The CATL Naxtra sodium-ion battery will debut in the Changan Nevo A06 sedan, delivering an estimated range of around 400 kilometers (249 miles) on the China Light-Duty Test Cycle.
and
It delivers 175 watt-hours per kilogram of energy density, which is lower than nickel-rich chemistries but roughly on par with LFP
The main benefits are that Sodium is abundant, cheap and stores 30x the energy of Lithium per unit mass. The draw back is that when exposed to water it explodes with 30x the energy of Lithium. The other drawback is that it bursts into flame when exposed to air.
Think of it this way, Sodium metal is abundant and cheap with 30x the energy storage (and energy transfer) of other solutions yet nobody has used it in almost any product ever (including as a coolant). The volatility of Sodium is why. Unless they have a solution to this, then I would be shorting whoever is insuring these batteries.
Sodium ion batteries use sodium ions, like in table salt. They correctly are not named metallic sodium batteries. They are less fire prone than lithium batteries, even in locations containing air.
You should also consider shorting Morton [0]. They sell sodium, combined with chlorine, one of the nastiest elements around! And for products that go in people's homes! On food!
This isn't correct. This is only true when the battery is first manufactured just like with Li-ion. Once the battery starts functioning, it is ionized metallic Sodium. All the volatility of Na but with corrosion too. There is no Chlorine nor any other halogen in there to engage in an ionic bond. In short, once the battery is functioning, the trick used to keep the Na in an ionic bond stops working (by design). After all, the ionic bond would prevent the battery from functioning.
It should be noted that most manufactures aren't doing pure Na-ion. They are mixing in a little Na with the Li to stretch Li supplies and gather data on the impact of the increased volatility on safety. I wouldn't expect their first use to be in cars. I would expect them to be in grid stabilizing batteries.
I was sure you were wrong so I went and did some reading and, you're right. I'm wrong.
I was thinking of the aqueous sodium ion batteries, which do not have the issues described. I thought those were the ones that are commercially available, but that's not the case.
In ancient times, salt developed an extraordinary reputation. Not only was it prized as a preservative, but it was a nutritious seasoning as well. Salt had great value, and much of that nutritional value could be ascribed to the trace minerals which it carried as it was mined or otherwise harvested.
Nowadays, the manufacturers of refined table salt present you with a digusting proposition: sprinkle this worthless elemental sodium-chloride onto your food, because it is "salt" and they are 100% trading on its ancient reputation. Perhaps it is better to simply trample it underfoot?
Unfortunately, all the trace minerals are missing from refined salt. That pure white, homogeneous, translucent quality gives it away. The refining of salt is done purposefully, because the trace minerals are more valuable to supplement vendors.
All those trace minerals are separated out and sold out to companies who will assemble them into expensive dietary supplements. Your magnesium, and selenium, and zinc that you pay $30 a bottle for.
And that is also why sodium has such a nasty reputation in 2026. If you get CVD then you avoid sodium. If you get hypertension then you avoid sodium. Sodium is avoided like the plague. No physician will recommend sodium or table salt for a diet! Why should they? Adding sodium no longer introduces trace minerals or nutrition, it only introduces saltiness.
It is still possible to find unrefined salt. It may be sold as "sea salt" or "kosher salt" but you'll need to find it in transparent packaging. If it contains impurities that look like pepper or dirt, then it is unrefined. If it is imprinted with the obligatory fake warning about iodide, then it may be unrefined. (The mandatory FDA "iodide" warning is not only fake, it's misleading and downright malicious.)
Good luck with your salt! With love from your eponysterical HN noob!
However, the information is false. The amount of nutrients in unrefined salt is negligible. Yes it contains trace minerals but not in any significant quantity.
I have never seen or visited that website ever in my life. Why would I? I wrote my comment completely originally, and your accusation of bad faith is, in itself, bad faith.
In fact, none of the content which I typed into my comment is found in that blog article. How and why did you even find it? Anyone else here can read and confirm that I copied nothing. I quoted nothing. I owe nothing to anyone. My comment is original and copyrighted by myself (c) 2026, all rights reserved.
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CATL has been producing Sodium-ion batteries since 2022. As CATL has continued to produce and introduce new Sodium-ion batteries, it appears they might have a solved the issue with volatility.
If they have not solved the problem, I still wouldn't recommend shorting any companies. Shorting a stock and waiting for years for it to drop is not a great strategy.
Think of it this way, Sodium metal is abundant and cheap with 30x the energy storage (and energy transfer) of other solutions yet nobody has used it in almost any product ever (including as a coolant).
I thought the price differential was not going to happen as there was a serious drop in the price of Lithium over the past year; but I looked it up and the lithium price drop is more a 5 year trend, with the last few months having a sudden surge in the price.
Increased production of Lithium is why. However, that only drains the (very limited) reserves of Lithium more quickly. Currently we have about 75 years left of it at previous extraction rates. More could be found, that is unlikely.
Draining lithium reserves isn't that important - batteries don't use up the lithium, once the battery dies you can just suck out all the lithium and re-use it (and battery electrolytes are ~100% lithium, compared to lithium ore/brine being anywhere from 0.1% to 15% lithium - an order of magnitude difference). And since modern batteries are more efficient than old batteries with the same amount of lithium, we effectively increase the circulating lithium capacity over time.
In 75 years we won't need to extract more lithium - except the fraction needed to replace permanently-lost batteries.
Incidentally, you should be very careful when talking about "<resource> reserves", because the definition of a reserve is usually "<resource> that is profitable to extract" - and when we "run out", prices will go up and thus currently-unprofitable sources will become profitable, and POOF! Our <resource> reserves have increased, purely through the power of semantics.
Also, over the decades resource extraction becomes cheaper and thus more sources become profitable.
Personally though, I don't think any of that will matter -IMO the future is proton batteries, AKA Hydrogen batteries (which use an electrolyte of "ionic hydrogen", H+, which has 1 proton and 0 electrons - people claim lithium is the lightest metal, but it has 3x the protons of hydrogen). I think that the recent TABQ batteries, or something like it, will become commercially viable within 75 years (although who even knows what batteries will look like in the year 2101).
Nobody has ever recycled Lithium, just reused the cells that lasted longer than average. We have no idea how to actually recycle Li. We don't even understand the physical mechanism that causes it to exhaust. We think if we just let it sit around for a few decades, it might just come back on it own. We don't know though.
As for reserves, while you understand the economics you are missing the physics. For example, there is Li (and U) in the ocean. We don't extract Uranium from the ocean not only because it isn't economical, it isn't even energy efficient. This is because moving a billion tonnes of water takes more energy than the 3 tonnes of Uranium you would harvest from doing that. For Li, its takes just as much energy (and money) as its just as rare. In other words, there is a floor on that economic extraction argument specified by a positive EROEI (energy returned on energy invested).
Yes, we have. This is a well understood and fairy simple chemical process, you grind up non-working Lithium battery and split up the FOD from the metals then it's just basic chemical metal refining from here on out? When lithium is mined and extracted it goes through the exact same processes.
If you have any other sources or information on why we can't recycle lithium please let me know. As far is battery failure goes it's a mechanical failure on a chemical level
The Li that comes out of the process you describe wouldn't be recycled. It would still be mostly exhausted. Specifically, something we don't understand about the structure of their electrons causes the batteries made with such material to have a far lower capacity than if you used freshly mined Lithium. My source is a Material Engineering class at MIT.
We understand the structure of electrons very clearly in a lithium battery. That is the core operating principle of how a lithium ion battery works.
The lithium ions are the chemical process that actually store the charge, They move from the anode to cathode in charge and discharge. The loss of these ions is what causes the degradation of the battery which is a function of entropy here. It is simply that the concise arrangement that we required for this electro-chemical to take place falls out of balance.
Entropy problem is easily solved by mashing a battery up and reconstituting it
into a new battery.
To put this all simply this is all fairly basic chemistry, even if there was some kind of structure being created that has a high bond enthrall we can still undo that with enough energy.
If you could maybe share some research or other information to back up your claims other than you went to a class at MIT i would really appreciate it also the company i was saying is called Li Cycle
what about the polymetallic nodules on the ocean floor, don't they contain Li? -- setting aside the environmental question, isn't that a vast untapped source?
I thought there were a few massive lithium sources found in the past few years like the one in Thailand which have significantly increased our estimates?
Sure, but by like 2 years. Lithium is rare. It sits between Cobalt and Scandium on the list of abundance in Earth's crust. And the vast majority comes from one place in South America.
They are always revising estimates up and down a bit. But Li demand just keeps rising and rising. And a single grid scale battery takes 10 years of current Li-ion battery production worldwide to build.
So do we have enough Li at current rates, sure. We don't have anywhere near enough to do anything like replacing even a fraction of FFs with renewables. I guess that's the real headline here. That's why people are experimenting with Na-ion. Putting it in a production car today, that seems...what's the word...homicidal. Making a grid stabilization battery (not for backup) with large amounts of space between cabinets to see what happens, that seems more wise.
We have many grid stabilization batteries. There are 0 grid scale backup systems. 1 year of worldwide Li-ion battery production could backup just California for about 90 minutes.
Retaining 90% range at -40°C sounds like a game changer, almost too good to be true. I'm definitely going to need to see some third-party real-world range tests to validate those claims before getting too excited.
Note that this article's summary has a significant error compared to the original press release[1]. The article says "90% range", whereas the press release says "90% capacity retention".
This is a big difference because there are all kinds of other factors besides energy capacity that can affect the efficiency of the whole system, and therefore affect range.
Most notably, air is about 28% denser at -40°C than at 25°C, so drag is about 28% higher. So you would expect roughly 28% less range at high speeds even if the battery has no capacity loss whatsoever.
As someone else mentioned, climate control also consumes a lot more power when it has to maintain a larger temperature difference between inside and outside.
> Most notably, air is about 28% denser at -40°C than at 25°C, so drag is about 28% higher. So you would expect roughly 28% less range at high speeds even if the battery has no capacity loss whatsoever.
With my gas car, I haven't noticed 30% worse fuel consumption at –30°C compared to +30°C [0]. To be fair, I haven't closely measured the fuel consumption at different temperatures, but I probably would have noticed such a big difference. This is just anecdotal of course, so your values may actually be correct.
[0]: It does occasionally get down to –40°C here, but my car won't usually start then, so I've slightly shifted your temperature range to the values where I've driven most.
It won't be as noticeable on a gas car because it is probably starting out around 30% efficiency (as compared with ~90% for an EV). This is a major advantage of gasoline, in a sense, because it means we have already engineered the package to account for a lot of wasted fuel.
Ah, so then the air temperature should reduce fuel consumption by 30%×30%=10%, which does seem to roughly match my experience. Thanks for pointing that out!
Internal combustion engines are actually more efficient in cold weather than hot weather. But the other factors like drag outweigh the increased efficiency of the engine. And since gas engines are so inefficient to begin with you don't notice much of a difference. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/270072/heated-an...
Gas cars produce more power at lower temperatures - more oxygen gets into the combustion chamber, and the engine also can run more advanced spark timing without as much worry of detonation. This is why turbochargers have intercoolers.
