Batteries are quite good already. You can wait for the next big thing, or get something that works and scales right now.
Battery production is now measured in multiple twh of capacity per year. That goes into vehicles of all types with any number and size of wheels, grid storage solutions, and domestic storage. People use them all over the world now. Including some developing economies.
There are many quality attributes you can look at with batteries: cost per kwh, weight per kwh, volume per kwh, charge/discharge rates, longevity in charge cycles, operating temperatures, robustness, chance of flammability (near zero with some cell types), etc. Better is a meaningless qualification unless you express it in those.
And what is best and what is optimal are two things. There's a reason LFP is dominating rather than NMC. It's good enough and a lot cheaper even though it has slightly less energy. For the same reason sodium ion is being put into some cars. It doesn't have the energy density. But it's cheap, operates in arctic and desert temperatures, and they last pretty long.
When it comes to new battery chemistries, it takes time to go from a lab breakthrough to mass production. Sodium ion is now being mass produced. A few years ago there was only low volume production. And before that, the technology was stuck in various stages of the R&D pipeline at various companies. From a lab prototype in a university to an actual proof of concept might take several years. And from there to production many years longer.
With solid state, there are about at least half a dozen technology companies that are moving from test samples to low volume production in the next years. Mostly the technology is proven and validated at this point. But it might still take until at least the end of the decade before we see any mass production. Building big factories costs billions and is super risky. Companies don't do that unless they are certain something will work.
Solid state will have to compete on quality and price. High density solid state in cheap cars is not likely to be a thing for cost reasons. But they might be popular with drone and sports car manufacturers. The press is unfortunately a bit sensationalist on this front and it creates unrealistic expectations.
It also doesn't help that every "breakthrough" announcement is always about something that happened in a lab that may or may not be scalable, and is usually said lab or their sponsoring organization just trying to put itself out there.
And hey, can't blame labs for playing the game, but it does produce a lot of noise with little signal for the average reader.
> When it comes to new battery chemistries, it takes time to go from a lab breakthrough to mass production. Sodium ion is now being mass produced. A few years ago there was only low volume production. And before that, the technology was stuck in various stages of the R&D pipeline at various companies. From a lab prototype in a university to an actual proof of concept might take several years. And from there to production many years longer.
That's absolutely fine and understandable. But then, why do we keep hearing the word "breakthrough" ?
I hate this word with all my heart.
Batteries are still not ubiquitous. EVs are still expensive.
The "breaktrough" that would be worth mentioning will be when people can buy an EV and never, ever, ever manage to build a scenario where there is _any_ range anxiety.
Or when everyone has a battery in their garage, that's as inconsequential to buy as a fridge, and can store enough energy for them to go through the winter with 2 months of sunshine.
I know we're far away from that. Fair enough. Godspeed to you if you're working on that, in the lab or in the factory. You or your grandkids will get there.
Just, write the _breakthrough_ article then, please.
A scientific breakthrough can happen and is news worthy. The consequence might be mass production of some thing enabled through decade of R&D that follows the breakthrough. But there are lots of reasons why that might never happen.
Anyway, catchy click bait news lines sell. And breakthroughs are worth reporting on by themselves. Anyway, the economist didn't do a great job here doing their job. They are all over the place mixing things that are basically on the market (sodium ion) or nearly on the market (solid state) with various scientific progress from research labs.
As for the rest of your comment, I don't think accurate information is your problem.
There will be no single moment when that happens. It will be a stack of years and years of innovations and improvements each of which take time to roll out into mass production, start expensive, and get cheaper.
> Just, write the _breakthrough_ article then, please.
When exactly though? When the price of the "new" breakthrough technology that's been around for decades at that point drops from $101 per kwH to $100 per kwH?
I totally get your frustration but it seems kinda arbitrary to say a new technology isn't a breakthrough until it's ubiquitous.
"Distinguishing hype from reality is not easy. But recent developments mean that ambitious promises could be fulfilled. "
Just like AI is changing the world before our eyes, this may be just such a technology. Maybe I will come to resent them when they are omnipresent, but a person-transporting drone (EVTOL) flying on a solid state battery would be transformative in connecting people, and I cannot wait to see it happen. The EU has committed 500bn in inter-european railway investment by 2050. Maybe it will be entirely disrupted? Who knows.
