Shipping a 300kg EV Li-ion battery?

[Jelly_Sheffield]

Massive cheap Chinese & other low cost country imports of EV's might just make other EU based manufactures readjust their vision of money grabbing even if tariffs are added , seeing that they are all ( ???? ) foreign owned & not just a British thing .
Isn't VW thinking of shifting EV production to China ??

In the main, the money grabbing isn't coming from the EU manufacturers of EV's, they're just about making them pay and making much worse margins than on ICE cars.

The three manufacturers who are making it work right now in terms of margins are:
- Tesla (since they started using chinese manufacturing),
- BYD (who are entirely chinese, and the world's biggest EV manufacturer by volume), and
- Volvo (who honestly must be working some kind of Scandi black magic).

Tesla is currently still selling their product at EU/USA made prices, but now manufacturing at china costs hence the big margins, although based on my FT this morning all indications are that their sales volumes look to have dropped off a cliff recently for some unknown reason.

BYD is very taking all the lessons of how Ford and Toyota did well in years gone by, massive volumes, tight vertical integration wherever it makes sense (Rouge River style) and clever supply chain management when it doesn't make sense to manufacture in house (Toyota City style).

Volvo is a bit more of a mystery to me, I think it's down to choosing which market segments to compete in and deciding they'd rather eat a big slice of a smaller pie than barely nibble the crust of a huge one...

Which makes sense when you remember cars are just a sideshow to them anyway, something like 15% of their revenue and 3% of profits... So if their margins dropped on cars it would make sense to just divert that manufacturing capacity onto trucks, plant equipment or marine where they're pushing +10% year on year growth.

 

[daleyd]

In the main, the money grabbing isn't coming from the EU manufacturers of EV's, they're just about making them pay and making much worse margins than on ICE cars.

The three manufacturers who are making it work right now in terms of margins are:
- Tesla (since they started using chinese manufacturing),
- BYD (who are entirely chinese, and the world's biggest EV manufacturer by volume), and
- Volvo (who honestly must be working some kind of Scandi black magic).

Tesla is currently still selling their product at EU/USA made prices, but now manufacturing at china costs hence the big margins, although based on my FT this morning all indications are that their sales volumes look to have dropped off a cliff recently for some unknown reason.

BYD is very taking all the lessons of how Ford and Toyota did well in years gone by, massive volumes, tight vertical integration wherever it makes sense (Rouge River style) and clever supply chain management when it doesn't make sense to manufacture in house (Toyota City style).

Volvo is a bit more of a mystery to me, I think it's down to choosing which market segments to compete in and deciding they'd rather eat a big slice of a smaller pie than barely nibble the crust of a huge one...

Which makes sense when you remember cars are just a sideshow to them anyway, something like 15% of their revenue and 3% of profits... So if their margins dropped on cars it would make sense to just divert that manufacturing capacity onto trucks, plant equipment or marine where they're pushing +10% year on year growth.

Volvo have been in bed with Geely (Chinese) for their ev ventures, which may explain their success?

In fact I think Volvo cars are completely separate from the truck division and have been for long time.

 

[Ubique]

Most are less than 24 months in service, without doubt, it's the energy/coolant interface that causes most problems. Some manufacturers are experimenting with CO2 coolant - but that has it's own problems. R744 refrigerant is essentially CO2 and has to be 'serviced' (i.e. replenished) every two years due to the high pressures involved causing losses. Most manufacturers I have / had dealings with are 'working towards' cell replacement rather than assembly replacement, the problem is that these packs are only intrinsically safe beyond the pyrofuse / contactor(s), there is no ability to force technicians to take the training to enable them (legally & technically) to carry out low level repairs to packs - and many are hesitant, very hesitant or outright refusing to do so due to the potential (see what I did there? ) risks involved - the risks are laid bare in the training up to that point, not by scaremongers or internet chat, but the vehicle manufacturers themselves (and their insurers).