Note that a 28% increase in drag results in a roughly 22% decrease in range, because 1/1.28 ~= 0.78. Also there are other losses (like rolling friction and constant loads like headlights or cabin heat), so range doesn't scale perfectly with drag. Drag is the main source of loss at highway speed, however
I drive long distance weekly on my gas car. Full tank in summer (+20C) gives me 520 km, while in winter (-20C here) I get 430-440 km. I noticed it on my current and previous cars. Maybe it's thicker oil and worse car efficiencies in winter ? And that's despite that full tank of gas has more gas in winter comparing to summer, gasoline is denser in cold temps.
It's the majority, but overwhelming or not surprisingly appears to depend on car model, at least per some calculations someone on reddit ran [1].
I'd add though that rolling resistance tends to be higher, on average, in winter too. When there's often a bit of snow on the roads... Less so on high speed highways admittedly.
For most cars driving through air, at sea level, on planet Earth, at normal speed, the drag force F is proportional to the square of the speed (v^2).
That's not exponential because the speed (v) is not in the exponent. In fact, it's quadratic.
Corollaries: The power required to push the car at speed v will be proportional to Fv ~ v^3. The gas spent over time t ~ energy spent ~ power time ~ v^3 * time.
Define ‘high speeds’. There’s a reason race cars look like they do, to the point of having serious problems driving at speeds just a bit below highway speed limit.
I don't imagine the difference is very significant on long drives. If the car is cold soaked at -30, it uses about 10kW for the first 3km. Then everything is warmed up, and the ~25% difference is increased consumption, not decreased battery capacity.
As long as you have a heat pump harvesting the waste heat to keep the battery up to temp.
But might be significant on short drives, 10kW for the first 3 km is massive.
Yeah, this heat up effect is massive for around-town use. We have had below freezing weather for two weeks, which is very unusual here in Annapolis. That’s had a huge impact on my wife’s use case, which involves a bunch of 5-10 mile trips to drop the kids off at school, go on a grocery run, pick the kids up, take the kids to math tutoring, etc. She ran out of charge the other day during drop-off b/c the “37 miles left” we had the night before was actually a lot less than that accounting for warming the battery up the next day.
And human occupants will still run the heater more in winter. But it sounds like there could be a future where makers offer a sodium battery and heat pump version of their cars for sale in colder climates.
Running a preheater loop for the heat pump from the systems than need to be cooled, inverter and motor that run better cold,and other optimisations could likely supply cabin heat with very little battery draw, solar pv blended into the exterior could zero that out on an average basis,but 40 below is nothing to play with unless you know exactly what you are doing, even if they say it will still work.
IIRC there are some surprising holdouts, at least in the NA market. For example as far as I'm aware the Mustang Mach-E still ships with a resistive heater.
Vehicle ASHP do little in deep cold temperatures, since the evaporator is necessarily so small. They're mostly effective in the 0-15C range. Note that all EVs have PTC heaters, regardless of heat pump. The PTC is what does most of the work for getting the interior to temperature quickly (they're 5-10 kW).
The VW id.3 costs about 30k. It doesn't have a heat pump by default, but it's a 1,200 EUR add-on. Which probably makes sense; in some markets where it's sold it doesn't really get cold enough that one is of significant benefit.
Interestingly, the Hyundai Inster (20k EUR) and Renault 5 (25k EUR) both have heat pumps as standard equipment.
just fyi for the MY23 and older software 3.8/9 should be available for update, which is a pretty significant upgrade compared to 3.2 or the 2.x builds (which I don't think a MY23 should have but idk).
There's one. Go to a Car and Driver article about cars with extreme ranges, namely those over 650 miles, and they will start listing out particular years' models over a 10 year period in order to get to even ~10 models, and most of them are EcoBoost or variants or poor selling hybrid versions of other cars.
Assuming a 1000km range is a very strange thing to do, as it's a fringe feature that almost no one needs or wants! Recall that "almost no one" means that there's still some, an existence of a handful of people on HN is quite consistent with "almost none."
Of course I didn't pick it for range, I looked at price and miles of what the local carmax had and then separately looked up how tall the top of the windshield was.
Which I would expect to typically find something that's, um, fairly typical on characteristics I wasn't selecting on.
my 2010 F-150 with the notoriously terrible 5.4L gas engine seems to manage 1000km range. there's absolutely nothing efficient about it, it's just got a big gas tank.
Yep, Ford had to put really big tanks on even the F150 to make up for the horrid mileage. Even with a 36 gallon tank, when towing with an F150 you might only get 300 miles. It's one reason the Lightning had problems selling as many as they wanted (aside from the ridiculous pricing the first year or so). Most people who are serious about towing don't use an F150 anyway, but that doesn't mean that F150 buyers don't fantasize about their potential towing needs in the future.
Comparing range of gasoline cars is idiotic. There are plenty of cars with long range (1000km), and they all have 60L+ fuel tanks and most run on diesel (which gives you ~15% more range per liter). It'd even argue the same for BEVs. More battery is more range.
> The point you are DESPERATELY trying to miss is you can easily "recharge", a "dead" ICE at home too
Eh? All I can see is you DESPERATELY trying to push the narrative that it’s common for people have barrels of fuel at home which is a pretty weird thing to try and prove since everyone reading this will know it’s not true.
You mean EVs? Yeah, none that I'm aware of. But petrol/diesel cars? Loads of them. Even my 400bhp Volvo XC60 will easily do 650 miles on one tank of fuel. A diesel one will do 700-800. And a diesel Passat will go over 1000 miles on a tank without trying. Hell, even my basic 1.6dCI Qashqai could do 700 miles on its 55 litre tank
Cool, I guess when I did 700 miles on a single tank of fuel driving Switzerland to Italy and then again driving Italy to Austria and then again Austria to Netherlands this summer I just imagined it. My total for the 3000 miles was 38mpg(imperial).
Also you are quoting a value for the B5, which is not what I have, mine is a T8(and before you ask - no, I didn't have any opportunity to charge it anywhere on the way).
> Fuel economy tests show that, in city driving, a conventional gasoline car's gas mileage is roughly 15% lower at 20°F than it would be at 77°F. It can drop as much as 24% for short (3- to 4-mile) trips.
The temperature difference should in principle increase thermodynamic efficiency. You get loss of MPG from other factors though mentioned in the link, like increased friction of moving parts, idling to warm up (0MPG), defrosters/seat heaters, lower tire pressure, denser air to drive through, winter fuel mixes which may not have as much energy, etc.
Sticking a piece of cardboard over a portion of the radiator was a common sight during the winter when I was growing up in rural Ohio. I didn't think our winters were that cold, but maybe late 70s to early 80s vehicles were more susceptible to running cold.
I had a car that developed a stuck-open thermostat and did the cardboard trick to get by until I could replace the faulty part.
I've had that happen, too, on a [more] regular car. I drove a Mustang 5.0 from Oklahoma to Oregon, and as I went through eastern Colorado the coolant temperature steadily dropped until it was resting at the bottom of the gauge. I don't recall whether the gas mileage suffered noticeably or not during that phase of the drive.
There are a bunch of things going on, and some people's measure of efficiency needs work.
1) winter blend fuels have less energy per volume, that doesn't make your engine any less efficient by energy but it does by volume of gas
2) lots of temporary cold effects: fuel vaporization, thick lubricants, etc. these things become less of a problem as the engine warms up but some energy is still lost on long drives
3) air resistance: all aerodynamic forces are linearly proportional with air density. At a constant pressure there's about a 15% difference in air density between the hottest and coldest places you can drive (and thus 15% less drag on a hot summer day than a cold winter day). aerodynamic forces are proportional to the square of your velocity and they become the largest resistive force around 50mph -- so at highway speeds you're losing efficiency because you have to push more air out of the way
4) energy used to maintain temperature: this is hard to calculate but some engine power is lost because the energy is used heating up the engine block and lost to the environment
5) the Thermodynamics 101 engine efficiency goes UP with increased temperature, but it's got a lot of real world effects to compete with, no spherical cows and all
Assuming you can get the car to start (mine needs an engine warmer at that temperature), it takes at least 15 minutes of driving to reach that temperature. Unless you’re going on a longer trip the engine most likely wont be warm by the time you reach your destination.
I had to drive in -30C once, the engine could not get up to final temperature after 2 hours of highway driving because I had to run cabin heater at full blast on windshield and side windows so they didn't cover with fog inside. But that was in very old low power car.
My tiny diesel car (2008 Toyota) needs its auxiliary heater below around -15 C for highway trips. It's a switch in my dash that burns extra fuel, otherwise the engine won't get up to or stay at temperate.
Pretty normal with diesel as it gives off less heat than petrol. I have a van with an 88kW engine, and even at -5c I can see the coolant temperature drop when I am idling down hill and have the heater on. Any colder and it's worth blocking the radiator with cardboard.
I once had a condo with parking in a cave that was above freezing even when outside was -30 C (or F, close enough at that part of the scale). It was a great winter perk.
Since the Lithium battery prices dropped, there are many Sodium battery companies simply abandoning the research or shuttering. Not a good sign when smart people jump ship.
The Na cells also have lower energy-density, and currently fewer viable charge cycles. One can still buy evaluation samples, but it takes time to figure out if the technology will make economic sense.
Remember those Donut/Verge solid state batteries, which were supposed to ship in Q1 2026? That just slipped to the end of 2026 or 2027.[1] Supposedly they're delayed by needing "certification" for their motorcycle.
(The motorcycle is real, and has been out for years. This is just a battery upgrade.)
Apparently the article was updated to clarify the "delay" date was referring to the delivery dates of new/future orders and not referring to any delays for the very first orders.
Is there some particular relevance to this article?
There's a lot of reasons to think that that battery might be a scam... unlike most batteries, including sodium ion ones... If it's not a scam it will certainly upset the battery market eventually.
It's another battery that you can't buy right now.
"Chinese battery giant CATL and automaker Changan Automobile are preparing to put the world’s first passenger car powered by sodium-ion batteries on public roads by mid-2026."
CATL is more credible than Donut, but both are making forward-looking statements.
Not all forwarding look statements are the same...
CATL is "we're going to mass produce this specific well known technology" and while there's some question as to precise numbers for their implementation of it they aren't claiming anything surprising. A worst they're somewhat over optimistic and fail to be a commercial success. At best they're slightly under optimistic and are slightly more successful than anticipated. We can be confident they aren't flat out lying (though they may be exaggerating) because the claim is so mundane.
Donut is "we're going to produce a technology capable of achieving targets that haven't even been demonstrated in a (public) lab. We won't tell you what specific technology. We're going to put this miracle battery in motorcycles, because we can". At worst they're flat out lying to scam investors - but if they're not lying, even if they're over optimistic, they've made a significant advance in the state of the art that will eventually (once it's not just put in motorcycles) have widespread repercussions.
Do any US automakers have anything in the pipes using Sodium-Ion batteries? A quick search turned up info on a plant mass producing the batteries in Holland, MI but no mention of when they would be available. As someone in the market for an EV within the next year or 2, and also currently enduring a month long stretch of temps in the single digits and below, cold weather performance has suddenly become a huge consideration.