Maybe I am missing something, but I haven't seen a solution to the noise problem of air traffic (especially anything rotor based).
Might not be an issue for long distance connection in sparsely populated countries like the United States, but I don't see it replacing trains in Europe until this is solved.
There is also the fairly obvious problem of safe operations in urban areas.
Rooftop helicopters were banned from Manhattan’s office buildings after a helicopter tipped over and decapitated waiting passengers, and then the blade fell to the street level where it killed another person.
Flying no matter how diminutive always has the issue of Newton's third law. This requires having large empty landing zones to be safe, or you risk having people land on you, which would hurt no matter how slowly they're coming in.
I had a chance to fly a simulator of the Beta Technologies VTOL airplane (they're a PartsBox customer). I went from horizontal flight into hover, and my guide said "oh, by the way, you are consuming a megawatt right now".
A megawatt. To hover.
That really opened my eyes to the reality: unless we have unlimited, clean and nearly free fusion power, flying cars are not going to be a thing.
In any reasonable setup, hovering would be a rare, rare operation (like 30-60 seconds during takeoff and landing), with most of the time spent in wing-borne forward flight – which'd be _wildly_ lower power usage, more like 200-250kW tops. About ~par with staying in continuous acceleration in an EV. More for sure, but not nearly as insane as what you're pointing to.
... and this is exactly where better batteries would help – being able to hold that power level for longer so you could actually go places in earnest without untenable mass.
Is it? If we're talking about a future where EVTOL takes over for passenger cars, there will be air traffic jams with delays that require extended circling and likely hovering.
There's a reason all the EVTOL startups show individual vehicles landing in pristine fields, and it's the same reason car advertisements show one car on a closed course instead of I-95 at 3pm on a Friday
... air traffic jams? The air is _much_ bigger than the corresponding ground.
Certainly there'd be density _at_ take-off and landing, but even that's manageable by having e.g. arrival/departure locations at multiple heights.
It also seems vanishingly unlikely (at this point) that we'd have EVTOL that's not fully autonomous, further reducing the odds of this - ~perfect and coordinated driving, as well as foreknowledge of what's happening between you and the arrival location drastically reduces traffic.
I have been thinking this for quite a while now, electric planes will kill a lot of rail routes. However I am still skeptical about the EVTOL form factor for mass scale transportation, at least on the short or medium term.
I think we are going to see a lot of fragmentation in modes of transport where we have jets going from international airports for long range, small electric planes in small airports for that 50-300km distance low-frequency destinations. And rail only for high-frequency destinations.
In fact I imagine that electric vs jet planes math will get so crazy that it might kill some international hubs that are too far inland, companies will want people off jets into electric propeller planes as fast as possible.
> I have been thinking this for quite a while now, electric planes will kill a lot of rail routes
Why? If you have an existing rail network, trains are bound to be cheaper than planes and can get to more places (including convenient centrally-located stations in most major metro areas).
Plus, air travel is generally miserable unless you have a private / chartered plane. Crowds, long lines, security screenings, opaque and abusive pricing models, etc. This is not something we couldn't fix, but over the past 30 years, it's gotten a lot worse, not better; electric planes don't automatically change that. In contrast, rail travel in Europe is almost universally pleasant and hassle-free.
For high volume routes rail is best. For lower volume automated cars on the highway are more efficient than flying by enough that only the rich will fly - just like today. You can book a helicopter flight home today if you are willing to pay for all the fuel. However even at 1/10th the energy cost, a car will be vastly cheaper and so what most people will choose. We also will continue to use trucks to move freight for many of these trips, so the roads will exist either way.
There is one other issue with flying: it often isn't legal - for good reason - to fly and land where you want to be. For a 300km trip flying to an airport is fine (if there is one close - they are not evenly scattered around), but at 50km you may as well drive the whole way instead of transfer at the airport - unless you live very close to the airport (which you won't because of noise)
If flying ever becomes efficient energy-wise, this may happen. However, right now, flying is very energy inefficient, so anything that doesn't need to be flown, is transported overland to save costs. A change of fuel won't change it, unless the underlying energy usage changes fundamentally.
Better batteries do not impact energy usage, only the means of energy delivery.
Rail will always be more efficient since you don't have to carry the load. I think places that never built passenger rail (Alberta has been toying with Edmonton to Calgary since they've existed) this will wipe out the need for them.