Conversely, the hybrid batteries are rarely a problem - possibly due to the relatively low capacity / lower charge rate / lower current draw / lower duty cycle? Hybrid is also a much more mature combination of technologies, even if ultimately more complex.

 

[Ubique]

Volvo have been in bed with Geely (Chinese) for their ev ventures, which may explain their success?

In fact I think Volvo cars are completely separate from the truck division and have been for long time.

Volvo / Geely are also heavily involved with M-B in producing the Smart EV's. It's odd that the Smart side of M-B dealerships has to be completely compartmented, even down to the diagnostics have to be on Smart-only devices, the tech training takes no account of M-B qualifications, essentially you have to start again - even if you're a M-B Master Tech.

The BEV side of Smart is 'OK', everything else is 'quirky' at best, deployable door handles are poorly made and have a habit of not deploying / deploying whilst driving entirely due to the robustness of the assembly...

Although to be fair, I've changed more defective door handles on VW iD3's than I have Smart - but that may be due to production / sales volumes

 

[Gragson]

Volvo have been in bed with Geely (Chinese) for their ev ventures, which may explain their success?

In fact I think Volvo cars are completely separate from the truck division and have been for long time.

Volvo are owned by Geely, who are controlled by the spiders from Mars along with Weird & Ziggy (who played it left hand)

 

[daleyd]

Volvo are owned by Geely, who are controlled by the spiders from Mars along with Weird & Ziggy (who played it left hand)

Yeah, they have been for some time. Polestar is their big ev collaboration but as you say they are the parent company anyway.

 

[Pigeon_Droppings2]

I've always assumed that a lot of what we consider to be cars "made in europe" are more like "assembled in europe". I've no evidence of course...just an assumption.

 

[daleyd]

I've always assumed that a lot of what we consider to be cars "made in europe" are more like "assembled in europe". I've no evidence of course...just an assumption.

I think there’s quite a big supply chain for parts in Europe, for things like body pressings, castings etc - there were certainly a lot of car component suppliers around my area supplying into Vauxhall, JLR Halewood - like everything more and more will be coming from the east nowadays of course but I think the majority of the major components are from Europe…for now.

 

[DAPPH]

I think there’s quite a big supply chain for parts in Europe, for things like body pressings, castings etc - there were certainly a lot of car component suppliers around my area supplying into Vauxhall, JLR Halewood - like everything more and more will be coming from the east nowadays of course but I think the majority of the major components are from Europe…for now.

Europe before the expansion ??
Around 1998 many firms in Peterborough were dropped like red hot steel in favour of Polish made parts & other former satellite countries .
Perkins engine suppliers were left high & dry almost overnight as the new hush hush plants came on stream .

 

[Jelly_Sheffield]

At least one vehicle manufacturer deals with this 'contaminated waste' by encasing in concrete and storing underground, to quote their training documentation 'until recovery methods are developed and tested' or as I prefer to think of it, until hell freezes over or the storage facility is costing too much to maintain....

Rant Incoming.

Recovery method already exist and are tested, it's actually demand for the recycled product that's the issue...


11 years ago when I was I was just entering the waste industry my employer was taking in lithium batteries Free of Charge from customers and exporting them to a company in southern France for pyrometallurgical recycling, at which time between my employer and our two competitors there was maybe a few thousand tonnes leaving the UK each year and the recycler charged almost nothing to take them off of us, and made their money on the recovered metals, whilst we made our money selling the evidence notes for producer responsibility schemes...

Now the UK produces ten times that amount of Lithium batteries, and the french company has more people wanting to send them batteries than they can find buyers for the recovered product, and charges much higher gate fees because they know demand for their services is outstripping what the market can supply.


There's a pilot plant here in Sheffield which uses much more efficient physical separations and hydrometallurgy to do the same thing, designed and built in house by a company who specialise in precious metal recycling, they are waiting for demand (for recycled product, because it's got to go somewhere) to increase before putting money at risk on building commercially sized facility.