Likely No. Undecided with Matt Ferrell recently did a video on how sodium ion batterys startup in the US (not necessarily for EVs, but other power applications) have had challenges largely due to the falling price of lithium making sodium batteries less competitive on price the past couple years: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nrTCgZmUFCY
OTOH, there are seemingly more lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery ev options now - rivian now uses LFP, Ford mustang mach-e has had a LFP variant since fall 2023 (and should have other models using LFP in 2027), I think the 2026 chevy bolt uses LFP, etc.
> The US administration has basically told them to do so.
Any US automaker relying on Trump staying in office is playing with fire. Yes, you may see reduced or zero press releases and budgets for EV research being "reallocated" on paper so the toddler in chief doesn't get a public tantrum - but assuming there will be free and fair elections this year, it is highly, highly likely that Congress will be solid blue and reinstate a lot of what Trump has cut down, only this time as an actual law that is far harder to cancel than executive orders.
And everyone not hedging for this possibility will wreck their company's future.
There is no realistic path to a veto-proof majority for Democrats in the midterm elections. If there was, Trump would be impeached and removed before EVs were addressed.
Don't expect any movement on EV legislation unless and until Democrats take back the White House in 2028
I would prefer that when the dems dive back into EV subsidies, they fly them under the radar instead of using tax credits for buyers. Lots of people actually believe that their fossil fuel is not subsidized, so we need to use the same techniques to actually help manufacturers bring competitive EVs to market.
It would be better to remove all subsidies, so the true cost is revealed to and paid by the consumer. It would be a bit difficult to remove all fossil fuel subsidies though, since that would include a large part of the defence (sorry war) budget that is spent keeping the oil flowing.
It would be better for governments to provide tax credits / subsidies to battery manufacturing facilities than it would be to directly subsidize consumers. The hope being the cheaper battery component cost gets passed onto consumers.
Vehicle sales subsidies frankly just end up rolled into the price as a markup.
The Canadian government here partially has the right idea in only subsidizing vehicles under a 50k CAD ($36k USD) price tier -- unless they're manufactured in Canada. But I don't think that barrier is low enough. Should be $40k or even less. Our subsidy also takes the form of a direct cash subsidy instead of a tax credit -- which is regressive and helps people less in lower income tiers who don't pay much in income taxes.
Axed EV subsidization, openly called EVs -- and climate change -- a scam, and then made noises about cutting emissions standards, and aggressively pursued fossil fuel expansion?
That and threw tariffs on the auto makers parts and imports such that their businesses are under threat?
GM just axed the Bolt again. The only domestic affordable EV. Stellantis killed all of theirs, from what I hear. And Ford has pulled back as well.
I don't understand your questions, please rephrase them.
Anyway I'm still curious about the mechanism the administration used to direct manufacturers to stop producing EVs, and how they could invoke such a power without covering Telsa or Rivian. Nothing about the administration would surprise me, but I'm surprised there hasn't been more noise made about it.
LFP battery production in the US only recently reached larger scale; so I expect it will be a while before they get around to sodium ion. With all the tariffs, they'd have to license technology and build local factories to get started. That will probably be a few years at least. Or the tariffs might become more reasonable at some point and they could import battery cells a bit sooner than that. But probably not until the end of this decade.
Cold weather performance with heat pumps and lithium batteries is fine. Don't worry about it. I wouldn't try to hold my breath until a US automaker produces a sodium battery EV.
It’s only “fine” if you live in the southern US where freezing conditions are rare and/or never drive anywhere near your winter range and you have a garage charger or some other easy access to a charge station. Anything outside of those conditions and winter range issues are painful.
Nah dude, I live in Canada, we're having a record cold winter here, and it's really not bad. My car (Polestar 2) is one of the least efficient, has no heat pump in my year, and only has a ~225km effective range in winter (~300 in summer) but .. I have zero range anxiety, there's no pain, it's not annoying. The number of times one is driving that far in a single trip is miniscule, but there's DC fast chargers all along the highways that take the edge off, and there are cars with far larger range anyways.
Canada must have a better fast charger network than the US, because I have to deal with range anxiety whenever I’m visiting family or camping/cabin or even just driving through a reservation in the winter. When you’re staying somewhere that is 30% (battery charge) away from the nearest fast charger and you lose 10% per day, you start budgeting trips pretty fast.
Why do you imagine that average miles per day matters? I don’t drive anywhere near 200 miles/day, but any time I have to drive across the state (or farther) in the winter I have to recharge a lot more frequently, and the charging stations are busier and fewer in number (usually more are out of service in the winter either because the snow has drifted over them or because the cable was left in the snow and is now frozen over or a plow damaged the unit). Worse still, if you don’t have a charging cable in your parking space, you will have to drive to a charging station much more frequently (because the idle battery usage is much higher).
But yeah, if you have a garage with a charger and you never exceed your winter range then it’s fine, per my previous comment.
More than 60 million Americans own a home with a garage (where a charger can be installed) and most are within 100 miles of a fast DC charger. Edge cases continue to shrink and be solved for, electricity is ubiquitous and batteries keep improving rapidly.
I think proportion is more useful that quantity. 66% of housing units (that's all forms of housing, not just single-family homes) have a garage or carport. Also, given that there are ~145 million housing units, 60 million would be a bad situation.
> most are within 100 miles of a fast DC charger
That's not good enough. No one can spend 3-4 hours to drive 200 miles round trip, or even 100 miles, to charge quickly.
There needs to be a good solution for the 33% of households that don't have access to EV charging as part of their home. Until it becomes really plentiful, part of the solution may involve fast charging that only the 33% can use or that favors the 33%; people who can charge overnight at home should charge overnight at home.
Fast chargers colocated at grocery stores people shop at at least weekly are a solution, Tesla did this (Meijer partnership), as did Electrify America. Walmart is rolling out charging at most of their US stores. Home charging is a solution, but so is workplace level 2 charging.
Can you charge at home? Do so. Can you charge at work? Do so. Can you charge at a grocery store or other location your task will take longer than the charging? Do so. This works for most Americans, while charging infrastructure continues to be rapidly deployed. The gaps will be filled, how fast is a function of will and investment.
Chargers at grocery stores and other places of public accommodation that have lots of parking and customers who stay a while are good options. I don't know how many are enough; even fast chargers take orders of magnitude longer to use than a gas pump.
At least in the midwest very few grocery stores have fast charging. Usually the fast chargers are along highways on the outskirts of cities, and even then they’re almost always at gas stations.
Agreed. However, the number of people who live 100+ miles from a fast charger rounds to zero. Something like 85-90% of the US population lives within a metro area, and even in the least "EV friendly" states probably has a fast charger within 10-20 miles at most.
Yes, things are rapidly improving. My claim was that cold weather is a pain today. Also “living within 100 miles of a fast charger” is small comfort to those who don’t have a convenient way to charge at home.
For the record, I’ve been an EV owner for 5 years in the northern US. I still like my EV and things get better all the time, but I don’t understand the people in this thread saying that cold weather battery performance is fine.
My argument is more charging infrastructure and sodium ion chemistries should solve this relatively soon, and both are on arguably steep trajectories. My 2018 Model S 100kw has decent cold weather performance even cold soaked after 8 years of ownership with resistive heat for both the cabin and battery pack (glycol heater), I expect state of the art to keep getting better.
I used to keep a 100ft 120V heavy duty extension cord in the frunk to charge due to how few charging options there were in 2018, and no longer have to (having driven across most of the continental US).
If an EV is not feasible today due to limited charging options, certainly, procure a hybrid until battery chemistry and charging infrastructure improves in your area. I admit cold weather performance might be hard for some, but Norway has achieved 99% BEV monthly sales, so it can be done. It’s just a matter of where you are on the global adoption curve.
No one disputes that most days most people drive less than their winter range, but I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Most people survive cancer most of the time; I still wouldn’t characterize modern cancer treatment as “fine”. We aren’t settling for the 50th percentile.
For consumer products, handling the 50th percentile is excellent. There's nothing wrong with a car that is "only" suitable for half the population.
Needing to buy a different kind of car and dying from cancer are ever so slightly different experiences. But thank you for the kind of absurd HN take that inspired my username.
But most of the EVangalists who post seem to have a very unrealistic viewpoint that says 33% of the (US) population is an edge case and that no one needs more than 200 miles of range because there are chargers every ten miles and no one goes on long trips anyway, especially unplanned (since they only have 80% of their range even when plugging in every night).
> Needing to buy a different kind of car and dying from cancer are ever so slightly different experiences. But thank you for the kind of absurd HN take that inspired my username.
It’s not absurdity, it’s analogy. If you can’t distinguish between the two then HN may indeed not be for you.
It's an absurd analogy. It doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. You wouldn't call a cancer treatment that fails to cure a minority of people "fine", so EVs aren't "fine"?
And yet, some of the biggest proponents of EVs live in frigid areas of Canada and the US. As it turns out, range loss is not really a huge deal for a lot of people, but being able to get in your car and drive without worrying about whether it will start at all is nice. No plugging in a block heater, no worry about fuel gelling, no warm up time. And you can pre-condition the interior so it is warm when you get in. With a modern EV you could lose 50% range and still have plenty for your daily commute. Even a fairly long commute.
Norway regularly sees -30C in winter and EVs account for like 99% of sales there, it made the news that in January only 7 ICE cars were sold in the entire country.
It's also a different country with a different culture, etc. Norwegians drive roughly 50% less than people in the US. There's probably a bunch of contributing factors, but the point is that reduced range is less of a problem if you drive less.
I'll be the first to say we need less range anxiety, and Norway is awesome. But we need to be careful comparing the US to Norway here.
Yes, they buy some, with roughly the same percentage of new car sales being EV. However, those regions have a significantly higher percentage of households with multiple cars, and they have overall a significantly higher fraction of ICE cars in service than do the warmer areas.
This means you can't really make deductions about EV performance in very cold weather in those very cold regions without getting data on what the EVs are being used for. It could be most of them are in households where they have ICE cars to handle things where they need long range or when they need to tow or haul things, and the EVs are just used for things where loss of range and capacity doesn't matter much.
Probably has a lot to do with the incentives—tax rebates for EVs, taxes for ICE cars, cost of fuel, availability of fast chargers, etc. I’m glad Norway is pushing hard for greater adoption (and the US should too), but these things don’t make for a meaningful comparison.
Well no, and I agree with you - but I think it's a fair rebutal to someone saying that EV's can't work somewhere where it's really cold, like the only reason people in the northern united states or canada don't buy EVs is purely because of the cold - that's a factor, sure, but I think there's a lot of other reasons other than cold.
I’m the person to whom this rebuttal was originally made, and I did not say that EVs can’t work in the cold (I own one and I live in a northern state—they work, but not flawlessly).
I was only disagreeing with another commenter who claimed the status quo was fine. There’s a pretty big gap between “not fine” and “not workable”.
Question: if a LiIon battery can't deliver as much energy when cold, where does the lost energy go? Is it just unavailable, and becomes available again when warmed up? Is discharge less efficient, so the energy is wasted? Or does charging stop early when cold, so there's less to be discharged in the first place?