A lot of the weirdos are trying to force trains to be worse by carrying batteries. Almost everyone knows this is crazy, except some Americans with surprising influence.
Most trains are diesel-electric, so they already have batteries? For those unaware, in this type of engine the diesel engine is actually a generator which charges the batteries and then the electrical power is used to drive the train. It's actually more efficient for the torque needed.
We have these things called helicopters, they are already made small enough for single occupants and have been for decades. Making them electric and automated doesn't make them less of a helicopter with all of the issues of existing helicopters.
For instance, I will never have any desire to risk the air traffic clusterfuck of hundreds of EVTOLs with different computers from different brands with different levels of maintenance trying to land/take-off in a Costco parking lot to grab a rotisserie chicken on their way home from work.
It isn't a technology problem. EVTOL only makes sense where helicopters currently make sense.
Your last sentence is simply not true. Helicopters are massive in terms of volume and weight, and incredibly loud. You're also assuming our current layout of everything would stay the same. Imagine if teleportation existed, do you think cities, towns, and suburbs would still look the same?
A collision is less likely in 3D than in 2D, and obviously the chicken would be delivered to you via drone rather than the inverse.
EVTOL isn't exactly quiet either. It will annoy the living shit out of your neighbors, particularly if everyone is doing it. Houses/apartments near airports are already cheaper for that reason.
And sure you can contrive whatever clean-slate sci-fi setting you want to try and make it make sense, but we aren't going to be ripping up existing infrastructure for it. This isn't Popular Science cover art.
Collisions are more likely if there's hundreds going to/from the same place at the same time, and also they can just fail and fall out of the sky onto dwellings, roads and businesses in ways that cars can't.
Your vision will be killed politically the first time a child playing on their swing-set or shopping with their mother or driving down the road is killed by a poorly maintained EVTOL.
We already have fatal car crashes from people who neglect maintenance and don't get their car inspected. Now imagine instead of a 2D plane to cause a wreck, on a road where people are generally alert and paying attention for wrecks, they can fall out of the sky onto kids playing in yards, onto busy roads out of the sun, or just onto each other during the final approach/take-off.
Nope, air travel is only safe because we strictly regulate pilots and maintenance.
I would think the most likely use for evtol (assuming, for the sake of argument, that whatever sci-fi technology needs to be invented will be invented to make it cost effective) is autopilot flights that are currently long commutes with a lot of traffic -- ie: Suburbs to city center and back, or long cross suburb trips.
Autopilot with strictly regulated maintenance and no personal ownership is about the only way it works, assuming your neighbors don't care about the noise
Recent history is full of examples of trains that killed air routes. Trains took 80% market share from Paris to Lyon and 100% to Brussels. Similar in Spain and Japan.
Battery technology is governed by the laws of physics and chemistry. I'm not an expert in battery technology, but I trust those who are to know physics and chemistry. We are likely asymptotically approaching a known limit. Perhaps someone who is an expert can tell us where those are.
And if you want to get really exotic, antimatter is about 83.2 billion times more energy dense. We're not going to be running into fundamental physics limitations for energy storage anytime soon.
Though maybe it's a little unfair to call either of those things a "battery", they seem like fundamentally different technologies to me even if in theory they could fill exactly the same role.
While we don't know everything, what we don't know must fit without the things we already know. It seems highly unlikely there is something significant in this area we don't know.
Mercedes has cars on the road now with solid state batteries. They're not mass-producing the batteries yet so they're only in test vehicles. Performance has been great.
Everyone's been talking about breakthroughs for batteries for years. Until I see one on the shelf, it doesn't matter. Go make them better, and come back once they actually are!
I've even seen ceramic batteries being tested on YouTube as long as 7 YEARS ago [0], but I still can't actually buy one.
They're available. Though you probably shouldn't invest to heavily in gen1 (production) sodium-ion batteries. It's looking like they'll be obsolete pretty quick.
I would agree if I could buy a AA battery that would power my toothbrush for a year. Or one that could be rechargeable with easily-available chargers reliably for a decade (and without having to drop 0.2V to achieve it...).
Any kind of consumer power technology can only ever be truly "good enough" if it never causes any inconvenience or significant cost.
> Everyone's been talking about breakthroughs for batteries for years.