EMR started taking on process engineers and doing R&D three years ago as part of a long term development program which is aiming for full scale EV battery recycling to come online in the UK in the early-mid 2030's when they predict demand for the recycled product will begin to justify the investment.


A year ago this week I was at one of my suppliers in Yantai, China stood in front of a full scale lithium battery recycling plant (based on physical separations, similar to the first, easy stage of the pilot plant in Sheffield) that was undergoing factory acceptance testing before being disassembled for export to an undisclosed "customer in the Asia-Pacific region", it was the third one they'd sold.


Ultimately, the vast majority of battery manufacturers aren't willing to take the "risk" of using secondary raw materials when virgin materials are still cheap.

It's the same story with just about anything you try to recycle, incredible things are already technically possible, but economically it's a nightmare.

The vast majority of manufacturers who would use what you make don't want to take even small financial or reputational risks on actually "closing the loop" even if they talk a good game on "circular economy" in their annual report.

But it's hard to blame them as they in turn are only being so cautious and short-termist because of the increasingly challenging cost of capital for any long-term capital intensive project...

Which is a result of the distortionary effects on capital markets from:
- a deregulated financial services sector fully embracing the potential of high frequency trading to pursue extreme forms of speculation that effectively "magic" money into existence faster than traditional value investment ever could.
- a decade and a half of a "vibes based" approach to valuation of big tech stocks which for long time failed to correlate with earnings or intrinsic value, and
- VC's capitalising on those two trends to perfect an investment cycle that's very close to a legalised "pump and dump scheme" around tech startups, again pulling private money away from more traditional value investment approaches.

Ultimately this is why I quit doing cutting edge R&D in the recycling sector and went off galavanting to build pollution control and waste management infrastructure for "middle income" countries...

It's not cutting edge stuff (in some places just building a properly run landfill site can be a game-changing environmental improvement), but there's a clear and growing demand, to deliver real, tangible projects that help people, help the environment, and pay well with it.

Rant over.

I am please to read that the latest forms of research are now producing viable results in weeks all over the globe , releasing new stuff every days where as 10 yrs ago it took 15 years to R& D things , 30 years they were thinking of 70 or more years . 200 years ago it was slower than the post office

Computer aided engineering and design has definitely changed the game in terms of speed of execution for R&D, especially in the last decade or so.

But in terms of manufacturing businesses it's really development and not research that's been sped up...

If anything proper forward looking research with long term goals is being kicked to the curb in favour of making much more marginal improvements at lower cost and risk, then making a big press release that hugely overstates the importance of said improvements in a bid to keep "market sentiment" on the company's side so the stock ticker can continue going up.

 

[daleyd]

Europe before the expansion ??
Around 1998 many firms in Peterborough were dropped like red hot steel in favour of Polish made parts & other former satellite countries .
Perkins engine suppliers were left high & dry almost overnight as the new hush hush plants came on stream .

I worked in electronics manufacturing in early 2000s and saw the same - work moving from the uk to places like Poland - then Romania because it was cheaper, and it then progressed out to the far east as it was cheaper still.

So yeah, I imagine it’s no different for other industries including car making. But from what I can see there still seems to be a big part of that supply chain for cars in Europe. But I’m sure the east have started making inroads.

 

[More Amps]

- a decade and a half of a "vibes based" approach to valuation of big tech stocks which for long time failed to correlate with earnings or intrinsic value,

I think you can go further back to the late 90's...when virtually any and every business that relied on the wonderful new internet was virtually guaranteed easy access to finance and gigantic valuations based on nothing more than smoke, mirrors and random comparisons "if that company flogging software is worth £10 million, then my company (flogging something totally unrelated) logically has to be worth at least double...." The trouble is people believed (or pretended) to believe the hype as the alternative was to point out the emperor's lack of clothes - which is fine as long as everyone else wakes up and smells the coffee at the same time - but does your career no favours if you point it out before market sentiment is ready to acknowledge the "obvious".