This is an educated guess, but I think it becomes less efficient, so it heats up, and then performs better as it heats. I assume this to be the case because I charge my RC plane LiPos the same way every time, and they take the same amount of energy, but flying in the winter gives much shorter flight times. Since the battery is warm after a flight, even in the cold, I don't think the energy is still there the battery is still discharged when I take it home), so it must just be much less efficient and wasting a lot of energy as heat.
I assume it's just that its internal resistance rises when it's cold, but I might be wrong.
> Is discharge less efficient, so the energy is wasted?
Yes. It's mostly wasted as heat inside the battery. I think there's also a temperature relationship to open-circuit voltage? But the predominate effect is from elevated internal resistance.
Easiest way to model this is from the cells impedance. Essentially think of the cold limiting ion motility in the electrolyte phase, and that resulting in a higher impedance, that works out as a voltage drop at the cells terminals, so the cell has a limited depth of discharge, vs at higher temperatures.
Batteries can freeze solid. It takes energy to keep them warm with an heater. Then there’s cabin heating which is usually warmed by heat from combustion in a gas engine.
Internal resistance increases, so the battery heats up more when delivering an amount of energy. So some of the battery's stored energy goes to waste as heat.
Sodium has greater density than lithium, while most other materials used in a battery have similar densities regardless if sodium or lithium is used, so if a Na-ion battery and a LFP battery have about the same mass and stored energy, it is likely that the sodium-ion battery has a smaller volume.
that doesn't check out, capacity depends on surface area, if the element that is on the surface is heavier then, all other things equal, the battery will be heavier for same kWh.
Sodium would need to be more efficient to be lighter, which it isn't
The maximum deliverable power depends on electrode area, through the maximum current density.
The capacity of storing energy does not depend at all on area, but only on the mass of sodium contained in the battery and on the efficiency of using it (i.e. between full discharge and full charge not 100% of the sodium or lithium is cycled between the 2 oxidation states, but a fraction, e.g. 90%).
Any battery has both an energy density and a power density, which are weakly correlated and the correlation may have opposite signs, i.e. for some batteries it may be possible to increase the power density if the energy density is lowered and vice-versa.
For a given stored energy in kWh, the required mass of sodium is several times greater than the corresponding mass of lithium, by a factor that is the product of the atomic mass ratio with the ratio between the battery voltages. The voltages are similar, with a slight advantage for sodium, so the required mass of sodium is about 3 times the corresponding mass of lithium.
If the complete batteries have about the same mass, that means that other components of the sodium-ion battery are smaller and/or lighter.
It is all about cost and efficiency... There is a classic 1913 electric vehicle that ran NiFe packs for many years, and were only replaced because the container rotted away. Sustainable storage costs real money, but has existed for over a century. =3
I have no idea about the characteristics of these new sodium-ion batteries, but there is a great likelihood that they auto-discharge much faster than LFP batteries.
This means that if you do not use the car for some time, you may need to recharge it before you can use it again. This may be a problem if the car is left far from a charger.
CATL's Naxtra cells apparently have a c rating of 5C. Which boils down to about 12 minutes for a full charge with the right charger. So, as fast or faster than LFP would be the answer here.
100% is a soft limit in many batteries. The battery management system actually prevents you from charging too much. Pushing it too far can damage the battery so they don't let you completely charge it.
A lot of EV drivers optimize to minimize waiting time. Mostly you try to charge while you are doing something else (sleeping, working, eating, shopping, etc.). So, you are not actually waiting for it and sitting in the car bored.
Charging speeds are non linear. The last few percent take a bit more waiting. But you don't actually have to charge the battery to 100% all the time. Two 10-80% charge breaks might be a lot less less time than one 10-100% charge break and it will get you a lot more miles.
When you are driving long distance, you can plan to top up while having breaks, lunch, etc. Just top it back up to whatever the time allows. You don't have to drive the battery to empty either. And destination charging is a thing as well.
You can trade off not having to stop for a bit more against the charging time. Charging to 100% at night is a good use of time. Because you are probably sleeping/resting. Interrupting your journey to do the same is probably not a great use of your time. Two 10-80% charge breaks might be a lot less less time than one 10-100% charge break and it will get you a lot more miles.
Of course on longer journeys, planning for 45 minute charging breaks is a lot more annoying than planning for 15 minute charging breaks. Which is what 5C charging should enable given the right cell and charger combination. With a normal EV (medium sized battery) that's once every 3-4 hours roughly. A bit longer if your car is more economical with the battery. That's actually not a horrible frequency for taking a short break. Even if you drive a petrol car.
And if you are really anxious about that, get an EV with a bigger battery. 300 miles. 400 miles. There are even some 500 mile batteries in some cars now. It will cost you of course. Financially it's probably not a great choice for most people.
Most people posting about 80% seem to talking about charging at home. If you are charging overnight, why are you restricting charge level if it doesn’t really matter to longevity? Is it just left over advice that no longer applies?
Had a thermometer read 170F 76C inside my black on black vehicle with windows cracked.
Decided to keep my battery devices in a cooler with cool and frozen water bottles to drink when I return. Phone, camera batteries, and a portable vehicle starter.
More interesting is that they're claiming 248 miles (400km) on a 45kWh battery[0]. That calculates out to 5.5 miles/kWh, whereas the most efficient Tesla 3 right now only claims 4.5 miles/kWh - and even that is a very optimistic estimate (most people can't get 270 miles out of their 60kWh Tesla 3 standard range models) [1]
This is awesome and I'm really happy to see this progress. Landing a new chemistry in a production car THIS YEAR is some crazy velocity, especially compared to where other Na-Ion batteries are in the development cycle elsewhere. Is anyone else even close to having a car on the road with their cells?
The reason this is so exciting for me personally is for stationary energy. Because the raw materials are so abundant and have good cold weather performance, both grid and home level energy storage costs should come down significantly as this is commercialized further.
This with 500-600 miles range means the end of ICE. 250 is still too little since that will realistically be closer to 150-160 if you’re consistently driving 74-80 mph.
Unfortunately sodium ion is less dense than lithium ion, so range is lower too.
Since it's also cheaper, it's likely that Na-ion will be adopted by cheaper city runabout type EVs, while premium long range EVs will continue using Li-ion.
I saw a CATL presentation where they were hyping a hybrid lithium-sodium pack. Their version of sodium ion could charge/discharge faster than LFP, and handle lower temperatures. The hybrid then gives you a nice combination of features. You get better density/range from LFP, but if you have to start in the cold, the sodium-ion can get you going, and then with active cooling you can heat the LFP using the waste heat from the sodium ion for the rest of the trip. Since the sodium ion charges faster, you can charge part of the overall pack really fast, so you can make a quick trip to the charger and add ~50%. If you live in a cold climate area it seems like a very good combination.
If it can charge as fast as filling up a tank, who cares?
There are already large battery swapping schemes in China with thousands of stations. Even if we don't get to 5-100 charging at 5C+ there's nothing stopping this from not being a problem.
If the arrow of time is to be believed, many of the complaints and gripes and "well aktuallys" from 10 years ago are solved already. And there seems to be no slowing down.
You can’t realistically swap out the battery on a full sized vehicle. It’s too large. The Chinese battery swaps are mostly for bikes and smaller vehicles.
Fast charging would fix it. If you could go from 15 to 80% in truly under 10 mins that would work too.
That assumes there are chargers and that they're available. Not a problem in big cities, but it will complicate road trips, and "range anxiety" remains a real concern for first time EV buyers.
Battery swapping is talked about a lot but AFAICT it hasn't really been successful anywhere. It just seems like a lot more hassle than plugging in, and with charging speeds constantly increasing the payoff is shrinking too.
Dumb question but I’ve always wondered if we could make a giant reusable “hand warmer” type chemistry around the battery and use that to get it going in cold environments.
Looking into it more. Maybe something like supersaturated solution of sodium acetate (plus water) in a sealed pouch with a metal disc. Bending the disc triggers crystallization, releasing stored heat (around 130–140°F for 20–60 minutes). Boil them to reset.
So you could boil and reset them during charging and click them off if needed in cold weather.
One way I've seen of doing this is to include a PTC heater. It's a heating element that you feed DC. It has a positive coefficient of resistivity vs. temperature, so it'll asymptotically approach a temperature defined by the structure of the material. No PID controller required, it's just a sheet of material you include in the battery structure.
Granted, you have a minor bootstrapping issue wherein you need the battery to be warm before you use battery power, but at very low % of the battery's power capacity I suspect it's less of an issue.
I don't think it's a dumb question at all. Storing thermal energy separately from electrical energy would make plenty of sense if we could store the thermal energy better (cheaper, lighter) than the electrical energy.
A quick search suggests that sodium acetate used like this stores 230kj/kg (i.e. 64 Wh/kg in the units used for batteries) [1] which is significantly worse than the sodium ion batteries being discussed. Same order of magnitude though, so maybe there's a better material that would make it work.
Out the gate, sodium ion advantages are so significant that unless there is some surprise show-stopper it will likely become the dominant energy storage medium.
Crustal abundance up to 1000x that of lithium - pretty much every nation has effectively unlimited supply, it's no longer a barrier or a geographically limited resource like lithium.
No significant damage going down to 0V, can even be stored at 0V - much safer than lithium which gets excitable once out of its prefered voltage range.
Cold weather performance down to -30C - northern latitude users don't have as much range anxiety in the winter.
Basically, the only problem I see is that companies that have made significant long-term investments in lithium could take a big hit. Countries that banked on their lithium reserves as a key future resource for will have to adjust their strategy.
Lithium batteries will likely still have a place in the high performance realm but but for the majority of run-of-the-mill applications - everything from customer electronics to EVs to offgrid storage - it's hard to see how sodium-ion wouldn't quickly replace it.
Energy density matters a lot for many applications, including customer electroncs and EVs. Sodium ion is at a fundamental disadvantage (sodium is heavier than lithium).
I don't doubt that sodium ion has a place... but whether it takes over as the dominant battery type for portable applications strikes me as very dependent on the future of lithium extraction. It seems like a place that has a lot of room to grow more efficient and thus more competitive on cost.
No mention of degradation as a result of recharge cycles. So many of my electronic devices have had to be disposed of because the battery would no longer hold a charge. This is also a big factor in EVs and their loss of value over time.
It is a big issue only for the ignorant (which is great for those that buy used). EV batteries are warranted for 60%-70% of capacity at eight years, which means most manufacturers expect batteries to do better, and actual real world experience shows much better.
It is impossible for sodium-ion batteries to reach the same energy density as the best lithium-ion batteries.
So lithium-ion batteries will never be replaced in smartphones or laptops by sodium-ion batteries.
But there are plenty of applications where the energy density of sodium-ion batteries is sufficient. Eventually sodium-ion batteries will be much cheaper and this is why they will replace lithium-ion batteries in all cheap cars and for most stationary energy storage (except when lower auto-discharge is desired).
For the same amount of stored energy, one needs a triple mass of sodium vs. lithium.
However, sodium-ion batteries and lithium-ion batteries do not have metal electrodes (because for now it is not known how to ensure that those will survive an acceptable number of cycles), so the actual mass and volume of the electrodes are significantly greater than that of the sodium or lithium that is used.
Because of that, the difference in energy densities is much lower than the mass ratio seems to imply.