Lithium iron phosphate has quietly gotten price competitive with lead acid and its wildly better tech. Not particularly sexy but its having a real world impact (LFP is commonly used for solar storage among many other uses).
So random consumer who just bought a ton of batteries here:
i don't follow the hype closely, nor am i a crazy battery dude, but i have tracked over the years the cost of doing battery backup vs generator, etc.
It's definitely the case for me (and friends of mine), that between reasonably priced batteries, inverters,etc, doing good battery backup for the house (and peak demand shaving/etc, i use a lot of power and take advantage of time of use tariffs) is now less than half the price of a generator.
Most of my friends spent 35-45k on a generator.
I will have spent <20k on batteries + inverters. It would actually be even less, but i have 600amps of split phase for the house, and 150 amps of 480v 3 phase for the shop, so i need two different kinds of inverters.
It is all literally being installed right now.
I would actually go completely off grid, but i live in a historic area and have slate roofs so can't really do solar easily ;)
As for what changed - 12 months ago this setup would have been almost double the price, just because of the availability (or lack thereof) of the right kinds of products necessary to achieve it. I know because i priced it :)
Availability here isn't in terms of stock, but literally in terms of "variety and choice of product".
For example - the availability of UL certified low cost 48v batteries in various sizes has skyrocketed in the past year. Lots of states require UL certification, assuming you are doing this in a permitted/etc way)
Additionally, a lot more outdoor batteries are now available (my setup is outdoors but mostly protected).
The availability of choices in higher kVA but still residential grade inverters has also skyrocketed, etc.
As for why the price was doubled - before i would have needed 2x the number of inverters, and you really couldn't get a good 480v inverter except with high volt batteries that are wildly less available and wildly more expensive.
On top of that, the batteries you could use that were UL certified and outdoor rated or could easily be done in outdoor enclosures was much lower than it is now.
Honestly curious: why do you need a generator ? And more to the point, why do "most of you friends" need one (35-45k seems like a huge investment, so it would not be some vanity purchase, right ?)
Is that customary where you live, because the grid is unreliable ?
I would love to see one I can actually buy! Let me know once there's one I can actually buy.
I've been having this issue for years of everyone being so excited about things that I can't actually buy. I don't care! I would love to be excited too, but it's just tiring now.
I wish there were some kind of aggregator for exciting achievements that you can actually buy. I'm tired of all this premature hype!
There are continual improvements in batteries all the time making them better, cheaper, and they are being deployed with exponential growth.
Silly headline. Just say solid state, yet again, the thing that's always been around the corner while lithium ion and sodium just ship ship ship on a massive scale.
If solid state works out, great, but it would no longer be a big breakthrough. Batteries are here and a major grid component today.
Batteries are quite good already. You can wait for the next big thing, or get something that works and scales right now.
Battery production is now measured in multiple twh of capacity per year. That goes into vehicles of all types with any number and size of wheels, grid storage solutions, and domestic storage. People use them all over the world now. Including some developing economies.
There are many quality attributes you can look at with batteries: cost per kwh, weight per kwh, volume per kwh, charge/discharge rates, longevity in charge cycles, operating temperatures, robustness, chance of flammability (near zero with some cell types), etc. Better is a meaningless qualification unless you express it in those.
And what is best and what is optimal are two things. There's a reason LFP is dominating rather than NMC. It's good enough and a lot cheaper even though it has slightly less energy. For the same reason sodium ion is being put into some cars. It doesn't have the energy density. But it's cheap, operates in arctic and desert temperatures, and they last pretty long.
When it comes to new battery chemistries, it takes time to go from a lab breakthrough to mass production. Sodium ion is now being mass produced. A few years ago there was only low volume production. And before that, the technology was stuck in various stages of the R&D pipeline at various companies. From a lab prototype in a university to an actual proof of concept might take several years. And from there to production many years longer.
With solid state, there are about at least half a dozen technology companies that are moving from test samples to low volume production in the next years. Mostly the technology is proven and validated at this point. But it might still take until at least the end of the decade before we see any mass production. Building big factories costs billions and is super risky. Companies don't do that unless they are certain something will work.
Solid state will have to compete on quality and price. High density solid state in cheap cars is not likely to be a thing for cost reasons. But they might be popular with drone and sports car manufacturers. The press is unfortunately a bit sensationalist on this front and it creates unrealistic expectations.