 

[Jelly_Sheffield]

I think you can go further back to the late 90's...when virtually any and every business that relied on the wonderful new internet was virtually guaranteed easy access to finance and gigantic valuations based on nothing more than smoke, mirrors and random comparisons "if that company flogging software is worth £10 million, then my company (flogging something totally unrelated) logically has to be worth at least double...." The trouble is people believed (or pretended) to believe the hype as the alternative was to point out the emperor's lack of clothes - which is fine as long as everyone else wakes up and smells the coffee at the same time - but does your career no favours if you point it out before market sentiment is ready to acknowledge the "obvious".

True enough.

My gut feeling is that the current situation is at least as excessive as, and much more sustained than anything seen in an extremely long time.

It's also my perception that the key market distortion since the early 80's has the market value of companies slowly but surely becoming completely divorced from the actual utility value of the goods and services they provide, and this has continued to accelerate even through multiple crashes.

Such that we may already be past the point where markets can climb down without pricing in either:
- yet another catastrophic financial crash, or
- sleepwalking into multiple self-inflicted resource shortages due to chronic underinvestment in critical sectors, or
- the latter suddenly causing the former in rapid succession.

 

[Ubique]

Rant Incoming.

Recovery method already exist and are tested, it's actually demand for the recycled product that's the issue...


11 years ago when I was I was just entering the waste industry my employer was taking in lithium batteries Free of Charge from customers and exporting them to a company in southern France for pyrometallurgical recycling, at which time between my employer and our two competitors there was maybe a few thousand tonnes leaving the UK each year and the recycler charged almost nothing to take them off of us, and made their money on the recovered metals, whilst we made our money selling the evidence notes for producer responsibility schemes...

Now the UK produces ten times that amount of Lithium batteries, and the french company has more people wanting to send them batteries than they can find buyers for the recovered product, and charges much higher gate fees because they know demand for their services is outstripping what the market can supply.


There's a pilot plant here in Sheffield which uses much more efficient physical separations and hydrometallurgy to do the same thing, designed and built in house by a company who specialise in precious metal recycling, they are waiting for demand (for recycled product, because it's got to go somewhere) to increase before putting money at risk on building commercially sized facility.


EMR started taking on process engineers and doing R&D three years ago as part of a long term development program which is aiming for full scale EV battery recycling to come online in the UK in the early-mid 2030's when they predict demand for the recycled product will begin to justify the investment.


A year ago this week I was at one of my suppliers in Yantai, China stood in front of a full scale lithium battery recycling plant (based on physical separations, similar to the first, easy stage of the pilot plant in Sheffield) that was undergoing factory acceptance testing before being disassembled for export to an undisclosed "customer in the Asia-Pacific region", it was the third one they'd sold.


Ultimately, the vast majority of battery manufacturers aren't willing to take the "risk" of using secondary raw materials when virgin materials are still cheap.

It's the same story with just about anything you try to recycle, incredible things are already technically possible, but economically it's a nightmare.

The vast majority of manufacturers who would use what you make don't want to take even small financial or reputational risks on actually "closing the loop" even if they talk a good game on "circular economy" in their annual report.

But it's hard to blame them as they in turn are only being so cautious and short-termist because of the increasingly challenging cost of capital for any long-term capital intensive project...

Which is a result of the distortionary effects on capital markets from:
- a deregulated financial services sector fully embracing the potential of high frequency trading to pursue extreme forms of speculation that effectively "magic" money into existence faster than traditional value investment ever could.
- a decade and a half of a "vibes based" approach to valuation of big tech stocks which for long time failed to correlate with earnings or intrinsic value, and
- VC's capitalising on those two trends to perfect an investment cycle that's very close to a legalised "pump and dump scheme" around tech startups, again pulling private money away from more traditional value investment approaches.