The parent article claims that the energy density of the Na-ion batteries is in the same range with that of the LFP batteries (i.e. lower than that of the Li-ion batteries with Ni or Co based electrodes).
I'd also go for "less computer". Just because it's an EV doesn't mean I don't want what is basically a bog standard Corolla. Physical switches. Not 5 massive touchscreens that all suck. Cloth seats. No mega futuristic design. Just a damn car.
Because batteries are still expensive, this is a tough sell for most of the market. You would be removing lots of things that most buyers associate with more luxury cars, but not actually saving much of the cost and therefore not reducing the price that much.
I think (hope) this niche will start to make a comeback as the underlying tech continues to get cheaper. You are starting to see glimmers of it in the low low end with some micromobility cars in Europe just providing phone holders instead of screens.
I suspect we will be finding this technology being used a fair bit in aerospace tech like satellites to compliment the onboard solar, given the low-temp operational capability.
Given the difficulty of radiating heat away I would have expected the opposite.
Especially considering the incentive to send up as little battery as possible, and the very predictable day/night cycle leading to the ability to precisely predict how small a battery you can get away with...
That seems really out of proportion with the experience of others, you may want to get it checked out. Do you have an older model with resistive heat and no seat heaters?
My car has a heat pump. I am basing the numbers off of the range estimates the car provides when I turn off cabin climate. The range is still lower, but I assume another chunk of that is from heating the battery when it's 10°F outside.
My EV is absolutely terrible range wise at cold weather. It is EPA rated at 220miles of range. I only see that when the temperature is at or above 80F.
Most of the winter it tells me I can only do between 100 and 120 miles. It is definitely half the EPA range with climate controls disabled at 0F. (Ask me how I know).
I love driving it in the winter.
I don't have a pressing need to go long distances, so that is not a current concern. Not having to stand outside in the bitter cold to fuel up in absolutely awesome.
There are EVs on the market that do much, much better than mine in cool weather and I now know what to look for.
To really penetrate the midwest it will take a car that can realistically do a road trip to Florida from say Duluth, MN or Michigan's UP in the winter.
Because not only do folks in the midwest drive long distances without a second thought, they sometimes do it in the cold of winter so they can get a break from the snow.
So yes still getting 90% of the range at -40C does sound attractive.
That right there is a big problem to begin with. The headline EPA number only reflects reality if you have a mix of city and highway driving. The problem is that people only care about range when driving 75mph. I think the headline EPA number should reflect that reality.
EV fetishist? Is this some kind of reverse psychology thing, like accusing everyone else of having TDS? Does that even work on someone who isn't already afflicted?
Nothing in the article really substantiates the headline (currently "The First Sodium-Ion Battery EV IS a Winter Range Monster").
The EV described in the article has a standardized range of 250 miles. This isn't a range monster in any condition. There is some gesturing that Sodium batteries don't require as much active heating in cold conditions. But nothing is quantified.
As usual with sci-tech broadly and batteries specifically: it's exciting that sodium batteries are coming to market; we can be optimistic that maybe in the future they will provide lots of range, or be less expensive, or maybe less flammable than today's lithium batteries. But the marketing hype is running miles ahead of reality.
> Unlike LFP or nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) packs, it reportedly avoids severe winter range loss, retaining more than 90% of its range at -40 degrees C (-40 degrees F). Power delivery is also said to remain stable at temperatures as low as -50 degrees C (-58 degrees F).
It doesn't quantify winter range. It gestures at possible benefit; without comparison to the state of the art, it's not especially meaningful. Nevermind that losing less than 10% of 250 miles is not a ton of range.
The absolute range is not the point. You can increase absolute range for any battery by having a bigger battery. The point is the low percentage lost due to cold.
Again, it does not compare this against the state of the art. We know how to heat battery technologies that are more sensitive to lower temperatures. So the interesting question would be, how does the combined efficiency compare? No such comparison is made.
Unlike in traditional vehicles, most EVs have such a robust firewall between the battery and the passenger compartments you literally have 1+ minute to get out, compared to often seconds in a traditional vehicle.
And I've been following Polish firefighters reports about EV fires and they are very interesting - basically saying that in all recent cases of EV fires they were contained so quickly even the interior was largely undamaged - something that practically never happens with regular cars. Some of these have been in underground garages too, with difficulty of access - but nowadays they just know how to approach an EV fire and containment isn't a problem.
That's a new one. How common are fires after accidents, and what fraction of those burn the car up while someone is trapped inside? I know people occasionally die in regular gasoline vehicles in this exact situation, so is it statistically a higher risk in EVs?
"The Long-Range Version sets a new record for light commercial vehicles with a single-pack capacity of 253 kWh, achieving a maximum range of 800km."
That would be some 720 km at -40 C if the numbers are correct. I'm not well versed in this area and not sure if these batteries are comparable to those in personal vehicles, but the ones I've heard owners talk about have a reach at about half that if it's cold at all.
800 km from 253 kWh is 316 Wh/km somewhat worse than my ancient (2015) Tesla Model S. newer versions, models, and brands do better. So for most buyers this is not an improvement. Also performance at -40 C is irrelevant to the vast majority of drivers.
You are correct that range for many cars with Lithium (NMC) batteries is halved when the ambient temperature is below about -10 C. But an important caveat is that this applies principally to short trips where the battery never warms up such as driving 10 km into town and back to do some shopping. On long continuous journeys the decrease in range is much less marked.
What I wanted to know from the article:
andThanks, I wanted to know about price. Isn't that the main benefit of sodium-ion. On par energy density with LFP, but a lot cheaper.
The main benefits are that Sodium is abundant, cheap and stores 30x the energy of Lithium per unit mass. The draw back is that when exposed to water it explodes with 30x the energy of Lithium. The other drawback is that it bursts into flame when exposed to air.
Think of it this way, Sodium metal is abundant and cheap with 30x the energy storage (and energy transfer) of other solutions yet nobody has used it in almost any product ever (including as a coolant). The volatility of Sodium is why. Unless they have a solution to this, then I would be shorting whoever is insuring these batteries.
Sodium ion batteries use sodium ions, like in table salt. They correctly are not named metallic sodium batteries. They are less fire prone than lithium batteries, even in locations containing air.
You should also consider shorting Morton [0]. They sell sodium, combined with chlorine, one of the nastiest elements around! And for products that go in people's homes! On food!
[0] https://www.mortonsalt.com/
This isn't correct. This is only true when the battery is first manufactured just like with Li-ion. Once the battery starts functioning, it is ionized metallic Sodium. All the volatility of Na but with corrosion too. There is no Chlorine nor any other halogen in there to engage in an ionic bond. In short, once the battery is functioning, the trick used to keep the Na in an ionic bond stops working (by design). After all, the ionic bond would prevent the battery from functioning.
It should be noted that most manufactures aren't doing pure Na-ion. They are mixing in a little Na with the Li to stretch Li supplies and gather data on the impact of the increased volatility on safety. I wouldn't expect their first use to be in cars. I would expect them to be in grid stabilizing batteries.
I was sure you were wrong so I went and did some reading and, you're right. I'm wrong.
I was thinking of the aqueous sodium ion batteries, which do not have the issues described. I thought those were the ones that are commercially available, but that's not the case.
Kudos on being big enough and actually caring about accuracy.
This chain is an example of why I love HN so much.
you deserve a high value metal medal
Isn't there very little free sodium in such batteries? At any point in time most of it should be intercalated in one or the other electrode, no?
Morton salt is currently owned by Stone Canyon Industries which is a holding company.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/STNE/
In ancient times, salt developed an extraordinary reputation. Not only was it prized as a preservative, but it was a nutritious seasoning as well. Salt had great value, and much of that nutritional value could be ascribed to the trace minerals which it carried as it was mined or otherwise harvested.
Nowadays, the manufacturers of refined table salt present you with a digusting proposition: sprinkle this worthless elemental sodium-chloride onto your food, because it is "salt" and they are 100% trading on its ancient reputation. Perhaps it is better to simply trample it underfoot?
Unfortunately, all the trace minerals are missing from refined salt. That pure white, homogeneous, translucent quality gives it away. The refining of salt is done purposefully, because the trace minerals are more valuable to supplement vendors.
All those trace minerals are separated out and sold out to companies who will assemble them into expensive dietary supplements. Your magnesium, and selenium, and zinc that you pay $30 a bottle for.
And that is also why sodium has such a nasty reputation in 2026. If you get CVD then you avoid sodium. If you get hypertension then you avoid sodium. Sodium is avoided like the plague. No physician will recommend sodium or table salt for a diet! Why should they? Adding sodium no longer introduces trace minerals or nutrition, it only introduces saltiness.
It is still possible to find unrefined salt. It may be sold as "sea salt" or "kosher salt" but you'll need to find it in transparent packaging. If it contains impurities that look like pepper or dirt, then it is unrefined. If it is imprinted with the obligatory fake warning about iodide, then it may be unrefined. (The mandatory FDA "iodide" warning is not only fake, it's misleading and downright malicious.)
Good luck with your salt! With love from your eponysterical HN noob!
You lifted most of your quote from https://www.navmi.co.in/difference-between-refined-salt-and-... without citing your source.
However, the information is false. The amount of nutrients in unrefined salt is negligible. Yes it contains trace minerals but not in any significant quantity.
That's an outright and verifiable lie.
I have never seen or visited that website ever in my life. Why would I? I wrote my comment completely originally, and your accusation of bad faith is, in itself, bad faith.
In fact, none of the content which I typed into my comment is found in that blog article. How and why did you even find it? Anyone else here can read and confirm that I copied nothing. I quoted nothing. I owe nothing to anyone. My comment is original and copyrighted by myself (c) 2026, all rights reserved.
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CATL has been producing Sodium-ion batteries since 2022. As CATL has continued to produce and introduce new Sodium-ion batteries, it appears they might have a solved the issue with volatility.
If they have not solved the problem, I still wouldn't recommend shorting any companies. Shorting a stock and waiting for years for it to drop is not a great strategy.
Think of it this way, Sodium metal is abundant and cheap with 30x the energy storage (and energy transfer) of other solutions yet nobody has used it in almost any product ever (including as a coolant).
Huh? See https://www.terrapower.com/natrium/ -- and it's not exactly a new idea.
Also not uncommon to use sodium-filled exhaust valves in car, motorcycle, and aircraft engines.
I thought the price differential was not going to happen as there was a serious drop in the price of Lithium over the past year; but I looked it up and the lithium price drop is more a 5 year trend, with the last few months having a sudden surge in the price.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
Increased production of Lithium is why. However, that only drains the (very limited) reserves of Lithium more quickly. Currently we have about 75 years left of it at previous extraction rates. More could be found, that is unlikely.
Draining lithium reserves isn't that important - batteries don't use up the lithium, once the battery dies you can just suck out all the lithium and re-use it (and battery electrolytes are ~100% lithium, compared to lithium ore/brine being anywhere from 0.1% to 15% lithium - an order of magnitude difference). And since modern batteries are more efficient than old batteries with the same amount of lithium, we effectively increase the circulating lithium capacity over time.
In 75 years we won't need to extract more lithium - except the fraction needed to replace permanently-lost batteries.