It also doesn't help that every "breakthrough" announcement is always about something that happened in a lab that may or may not be scalable, and is usually said lab or their sponsoring organization just trying to put itself out there.
And hey, can't blame labs for playing the game, but it does produce a lot of noise with little signal for the average reader.
I wish there were a media with articles like this
> When it comes to new battery chemistries, it takes time to go from a lab breakthrough to mass production. Sodium ion is now being mass produced. A few years ago there was only low volume production. And before that, the technology was stuck in various stages of the R&D pipeline at various companies. From a lab prototype in a university to an actual proof of concept might take several years. And from there to production many years longer.
That's absolutely fine and understandable. But then, why do we keep hearing the word "breakthrough" ? I hate this word with all my heart.
Batteries are still not ubiquitous. EVs are still expensive.
The "breaktrough" that would be worth mentioning will be when people can buy an EV and never, ever, ever manage to build a scenario where there is _any_ range anxiety.
Or when everyone has a battery in their garage, that's as inconsequential to buy as a fridge, and can store enough energy for them to go through the winter with 2 months of sunshine.
I know we're far away from that. Fair enough. Godspeed to you if you're working on that, in the lab or in the factory. You or your grandkids will get there.
Just, write the _breakthrough_ article then, please.
A scientific breakthrough can happen and is news worthy. The consequence might be mass production of some thing enabled through decade of R&D that follows the breakthrough. But there are lots of reasons why that might never happen.
Anyway, catchy click bait news lines sell. And breakthroughs are worth reporting on by themselves. Anyway, the economist didn't do a great job here doing their job. They are all over the place mixing things that are basically on the market (sodium ion) or nearly on the market (solid state) with various scientific progress from research labs.
As for the rest of your comment, I don't think accurate information is your problem.
There will be no single moment when that happens. It will be a stack of years and years of innovations and improvements each of which take time to roll out into mass production, start expensive, and get cheaper.
> Just, write the _breakthrough_ article then, please.
When exactly though? When the price of the "new" breakthrough technology that's been around for decades at that point drops from $101 per kwH to $100 per kwH?
I totally get your frustration but it seems kinda arbitrary to say a new technology isn't a breakthrough until it's ubiquitous.
"Distinguishing hype from reality is not easy. But recent developments mean that ambitious promises could be fulfilled. "
Just like AI is changing the world before our eyes, this may be just such a technology. Maybe I will come to resent them when they are omnipresent, but a person-transporting drone (EVTOL) flying on a solid state battery would be transformative in connecting people, and I cannot wait to see it happen. The EU has committed 500bn in inter-european railway investment by 2050. Maybe it will be entirely disrupted? Who knows.
Maybe I am missing something, but I haven't seen a solution to the noise problem of air traffic (especially anything rotor based).
Might not be an issue for long distance connection in sparsely populated countries like the United States, but I don't see it replacing trains in Europe until this is solved.
There is also the fairly obvious problem of safe operations in urban areas.
Rooftop helicopters were banned from Manhattan’s office buildings after a helicopter tipped over and decapitated waiting passengers, and then the blade fell to the street level where it killed another person.
Flying no matter how diminutive always has the issue of Newton's third law. This requires having large empty landing zones to be safe, or you risk having people land on you, which would hurt no matter how slowly they're coming in.
I had a chance to fly a simulator of the Beta Technologies VTOL airplane (they're a PartsBox customer). I went from horizontal flight into hover, and my guide said "oh, by the way, you are consuming a megawatt right now".
A megawatt. To hover.
That really opened my eyes to the reality: unless we have unlimited, clean and nearly free fusion power, flying cars are not going to be a thing.
This conclusion is... kinda absurd.
In any reasonable setup, hovering would be a rare, rare operation (like 30-60 seconds during takeoff and landing), with most of the time spent in wing-borne forward flight – which'd be _wildly_ lower power usage, more like 200-250kW tops. About ~par with staying in continuous acceleration in an EV. More for sure, but not nearly as insane as what you're pointing to.
... and this is exactly where better batteries would help – being able to hold that power level for longer so you could actually go places in earnest without untenable mass.
Is it? If we're talking about a future where EVTOL takes over for passenger cars, there will be air traffic jams with delays that require extended circling and likely hovering.