Ultimately this is why I quit doing cutting edge R&D in the recycling sector and went off galavanting to build pollution control and waste management infrastructure for "middle income" countries...

It's not cutting edge stuff (in some places just building a properly run landfill site can be a game-changing environmental improvement), but there's a clear and growing demand, to deliver real, tangible projects that help people, help the environment, and pay well with it.

Rant over.


Computer aided engineering and design has definitely changed the game in terms of speed of execution for R&D, especially in the last decade or so.

But in terms of manufacturing businesses it's really development and not research that's been sped up...

If anything proper forward looking research with long term goals is being kicked to the curb in favour of making much more marginal improvements at lower cost and risk, then making a big press release that hugely overstates the importance of said improvements in a bid to keep "market sentiment" on the company's side so the stock ticker can continue going up.

I think you missed the point - it's recycling of contaminated batteries that is apparently a problem. Coolant isn't just water, it's got glycol, polythene and other (apparently) reactive components in it that make the process of harvesting the cells hazardous beyond the limits of the benefits (or costs, more likely).

 

[Jelly_Sheffield]

I think you missed the point - it's recycling of contaminated batteries that is apparently a problem. Coolant isn't just water, it's got glycol, polythene and other (apparently) reactive components in it that make the process of harvesting the cells hazardous beyond the limits of the benefits (or costs, more likely).

That really doesn't matter a great deal, especially to the very well established pyrometallurgical process. Granted shipping is an issue for anything that's become destabilised like that, but not one that can't be overcome with overpacks

The idea of "encase it in concrete" is a literal joke in the UK hazardous waste industry (after infamously someone did just that to a bunch of toxic gas cylinders, then later had to pay Shanks & McEwan an astronomical bill to have them removed from concrete like archeological artifact and disposed of properly after being forced to have it treated by what was then Her Majesties Inspectorate of Pollution).

If a UK or EU regulator has signed off on that process, and issued a Permit for a D12 Permanent Storage or D15 Temporary Storage facility to hold those batteries it fundamentally undermines the entire application of the "Polluter Pays Principle", but it wouldn't be the first time a manufacturer has been given that kind of special treatment that flies in the face of decades of policy.

 

[Ubique]

Renault Group shares EV battery fire prevention system

Renault Group is giving all car makers permission to use its Fireman Access system, which helps prevent electric vehicle (EV) battery fires.

www.fleetnews.co.uk

Seems a simple solution to a common problem, sure, access may be problematic in some cases but it's better than the current methods.

 

[ukracer]

Offer the local fire brigade the battery for practicing at putting them out using the latest methods

Can't even have sofa donations any more.

 

[Erie Fred]

Can't even have sofa donations any more.

Light them on fire......

 

[DanZac]

Renault Group shares EV battery fire prevention system

Renault Group is giving all car makers permission to use its Fireman Access system, which helps prevent electric vehicle (EV) battery fires.

www.fleetnews.co.uk

Seems a simple solution to a common problem, sure, access may be problematic in some cases but it's better than the current methods.

I'm always up for a bit of innovation, and any progress on the safety front is always positive. But how on earth are the firemen supposed to get to that battery access point.

Unless the pictures totally wrong, (which it might be) that's going to be under the car, up against the floor. Hardly the place you want to be trying to get a heavy, unwieldy hose into whilst the car burns around you.

If they want to go down that route, they would be better off putting a hose connector on the side of the vehicle (a bit like your fuel filler) that the fireman can simply plug a hose into.

 

[Ubique]

Well, they don't get the big bucks for nothing you know!

Honestly, with the typical levels of intelligence around, if there was an external port, EV batteries would be filled with screenwash, AdBlue, petrol or diesel - or even high pressure water, 'just to see if it works' on a weekly basis...

With the ongoing rise of the nanny state, Darwinism is in recession and stupid people are positively encouraged to live longer lives and breed, which is the only explanation I can find for some of the things we regularly see - and that's just in relation to vehicles!