into production after 2023.

ONE says it focuses on battery chemistries that are "safer" and "sustainable," using a "conflict-free supply chain." In practice, that means lithium iron-phosphate (LFP) chemistry, which historically has energy density 30 percent lower than cobalt- or nickel-based chemistries (and, unfortunately, reportedly cold-weather issues). Its first product, Aries, will go into production late this year. It's a battery using prismatic LFP cells in a structural cell-to-pack architecture without separate modules, packing more cells into the pack to lower the energy disadvantage against cobalt cells.


One Battery, Two Cell Types
For Gemini, the company plans to supplement the lower-cost LFP cells with a range-extender portion of the battery for extreme power needs, to reduce stress and deterioration in the bulk of the pack. Range-extender cells will use an anode modified to eliminate graphite, which the company says "makes more volume available for the cathode" to boost the energy density of the range-extender cells.

The cathode will be made of a proprietary material rich in manganese that ONE says can be sustainably sourced at low cost. (The company has so far applied for 14 patents related to the Gemini pack.) The LFP cells cover 99 percent of the vehicle’s duty cycle, Ijaz told C/D, and the range extender is used for just 1 percent.

As a proof of concept, however, the prototype pack used in the demonstration was powered by different cells. The capacity of more than 200 kilowatt-hours was provided by high-energy cobalt-nickel cells, while those intended for the Gemini line are still under development.

The point of this test, then, wasn’t about ONE's future plans for new cells. Instead, it was to show that it's possible to pack considerably more energy into a battery the same size as today's—without, for instance, double-stacking a pair of packs, as GM is doing in its 2022 GMC Hummer EV.

Headlines about EVs with 752 miles of range, or the EQXX's target of 620 miles, or the 520 miles of the 2022 Lucid Air version now being delivered, should go a long way to reassure nervous buyers. People will start to believe that EVs capable of very long ranges are possible—even if they end up opting for a more affordable 300-mile alternative in the end.

I already had a thread on it . Probably should combine this.

 

[Arulmozhi Varman]

Battery range and size is only a part of it. The software is the one playing an important role along with BMS. The same Battery with an Ford EV would give an less range. I think that's where Tesla excels.