There's a reason all the EVTOL startups show individual vehicles landing in pristine fields, and it's the same reason car advertisements show one car on a closed course instead of I-95 at 3pm on a Friday
... air traffic jams? The air is _much_ bigger than the corresponding ground.
Certainly there'd be density _at_ take-off and landing, but even that's manageable by having e.g. arrival/departure locations at multiple heights.
It also seems vanishingly unlikely (at this point) that we'd have EVTOL that's not fully autonomous, further reducing the odds of this - ~perfect and coordinated driving, as well as foreknowledge of what's happening between you and the arrival location drastically reduces traffic.
Do you know how planes land at an airport? They circle waiting for their turn. Why would that problem vanish?
In the way Boring Co. disrupted subways?
I have been thinking this for quite a while now, electric planes will kill a lot of rail routes. However I am still skeptical about the EVTOL form factor for mass scale transportation, at least on the short or medium term.
I think we are going to see a lot of fragmentation in modes of transport where we have jets going from international airports for long range, small electric planes in small airports for that 50-300km distance low-frequency destinations. And rail only for high-frequency destinations.
In fact I imagine that electric vs jet planes math will get so crazy that it might kill some international hubs that are too far inland, companies will want people off jets into electric propeller planes as fast as possible.
> I have been thinking this for quite a while now, electric planes will kill a lot of rail routes
Why? If you have an existing rail network, trains are bound to be cheaper than planes and can get to more places (including convenient centrally-located stations in most major metro areas).
Plus, air travel is generally miserable unless you have a private / chartered plane. Crowds, long lines, security screenings, opaque and abusive pricing models, etc. This is not something we couldn't fix, but over the past 30 years, it's gotten a lot worse, not better; electric planes don't automatically change that. In contrast, rail travel in Europe is almost universally pleasant and hassle-free.
> In contrast, rail travel in Europe is almost universally pleasant and hassle-free.
Laughs hollowly in German.
For high volume routes rail is best. For lower volume automated cars on the highway are more efficient than flying by enough that only the rich will fly - just like today. You can book a helicopter flight home today if you are willing to pay for all the fuel. However even at 1/10th the energy cost, a car will be vastly cheaper and so what most people will choose. We also will continue to use trucks to move freight for many of these trips, so the roads will exist either way.
There is one other issue with flying: it often isn't legal - for good reason - to fly and land where you want to be. For a 300km trip flying to an airport is fine (if there is one close - they are not evenly scattered around), but at 50km you may as well drive the whole way instead of transfer at the airport - unless you live very close to the airport (which you won't because of noise)
If flying ever becomes efficient energy-wise, this may happen. However, right now, flying is very energy inefficient, so anything that doesn't need to be flown, is transported overland to save costs. A change of fuel won't change it, unless the underlying energy usage changes fundamentally.
Better batteries do not impact energy usage, only the means of energy delivery.
Rail will always be more efficient since you don't have to carry the load. I think places that never built passenger rail (Alberta has been toying with Edmonton to Calgary since they've existed) this will wipe out the need for them.
A lot of the weirdos are trying to force trains to be worse by carrying batteries. Almost everyone knows this is crazy, except some Americans with surprising influence.
Most trains are diesel-electric, so they already have batteries? For those unaware, in this type of engine the diesel engine is actually a generator which charges the batteries and then the electrical power is used to drive the train. It's actually more efficient for the torque needed.
In the US, over 70% of commuter rail uses shared freight track and electric planes are not going to be moving freight.
Where have you heard of electric planes being so much more energy efficient than jets?
We have these things called helicopters, they are already made small enough for single occupants and have been for decades. Making them electric and automated doesn't make them less of a helicopter with all of the issues of existing helicopters.
For instance, I will never have any desire to risk the air traffic clusterfuck of hundreds of EVTOLs with different computers from different brands with different levels of maintenance trying to land/take-off in a Costco parking lot to grab a rotisserie chicken on their way home from work.
It isn't a technology problem. EVTOL only makes sense where helicopters currently make sense.
Your last sentence is simply not true. Helicopters are massive in terms of volume and weight, and incredibly loud. You're also assuming our current layout of everything would stay the same. Imagine if teleportation existed, do you think cities, towns, and suburbs would still look the same?
A collision is less likely in 3D than in 2D, and obviously the chicken would be delivered to you via drone rather than the inverse.