Incidentally, you should be very careful when talking about "<resource> reserves", because the definition of a reserve is usually "<resource> that is profitable to extract" - and when we "run out", prices will go up and thus currently-unprofitable sources will become profitable, and POOF! Our <resource> reserves have increased, purely through the power of semantics.
Also, over the decades resource extraction becomes cheaper and thus more sources become profitable.
Personally though, I don't think any of that will matter -IMO the future is proton batteries, AKA Hydrogen batteries (which use an electrolyte of "ionic hydrogen", H+, which has 1 proton and 0 electrons - people claim lithium is the lightest metal, but it has 3x the protons of hydrogen). I think that the recent TABQ batteries, or something like it, will become commercially viable within 75 years (although who even knows what batteries will look like in the year 2101).
Nobody has ever recycled Lithium, just reused the cells that lasted longer than average. We have no idea how to actually recycle Li. We don't even understand the physical mechanism that causes it to exhaust. We think if we just let it sit around for a few decades, it might just come back on it own. We don't know though.
As for reserves, while you understand the economics you are missing the physics. For example, there is Li (and U) in the ocean. We don't extract Uranium from the ocean not only because it isn't economical, it isn't even energy efficient. This is because moving a billion tonnes of water takes more energy than the 3 tonnes of Uranium you would harvest from doing that. For Li, its takes just as much energy (and money) as its just as rare. In other words, there is a floor on that economic extraction argument specified by a positive EROEI (energy returned on energy invested).
Yes, we have. This is a well understood and fairy simple chemical process, you grind up non-working Lithium battery and split up the FOD from the metals then it's just basic chemical metal refining from here on out? When lithium is mined and extracted it goes through the exact same processes.
If you have any other sources or information on why we can't recycle lithium please let me know. As far is battery failure goes it's a mechanical failure on a chemical level
And the name of the company which is doing this?
The Li that comes out of the process you describe wouldn't be recycled. It would still be mostly exhausted. Specifically, something we don't understand about the structure of their electrons causes the batteries made with such material to have a far lower capacity than if you used freshly mined Lithium. My source is a Material Engineering class at MIT.
We understand the structure of electrons very clearly in a lithium battery. That is the core operating principle of how a lithium ion battery works.
The lithium ions are the chemical process that actually store the charge, They move from the anode to cathode in charge and discharge. The loss of these ions is what causes the degradation of the battery which is a function of entropy here. It is simply that the concise arrangement that we required for this electro-chemical to take place falls out of balance.
Entropy problem is easily solved by mashing a battery up and reconstituting it into a new battery.
To put this all simply this is all fairly basic chemistry, even if there was some kind of structure being created that has a high bond enthrall we can still undo that with enough energy.
If you could maybe share some research or other information to back up your claims other than you went to a class at MIT i would really appreciate it also the company i was saying is called Li Cycle
what about the polymetallic nodules on the ocean floor, don't they contain Li? -- setting aside the environmental question, isn't that a vast untapped source?
I thought there were a few massive lithium sources found in the past few years like the one in Thailand which have significantly increased our estimates?
Sure, but by like 2 years. Lithium is rare. It sits between Cobalt and Scandium on the list of abundance in Earth's crust. And the vast majority comes from one place in South America.
They are always revising estimates up and down a bit. But Li demand just keeps rising and rising. And a single grid scale battery takes 10 years of current Li-ion battery production worldwide to build.
So do we have enough Li at current rates, sure. We don't have anywhere near enough to do anything like replacing even a fraction of FFs with renewables. I guess that's the real headline here. That's why people are experimenting with Na-ion. Putting it in a production car today, that seems...what's the word...homicidal. Making a grid stabilization battery (not for backup) with large amounts of space between cabinets to see what happens, that seems more wise.
That 10yr per grid scale battery estimate seems high since we have built many grid scale batteries as well as millions of EVs in recent history.
We have many grid stabilization batteries. There are 0 grid scale backup systems. 1 year of worldwide Li-ion battery production could backup just California for about 90 minutes.
There are virtually zero singular grid scale power systems these days. It is a mix of CCGT, Solar, Wind and Nuclear.
*potentially a lot cheaper.
I've seen that repeated a lot but I still can't buy sodium batteries cheaper than lifepo...
Sodium batteries don't yet have the scale that lifepo4 batteries have. I'd expect we will see them get cheaper.
Retaining 90% range at -40°C sounds like a game changer, almost too good to be true. I'm definitely going to need to see some third-party real-world range tests to validate those claims before getting too excited.
Note that this article's summary has a significant error compared to the original press release[1]. The article says "90% range", whereas the press release says "90% capacity retention".
This is a big difference because there are all kinds of other factors besides energy capacity that can affect the efficiency of the whole system, and therefore affect range.
Most notably, air is about 28% denser at -40°C than at 25°C, so drag is about 28% higher. So you would expect roughly 28% less range at high speeds even if the battery has no capacity loss whatsoever.
As someone else mentioned, climate control also consumes a lot more power when it has to maintain a larger temperature difference between inside and outside.
[1]: https://www.catl.com/en/news/6720.html
> Most notably, air is about 28% denser at -40°C than at 25°C, so drag is about 28% higher. So you would expect roughly 28% less range at high speeds even if the battery has no capacity loss whatsoever.
With my gas car, I haven't noticed 30% worse fuel consumption at –30°C compared to +30°C [0]. To be fair, I haven't closely measured the fuel consumption at different temperatures, but I probably would have noticed such a big difference. This is just anecdotal of course, so your values may actually be correct.
[0]: It does occasionally get down to –40°C here, but my car won't usually start then, so I've slightly shifted your temperature range to the values where I've driven most.
It won't be as noticeable on a gas car because it is probably starting out around 30% efficiency (as compared with ~90% for an EV). This is a major advantage of gasoline, in a sense, because it means we have already engineered the package to account for a lot of wasted fuel.
Ah, so then the air temperature should reduce fuel consumption by 30%×30%=10%, which does seem to roughly match my experience. Thanks for pointing that out!
Internal combustion engines are actually more efficient in cold weather than hot weather. But the other factors like drag outweigh the increased efficiency of the engine. And since gas engines are so inefficient to begin with you don't notice much of a difference. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/270072/heated-an...
Gas cars produce more power at lower temperatures - more oxygen gets into the combustion chamber, and the engine also can run more advanced spark timing without as much worry of detonation. This is why turbochargers have intercoolers.
Air drag energy losses are tiny comparing to other losses when burning petrol so you don't notice the difference.
Ohhhh, that makes complete sense, thanks!
Note that a 28% increase in drag results in a roughly 22% decrease in range, because 1/1.28 ~= 0.78. Also there are other losses (like rolling friction and constant loads like headlights or cabin heat), so range doesn't scale perfectly with drag. Drag is the main source of loss at highway speed, however
I drive long distance weekly on my gas car. Full tank in summer (+20C) gives me 520 km, while in winter (-20C here) I get 430-440 km. I noticed it on my current and previous cars. Maybe it's thicker oil and worse car efficiencies in winter ? And that's despite that full tank of gas has more gas in winter comparing to summer, gasoline is denser in cold temps.
I'd imagine also less rolling resistance from both rubber hardening and just roads being more slippery
But TBF same factors affect ICE cars
That implies that air resistance is the overwhelming contributor at high speeds. Is that the case?
It's the majority, but overwhelming or not surprisingly appears to depend on car model, at least per some calculations someone on reddit ran [1].
I'd add though that rolling resistance tends to be higher, on average, in winter too. When there's often a bit of snow on the roads... Less so on high speed highways admittedly.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l2cq6b/comment/...
Oh yes, by so much.
Even at 30kmph it's already the majority of the resistance and it scales exponentially with speed so you can imagine how much it matters.
For most cars driving through air, at sea level, on planet Earth, at normal speed, the drag force F is proportional to the square of the speed (v^2).
That's not exponential because the speed (v) is not in the exponent. In fact, it's quadratic.
Corollaries: The power required to push the car at speed v will be proportional to Fv ~ v^3. The gas spent over time t ~ energy spent ~ power time ~ v^3 * time.
It scales quadratically with speed*
Those two things very different.
Considering air resistance is proportional to the cube of the speed, it would be highly surprising to not be the case.
It goes with the cube in terms of power, but with the square in terms of energy/distance, which is usually what you'd care about.
s/cube/square/
Define ‘high speeds’. There’s a reason race cars look like they do, to the point of having serious problems driving at speeds just a bit below highway speed limit.
Yes it is.
I don't imagine the difference is very significant on long drives. If the car is cold soaked at -30, it uses about 10kW for the first 3km. Then everything is warmed up, and the ~25% difference is increased consumption, not decreased battery capacity.
As long as you have a heat pump harvesting the waste heat to keep the battery up to temp.
But might be significant on short drives, 10kW for the first 3 km is massive.
Yeah, this heat up effect is massive for around-town use. We have had below freezing weather for two weeks, which is very unusual here in Annapolis. That’s had a huge impact on my wife’s use case, which involves a bunch of 5-10 mile trips to drop the kids off at school, go on a grocery run, pick the kids up, take the kids to math tutoring, etc. She ran out of charge the other day during drop-off b/c the “37 miles left” we had the night before was actually a lot less than that accounting for warming the battery up the next day.
10kW is about 40 miles of range, as you figured out the hard way.
Arg, 10kWh, not 10kW.
And human occupants will still run the heater more in winter. But it sounds like there could be a future where makers offer a sodium battery and heat pump version of their cars for sale in colder climates.
Running a preheater loop for the heat pump from the systems than need to be cooled, inverter and motor that run better cold,and other optimisations could likely supply cabin heat with very little battery draw, solar pv blended into the exterior could zero that out on an average basis,but 40 below is nothing to play with unless you know exactly what you are doing, even if they say it will still work.
https://electrek.co/2026/02/05/first-sodium-ion-battery-ev-d...
> future where makers offer a sodium battery and heat pump version
AFAIK most EVs already use heat pumps today, so the future happens whenever sodium batteries become mainstream.
IIRC there are some surprising holdouts, at least in the NA market. For example as far as I'm aware the Mustang Mach-E still ships with a resistive heater.
> Mustang Mach-E still ships with a resistive heater
Nope, the Mach E and Lightning both have a heat pump (well, just the Mach E now, I suppose, since the Lightning is out of production).
It should be noted that started with the 2025 model. Earlier Mach-Es just had resistance heating.
Vehicle ASHP do little in deep cold temperatures, since the evaporator is necessarily so small. They're mostly effective in the 0-15C range. Note that all EVs have PTC heaters, regardless of heat pump. The PTC is what does most of the work for getting the interior to temperature quickly (they're 5-10 kW).
The cheaper EVs don't. Think 35k range.
Obviously Tesla and the like are more luxury cars but if EV is to become mainstream they need to compete with ICE Kia's and Volkswagen.
The VW id.3 costs about 30k. It doesn't have a heat pump by default, but it's a 1,200 EUR add-on. Which probably makes sense; in some markets where it's sold it doesn't really get cold enough that one is of significant benefit.
Interestingly, the Hyundai Inster (20k EUR) and Renault 5 (25k EUR) both have heat pumps as standard equipment.
I think our id.4 2023 model already has that. It has crappy software too. Great car, drives fantastically, but horrific software!
