I thought they would have been pushing for sodium ion batteries instead. Lead acid batteries are a bad choice for anything that needs to be cycled frequently.
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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Traded-in e-bikes will be sent for dismantling and recycling
Maybe they need the batteries for something else...
Last part of the article basically says sodium ion batteries are where they're going next.
They're a also bad choice for e-bikes because they're heavy as hell. I had an e-bike a while back that had two lead acid batteries, and they were about 15 lbs each. The added weight made it almost impossible to go uphill with the motor, so you'd have to pedal a much heavier bike up hills. Not a good experience at all.
However, safety concerns regarding rare yet dangerous lithium-ion battery fires have put a pause on that proliferation.
Urging citizens to buy new and inferior instead of increasing safety standards?
I'm Swiss (europe) and it's common knowledge here that chinese imported transportation devices can be russian roulette to use.
The very next sentence specifically mentions that they did institute new safety standards
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I mean there are quite many fires in China started by those e-bikes but I thought it was because of bad quality.
Thermal runaway probably shouldn't be a realistic consequence of bad quality in any consumer product.
There are chemistries that are less volatile But they're less energy dense as well.
The biggest problem I see on most of the Chinese stuff is a lack of safety in the battery packs. They're just mass-producing cells and shoving them together, It wouldn't be very expensive to put a small battery management system on every cell. Watch each cell for voltage and temperature. Have them shut down when they're out of safety margins
LiFePO4 is still superior to traction lead-acid in pretty much every way: energy density, safety, time and cycle life, internal resistance... Yes, they need a BMS but those are very cheap and lots of batteries have them built-in. In fact, I was unable to find 4-cell packs without a BMS inside so I could put two of them in series and balance the 8S cells with each other using an active BMS of my choice, and ended up ordering individual cells and screwing them together.
Also worth mentioning LiFePO4 is like half the weight of lead acid and it's far less susceptible to voltage sag under load. The only area I think LiFePO4 runs into challenges is the inability to charge below freezing. Lead acid is a real workhorse when it comes to the extremes.
The article also mentions sodium ion batteries as an alternative. Can’t wait to see how they perform in real life.
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The safety thing is 100% true but only part of the picture.
E-bikes don’t need maximum energy density because they’re not gonna be used for long trips and are significantly lighter than cars and trucks.
China has many, many more electric vehicles than any other country and a ton of electricity production to run them. At some point it’s gonna become important to save the lithium batteries for the stuff that needs that high density power.
Maybe these better chemistries that will replace lithium are just around the corner. I certainly don’t count unhatched chickens.
Makes sense. Thanks, Gayhitler.
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