EVTOL isn't exactly quiet either. It will annoy the living shit out of your neighbors, particularly if everyone is doing it. Houses/apartments near airports are already cheaper for that reason.
And sure you can contrive whatever clean-slate sci-fi setting you want to try and make it make sense, but we aren't going to be ripping up existing infrastructure for it. This isn't Popular Science cover art.
Collisions are more likely if there's hundreds going to/from the same place at the same time, and also they can just fail and fall out of the sky onto dwellings, roads and businesses in ways that cars can't.
Your vision will be killed politically the first time a child playing on their swing-set or shopping with their mother or driving down the road is killed by a poorly maintained EVTOL.
Multiple smaller rotors does seem to have a powerful simplifying ability due to redundancy and the much better responsiveness it offers.
Generally though I agree with you. Plus it will always use WAY more power than a wheeled vehicle, and have much worse failures.
Yeah, they're definitely better helicopters than what came before depending on what you want out of the vehicle, but helicopters nonetheless.
Electric helicopters come with the advantage that they’re much simpler to maintain surely.
Go watch some of these and tell me you trust these people to maintain an EVTOL vehicle, however simple.
https://www.youtube.com/@mechanicalnightmare/videos
We already have fatal car crashes from people who neglect maintenance and don't get their car inspected. Now imagine instead of a 2D plane to cause a wreck, on a road where people are generally alert and paying attention for wrecks, they can fall out of the sky onto kids playing in yards, onto busy roads out of the sun, or just onto each other during the final approach/take-off.
Nope, air travel is only safe because we strictly regulate pilots and maintenance.
I would think the most likely use for evtol (assuming, for the sake of argument, that whatever sci-fi technology needs to be invented will be invented to make it cost effective) is autopilot flights that are currently long commutes with a lot of traffic -- ie: Suburbs to city center and back, or long cross suburb trips.
Autopilot with strictly regulated maintenance and no personal ownership is about the only way it works, assuming your neighbors don't care about the noise
Rail is energy efficient and extremely reliable. You're not going to win on either of those metrics.
Recent history is full of examples of trains that killed air routes. Trains took 80% market share from Paris to Lyon and 100% to Brussels. Similar in Spain and Japan.
Trains are absolutely better but France also outlawed most of those short haul flights. https://www.euronews.com/2024/07/06/frances-short-haul-fligh...
https://archive.is/ReAtU
You'll need to get your hands on Greenland first.
With both battery tech and quantum, you have to separate out "commercial availability" vs "laboratory availability".
I doubt we have even scratched the surface of battery technology though.
Battery technology is governed by the laws of physics and chemistry. I'm not an expert in battery technology, but I trust those who are to know physics and chemistry. We are likely asymptotically approaching a known limit. Perhaps someone who is an expert can tell us where those are.
Well we know gasoline as an organic battery is 50x more energy dense than an EV battery by weight for example and 25x more dense by volume.
And if you want to get really exotic, antimatter is about 83.2 billion times more energy dense. We're not going to be running into fundamental physics limitations for energy storage anytime soon.
Though maybe it's a little unfair to call either of those things a "battery", they seem like fundamentally different technologies to me even if in theory they could fill exactly the same role.
250 years ago nobody knew what the hell a battery was. It seems hubristic to assume we now possess ultimate knowledge of the universe.
While we don't know everything, what we don't know must fit without the things we already know. It seems highly unlikely there is something significant in this area we don't know.
solid state batteries - perpetually only 5 years away
Mercedes has cars on the road now with solid state batteries. They're not mass-producing the batteries yet so they're only in test vehicles. Performance has been great.
So do various Chinese manufacturers
Cool, just five years away from production
You can already buy cars with semi solid state, and full solid state goes into large scale production & cars in 2027. Not long to wait!
Everyone's been talking about breakthroughs for batteries for years. Until I see one on the shelf, it doesn't matter. Go make them better, and come back once they actually are!
I've even seen ceramic batteries being tested on YouTube as long as 7 YEARS ago [0], but I still can't actually buy one.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJXRyWQgOY4
I think CATL bringing sodium-ion to industrial scale should count as "on the shelf".
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/28/catl-secures-worlds-l...
Hmm, that is industrial-scale which I wouldn't say is something I can really buy but that is cool nonetheless!