But if they add buttons back as planned, I might be willing to try a new id.4 in 5-10 years.
just fyi for the MY23 and older software 3.8/9 should be available for update, which is a pretty significant upgrade compared to 3.2 or the 2.x builds (which I don't think a MY23 should have but idk).
Gasoline engines are already 15% less efficient at 20F.
https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/fuel-economy-cold-weather
At -40F (-40C), it's generally good practice to just stay inside and not drive at all...
That 15% loss reduces your range from 1000km to 850km? That hardly affects how useful the vehicle is. For EV that’s different story.
How many vehicles have a 650 mile range? Almost none. Plus you can't fill up at home with gasoline, like you can with an EV.
> How many vehicles have a 650 mile range? Almost none.
'22 Ford Escape hybrid
The remaining miles thing shows less than that on a full tank, but I've been pretty consistently getting upper-600s between fill-ups.
I suppose it would probably be less if I went on the interstate more.
There's one. Go to a Car and Driver article about cars with extreme ranges, namely those over 650 miles, and they will start listing out particular years' models over a 10 year period in order to get to even ~10 models, and most of them are EcoBoost or variants or poor selling hybrid versions of other cars.
Assuming a 1000km range is a very strange thing to do, as it's a fringe feature that almost no one needs or wants! Recall that "almost no one" means that there's still some, an existence of a handful of people on HN is quite consistent with "almost none."
Of course I didn't pick it for range, I looked at price and miles of what the local carmax had and then separately looked up how tall the top of the windshield was.
Which I would expect to typically find something that's, um, fairly typical on characteristics I wasn't selecting on.
my 2010 F-150 with the notoriously terrible 5.4L gas engine seems to manage 1000km range. there's absolutely nothing efficient about it, it's just got a big gas tank.
Yep, Ford had to put really big tanks on even the F150 to make up for the horrid mileage. Even with a 36 gallon tank, when towing with an F150 you might only get 300 miles. It's one reason the Lightning had problems selling as many as they wanted (aside from the ridiculous pricing the first year or so). Most people who are serious about towing don't use an F150 anyway, but that doesn't mean that F150 buyers don't fantasize about their potential towing needs in the future.
Comparing range of gasoline cars is idiotic. There are plenty of cars with long range (1000km), and they all have 60L+ fuel tanks and most run on diesel (which gives you ~15% more range per liter). It'd even argue the same for BEVs. More battery is more range.
you can have drum of fuel enough for entire winter in your garage, the fuck you mean by "can't fill up at home"?
They mean that rounded to the nearest percent, 0% of people will be filling up their car at home from a drum.
rounded to nearest percentage zero people have winter-related car issues in the first place...
The point you are DESPERATELY trying to miss is you can easily "recharge", a "dead" ICE at home too
> The point you are DESPERATELY trying to miss is you can easily "recharge", a "dead" ICE at home too
Eh? All I can see is you DESPERATELY trying to push the narrative that it’s common for people have barrels of fuel at home which is a pretty weird thing to try and prove since everyone reading this will know it’s not true.
You mean EVs? Yeah, none that I'm aware of. But petrol/diesel cars? Loads of them. Even my 400bhp Volvo XC60 will easily do 650 miles on one tank of fuel. A diesel one will do 700-800. And a diesel Passat will go over 1000 miles on a tank without trying. Hell, even my basic 1.6dCI Qashqai could do 700 miles on its 55 litre tank
Volvo xc60 has an estimated 25 mpg overall (https://www.volvocarsrichmond.com/volvo-xc60-mpg.htm)
It has an 18.8 gallon fuel capacity (https://www.volvocars.com/lb/support/car/xc60/article/dfc6f0...)
That’s a max range of 470 miles. You would need much greater fuel efficiency above 34 mpg to get to 650 miles on an 18.8 gallon tank.
Cool, I guess when I did 700 miles on a single tank of fuel driving Switzerland to Italy and then again driving Italy to Austria and then again Austria to Netherlands this summer I just imagined it. My total for the 3000 miles was 38mpg(imperial).
Also you are quoting a value for the B5, which is not what I have, mine is a T8(and before you ask - no, I didn't have any opportunity to charge it anywhere on the way).
Every modern passenger car will show you 650 miles when driving at ~60mph. In the EU, anyway, and with a diesel engine.
90% of passenger cars in north america are gas powered
Not so in EU
> Gasoline engines are already 15% less efficient at 20F.
Is that actually true once the engine has reached operating temperature?
Short trips are worse:
> Fuel economy tests show that, in city driving, a conventional gasoline car's gas mileage is roughly 15% lower at 20°F than it would be at 77°F. It can drop as much as 24% for short (3- to 4-mile) trips.
The temperature difference should in principle increase thermodynamic efficiency. You get loss of MPG from other factors though mentioned in the link, like increased friction of moving parts, idling to warm up (0MPG), defrosters/seat heaters, lower tire pressure, denser air to drive through, winter fuel mixes which may not have as much energy, etc.
Once had a Porsche 914. Air cooled engine. Drove it across Montana and the Dakotas one winter. One very cold winter.
Not sure the engine ever reached "operating temperature" on that drive.
Sticking a piece of cardboard over a portion of the radiator was a common sight during the winter when I was growing up in rural Ohio. I didn't think our winters were that cold, but maybe late 70s to early 80s vehicles were more susceptible to running cold.
I had a car that developed a stuck-open thermostat and did the cardboard trick to get by until I could replace the faulty part.
I've had that happen, too, on a [more] regular car. I drove a Mustang 5.0 from Oklahoma to Oregon, and as I went through eastern Colorado the coolant temperature steadily dropped until it was resting at the bottom of the gauge. I don't recall whether the gas mileage suffered noticeably or not during that phase of the drive.
There are a bunch of things going on, and some people's measure of efficiency needs work.
1) winter blend fuels have less energy per volume, that doesn't make your engine any less efficient by energy but it does by volume of gas
2) lots of temporary cold effects: fuel vaporization, thick lubricants, etc. these things become less of a problem as the engine warms up but some energy is still lost on long drives
3) air resistance: all aerodynamic forces are linearly proportional with air density. At a constant pressure there's about a 15% difference in air density between the hottest and coldest places you can drive (and thus 15% less drag on a hot summer day than a cold winter day). aerodynamic forces are proportional to the square of your velocity and they become the largest resistive force around 50mph -- so at highway speeds you're losing efficiency because you have to push more air out of the way
4) energy used to maintain temperature: this is hard to calculate but some engine power is lost because the energy is used heating up the engine block and lost to the environment
5) the Thermodynamics 101 engine efficiency goes UP with increased temperature, but it's got a lot of real world effects to compete with, no spherical cows and all
Partial pressure variant fx on combustion outputs
Assuming you can get the car to start (mine needs an engine warmer at that temperature), it takes at least 15 minutes of driving to reach that temperature. Unless you’re going on a longer trip the engine most likely wont be warm by the time you reach your destination.
I had to drive in -30C once, the engine could not get up to final temperature after 2 hours of highway driving because I had to run cabin heater at full blast on windshield and side windows so they didn't cover with fog inside. But that was in very old low power car.
My tiny diesel car (2008 Toyota) needs its auxiliary heater below around -15 C for highway trips. It's a switch in my dash that burns extra fuel, otherwise the engine won't get up to or stay at temperate.
Pretty normal with diesel as it gives off less heat than petrol. I have a van with an 88kW engine, and even at -5c I can see the coolant temperature drop when I am idling down hill and have the heater on. Any colder and it's worth blocking the radiator with cardboard.
Protip for next time, cover the rad halfway with some cardboard and this will help a bit.
Garages exist though.
Schrodingers garage. Ceases to exists when talking about EV charging but exists when ICE vehicles need cold starts.
Heated ones are rarer.
I once had a condo with parking in a cave that was above freezing even when outside was -30 C (or F, close enough at that part of the scale). It was a great winter perk.
Well you have to keep it at operating temperature
>almost too good to be true
Since the Lithium battery prices dropped, there are many Sodium battery companies simply abandoning the research or shuttering. Not a good sign when smart people jump ship.
The Na cells also have lower energy-density, and currently fewer viable charge cycles. One can still buy evaluation samples, but it takes time to figure out if the technology will make economic sense.
Best regards =3
> many Sodium battery companies simply abandoning the research or shuttering
There could be other reasons. Maybe they just cannot compete with CATL.
Rule #29: Information people want public usually isn't news, but rather just marketing rhetoric.
we can always afford to wait and see.
Have a great day =3
Chemistry-wise it checks out, it was long touted advantage of sodium, just that they probably ignored rest of the problems in winter
Why would that be a game changer? Genuinely curious.
With high-density energy carbohydrogens, you retain 100%.
And get 100% of the conflict and air pollution
Less bloated site:
https://carnewschina.com/2026/01/22/catl-unveils-worlds-firs...
Remember those Donut/Verge solid state batteries, which were supposed to ship in Q1 2026? That just slipped to the end of 2026 or 2027.[1] Supposedly they're delayed by needing "certification" for their motorcycle.
(The motorcycle is real, and has been out for years. This is just a battery upgrade.)
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/786388/verge-motorcycles-donut-la...
Apparently the article was updated to clarify the "delay" date was referring to the delivery dates of new/future orders and not referring to any delays for the very first orders.
Is there some particular relevance to this article?
There's a lot of reasons to think that that battery might be a scam... unlike most batteries, including sodium ion ones... If it's not a scam it will certainly upset the battery market eventually.
It's another battery that you can't buy right now.
"Chinese battery giant CATL and automaker Changan Automobile are preparing to put the world’s first passenger car powered by sodium-ion batteries on public roads by mid-2026."
CATL is more credible than Donut, but both are making forward-looking statements.
Not all forwarding look statements are the same...
CATL is "we're going to mass produce this specific well known technology" and while there's some question as to precise numbers for their implementation of it they aren't claiming anything surprising. A worst they're somewhat over optimistic and fail to be a commercial success. At best they're slightly under optimistic and are slightly more successful than anticipated. We can be confident they aren't flat out lying (though they may be exaggerating) because the claim is so mundane.
Donut is "we're going to produce a technology capable of achieving targets that haven't even been demonstrated in a (public) lab. We won't tell you what specific technology. We're going to put this miracle battery in motorcycles, because we can". At worst they're flat out lying to scam investors - but if they're not lying, even if they're over optimistic, they've made a significant advance in the state of the art that will eventually (once it's not just put in motorcycles) have widespread repercussions.
Do any US automakers have anything in the pipes using Sodium-Ion batteries? A quick search turned up info on a plant mass producing the batteries in Holland, MI but no mention of when they would be available. As someone in the market for an EV within the next year or 2, and also currently enduring a month long stretch of temps in the single digits and below, cold weather performance has suddenly become a huge consideration.
Likely No. Undecided with Matt Ferrell recently did a video on how sodium ion batterys startup in the US (not necessarily for EVs, but other power applications) have had challenges largely due to the falling price of lithium making sodium batteries less competitive on price the past couple years: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nrTCgZmUFCY
OTOH, there are seemingly more lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery ev options now - rivian now uses LFP, Ford mustang mach-e has had a LFP variant since fall 2023 (and should have other models using LFP in 2027), I think the 2026 chevy bolt uses LFP, etc.