They're available. Though you probably shouldn't invest to heavily in gen1 (production) sodium-ion batteries. It's looking like they'll be obsolete pretty quick.
https://battery-tech.net/battery-markets-news/gotion-unveils...
CATL's recent sodium ion battery production start is their second generation. The first generation was a few years ago.
> something I can really buy
What are you going to use them for?
Consumer batteries are already good enough IMO. Cheaper batteries in large quantities are what we need more of.
Smartphone batteries that last a month instead of just a day would be nice.
I would agree if I could buy a AA battery that would power my toothbrush for a year. Or one that could be rechargeable with easily-available chargers reliably for a decade (and without having to drop 0.2V to achieve it...).
Any kind of consumer power technology can only ever be truly "good enough" if it never causes any inconvenience or significant cost.
My point is that this is clearly out of the lab.
> Everyone's been talking about breakthroughs for batteries for years.
Lithium iron phosphate has quietly gotten price competitive with lead acid and its wildly better tech. Not particularly sexy but its having a real world impact (LFP is commonly used for solar storage among many other uses).
They are better and keep getting better and cheaper. Iteratively rather than one giant leap, but undeniable.
been tracking this sector for years and we did hit a major inflection point in the last 12 months
What actually changed?
So random consumer who just bought a ton of batteries here: i don't follow the hype closely, nor am i a crazy battery dude, but i have tracked over the years the cost of doing battery backup vs generator, etc.
It's definitely the case for me (and friends of mine), that between reasonably priced batteries, inverters,etc, doing good battery backup for the house (and peak demand shaving/etc, i use a lot of power and take advantage of time of use tariffs) is now less than half the price of a generator.
Most of my friends spent 35-45k on a generator.
I will have spent <20k on batteries + inverters. It would actually be even less, but i have 600amps of split phase for the house, and 150 amps of 480v 3 phase for the shop, so i need two different kinds of inverters.
It is all literally being installed right now.
I would actually go completely off grid, but i live in a historic area and have slate roofs so can't really do solar easily ;)
As for what changed - 12 months ago this setup would have been almost double the price, just because of the availability (or lack thereof) of the right kinds of products necessary to achieve it. I know because i priced it :)
Availability here isn't in terms of stock, but literally in terms of "variety and choice of product".
For example - the availability of UL certified low cost 48v batteries in various sizes has skyrocketed in the past year. Lots of states require UL certification, assuming you are doing this in a permitted/etc way) Additionally, a lot more outdoor batteries are now available (my setup is outdoors but mostly protected).
The availability of choices in higher kVA but still residential grade inverters has also skyrocketed, etc.
As for why the price was doubled - before i would have needed 2x the number of inverters, and you really couldn't get a good 480v inverter except with high volt batteries that are wildly less available and wildly more expensive. On top of that, the batteries you could use that were UL certified and outdoor rated or could easily be done in outdoor enclosures was much lower than it is now.
> Most of my friends spent 35-45k on a generator.
Honestly curious: why do you need a generator ? And more to the point, why do "most of you friends" need one (35-45k seems like a huge investment, so it would not be some vanity purchase, right ?)
Is that customary where you live, because the grid is unreliable ?
I would be interested in hearing more about the system you installed, if you don't mind sharing. I'll probably be taking the plunge in a year or two.
I would love to see one I can actually buy! Let me know once there's one I can actually buy.
I've been having this issue for years of everyone being so excited about things that I can't actually buy. I don't care! I would love to be excited too, but it's just tiring now.
I wish there were some kind of aggregator for exciting achievements that you can actually buy. I'm tired of all this premature hype!
They will be delivered as soon as fusion power plants come online to charge them.
I agree with you, I'm sick of hearing about the "developments" in batteries, nano materials, and fusion. Need an add blocker for these.
There are continual improvements in batteries all the time making them better, cheaper, and they are being deployed with exponential growth.
Silly headline. Just say solid state, yet again, the thing that's always been around the corner while lithium ion and sodium just ship ship ship on a massive scale.
If solid state works out, great, but it would no longer be a big breakthrough. Batteries are here and a major grid component today.
The first quantum laptop will run on solid state batteries that were charged with electricity from a fusion reactor.
Immediately upon being switched on it will cure cancer.
And the next version of Windows is going to make it much more secure, fun and easy to use !
And I'll still be waiting a year to play Half Life 3 on it.