If you remove Tesla and Rivian from the equation, US automakers are actively curtailing EV production period.
The US administration has basically told them to do so.
So don't expect any innovation on this front from the middle of the North American continent. It's being actively sabotaged.
> The US administration has basically told them to do so.
Any US automaker relying on Trump staying in office is playing with fire. Yes, you may see reduced or zero press releases and budgets for EV research being "reallocated" on paper so the toddler in chief doesn't get a public tantrum - but assuming there will be free and fair elections this year, it is highly, highly likely that Congress will be solid blue and reinstate a lot of what Trump has cut down, only this time as an actual law that is far harder to cancel than executive orders.
And everyone not hedging for this possibility will wreck their company's future.
There is no realistic path to a veto-proof majority for Democrats in the midterm elections. If there was, Trump would be impeached and removed before EVs were addressed.
Don't expect any movement on EV legislation unless and until Democrats take back the White House in 2028
I would prefer that when the dems dive back into EV subsidies, they fly them under the radar instead of using tax credits for buyers. Lots of people actually believe that their fossil fuel is not subsidized, so we need to use the same techniques to actually help manufacturers bring competitive EVs to market.
It would be better to remove all subsidies, so the true cost is revealed to and paid by the consumer. It would be a bit difficult to remove all fossil fuel subsidies though, since that would include a large part of the defence (sorry war) budget that is spent keeping the oil flowing.
It would be better for governments to provide tax credits / subsidies to battery manufacturing facilities than it would be to directly subsidize consumers. The hope being the cheaper battery component cost gets passed onto consumers.
Vehicle sales subsidies frankly just end up rolled into the price as a markup.
The Canadian government here partially has the right idea in only subsidizing vehicles under a 50k CAD ($36k USD) price tier -- unless they're manufactured in Canada. But I don't think that barrier is low enough. Should be $40k or even less. Our subsidy also takes the form of a direct cash subsidy instead of a tax credit -- which is regressive and helps people less in lower income tiers who don't pay much in income taxes.
What did the administration say to them?
Axed EV subsidization, openly called EVs -- and climate change -- a scam, and then made noises about cutting emissions standards, and aggressively pursued fossil fuel expansion?
That and threw tariffs on the auto makers parts and imports such that their businesses are under threat?
GM just axed the Bolt again. The only domestic affordable EV. Stellantis killed all of theirs, from what I hear. And Ford has pulled back as well.
I don't understand your questions, please rephrase them.
Anyway I'm still curious about the mechanism the administration used to direct manufacturers to stop producing EVs, and how they could invoke such a power without covering Telsa or Rivian. Nothing about the administration would surprise me, but I'm surprised there hasn't been more noise made about it.
There is never such thing as "direct action" it is not as if the current president came down and said electric vehicles are banned.
Rather it's a series of policy decisions to try and stunt reemerging technologies
LFP battery production in the US only recently reached larger scale; so I expect it will be a while before they get around to sodium ion. With all the tariffs, they'd have to license technology and build local factories to get started. That will probably be a few years at least. Or the tariffs might become more reasonable at some point and they could import battery cells a bit sooner than that. But probably not until the end of this decade.
Cold weather performance with heat pumps and lithium batteries is fine. Don't worry about it. I wouldn't try to hold my breath until a US automaker produces a sodium battery EV.
It’s only “fine” if you live in the southern US where freezing conditions are rare and/or never drive anywhere near your winter range and you have a garage charger or some other easy access to a charge station. Anything outside of those conditions and winter range issues are painful.
Nah dude, I live in Canada, we're having a record cold winter here, and it's really not bad. My car (Polestar 2) is one of the least efficient, has no heat pump in my year, and only has a ~225km effective range in winter (~300 in summer) but .. I have zero range anxiety, there's no pain, it's not annoying. The number of times one is driving that far in a single trip is miniscule, but there's DC fast chargers all along the highways that take the edge off, and there are cars with far larger range anyways.
Canada must have a better fast charger network than the US, because I have to deal with range anxiety whenever I’m visiting family or camping/cabin or even just driving through a reservation in the winter. When you’re staying somewhere that is 30% (battery charge) away from the nearest fast charger and you lose 10% per day, you start budgeting trips pretty fast.
Yes, most people don’t drive 200 mi/day. It’s really ok.
Why do you imagine that average miles per day matters? I don’t drive anywhere near 200 miles/day, but any time I have to drive across the state (or farther) in the winter I have to recharge a lot more frequently, and the charging stations are busier and fewer in number (usually more are out of service in the winter either because the snow has drifted over them or because the cable was left in the snow and is now frozen over or a plow damaged the unit). Worse still, if you don’t have a charging cable in your parking space, you will have to drive to a charging station much more frequently (because the idle battery usage is much higher).
But yeah, if you have a garage with a charger and you never exceed your winter range then it’s fine, per my previous comment.
More than 60 million Americans own a home with a garage (where a charger can be installed) and most are within 100 miles of a fast DC charger. Edge cases continue to shrink and be solved for, electricity is ubiquitous and batteries keep improving rapidly.
I think proportion is more useful that quantity. 66% of housing units (that's all forms of housing, not just single-family homes) have a garage or carport. Also, given that there are ~145 million housing units, 60 million would be a bad situation.
> most are within 100 miles of a fast DC charger
That's not good enough. No one can spend 3-4 hours to drive 200 miles round trip, or even 100 miles, to charge quickly.
There needs to be a good solution for the 33% of households that don't have access to EV charging as part of their home. Until it becomes really plentiful, part of the solution may involve fast charging that only the 33% can use or that favors the 33%; people who can charge overnight at home should charge overnight at home.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1268-dece...
Fast chargers colocated at grocery stores people shop at at least weekly are a solution, Tesla did this (Meijer partnership), as did Electrify America. Walmart is rolling out charging at most of their US stores. Home charging is a solution, but so is workplace level 2 charging.
Can you charge at home? Do so. Can you charge at work? Do so. Can you charge at a grocery store or other location your task will take longer than the charging? Do so. This works for most Americans, while charging infrastructure continues to be rapidly deployed. The gaps will be filled, how fast is a function of will and investment.
US Gains 11,300 Ultra-Fast Chargers in Bet to Lure More EV Drivers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46815932 - January 2026 (11 comments)
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=walmart+ev
https://supercharge.info/map
https://www.plugshare.com/
Chargers at grocery stores and other places of public accommodation that have lots of parking and customers who stay a while are good options. I don't know how many are enough; even fast chargers take orders of magnitude longer to use than a gas pump.
I don't think 2x slower is plural "orders of magnitude" no matter how you count it. It's at best a single power of two.
Filling the gas tank of of a sedan takes like 2 minutes, doing the equivalent charging is going to take a lot more than 4 minutes.
"Orders" may be an exaggeration but one order of magnitude isn't.
Filling a sedan takes longer than 2 minutes; you just don't notice the time.
If your grocery shopping takes longer than 20 minutes, fast charging will suffice. This is my experience with 250kw fast chargers.
At least in the midwest very few grocery stores have fast charging. Usually the fast chargers are along highways on the outskirts of cities, and even then they’re almost always at gas stations.
> That's not good enough.
Agreed. However, the number of people who live 100+ miles from a fast charger rounds to zero. Something like 85-90% of the US population lives within a metro area, and even in the least "EV friendly" states probably has a fast charger within 10-20 miles at most.
Nope - try again.
I can back up my assertions with data, can you?
Yes, things are rapidly improving. My claim was that cold weather is a pain today. Also “living within 100 miles of a fast charger” is small comfort to those who don’t have a convenient way to charge at home.
For the record, I’ve been an EV owner for 5 years in the northern US. I still like my EV and things get better all the time, but I don’t understand the people in this thread saying that cold weather battery performance is fine.
My argument is more charging infrastructure and sodium ion chemistries should solve this relatively soon, and both are on arguably steep trajectories. My 2018 Model S 100kw has decent cold weather performance even cold soaked after 8 years of ownership with resistive heat for both the cabin and battery pack (glycol heater), I expect state of the art to keep getting better.
I used to keep a 100ft 120V heavy duty extension cord in the frunk to charge due to how few charging options there were in 2018, and no longer have to (having driven across most of the continental US).
If an EV is not feasible today due to limited charging options, certainly, procure a hybrid until battery chemistry and charging infrastructure improves in your area. I admit cold weather performance might be hard for some, but Norway has achieved 99% BEV monthly sales, so it can be done. It’s just a matter of where you are on the global adoption curve.
https://robbieandrew.github.io/EV/
I agree with all of this; my response was narrowly to the claim that the status quo was fine.
> and you have a garage charger or some other easy access to a charge station.
I wouldn't recommend EVs in any climate without home charging.
Having a garage charger and never driving more than your winter range on any given day is a pretty common situation.
No one disputes that most days most people drive less than their winter range, but I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Most people survive cancer most of the time; I still wouldn’t characterize modern cancer treatment as “fine”. We aren’t settling for the 50th percentile.
For consumer products, handling the 50th percentile is excellent. There's nothing wrong with a car that is "only" suitable for half the population.
Needing to buy a different kind of car and dying from cancer are ever so slightly different experiences. But thank you for the kind of absurd HN take that inspired my username.
But most of the EVangalists who post seem to have a very unrealistic viewpoint that says 33% of the (US) population is an edge case and that no one needs more than 200 miles of range because there are chargers every ten miles and no one goes on long trips anyway, especially unplanned (since they only have 80% of their range even when plugging in every night).
> Needing to buy a different kind of car and dying from cancer are ever so slightly different experiences. But thank you for the kind of absurd HN take that inspired my username.
It’s not absurdity, it’s analogy. If you can’t distinguish between the two then HN may indeed not be for you.
It's an absurd analogy. It doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. You wouldn't call a cancer treatment that fails to cure a minority of people "fine", so EVs aren't "fine"?
lol that was the entire point of the analogy. congratulations, you seem to have accidentally stumbled onto the point, but at least you got there. :)
The point of the analogy was that these things are in no way comparable, and EVs only serving a large chunk of the population is in fact fine?
And yet, some of the biggest proponents of EVs live in frigid areas of Canada and the US. As it turns out, range loss is not really a huge deal for a lot of people, but being able to get in your car and drive without worrying about whether it will start at all is nice. No plugging in a block heater, no worry about fuel gelling, no warm up time. And you can pre-condition the interior so it is warm when you get in. With a modern EV you could lose 50% range and still have plenty for your daily commute. Even a fairly long commute.
Norway regularly sees -30C in winter and EVs account for like 99% of sales there, it made the news that in January only 7 ICE cars were sold in the entire country.
It's also a different country with a different culture, etc. Norwegians drive roughly 50% less than people in the US. There's probably a bunch of contributing factors, but the point is that reduced range is less of a problem if you drive less.
I'll be the first to say we need less range anxiety, and Norway is awesome. But we need to be careful comparing the US to Norway here.
Around 90% of Norway's population lives in southern or coastal areas that usually don't get anywhere near that cold.
And the other 10% still buys EVs apparently.
Yes, they buy some, with roughly the same percentage of new car sales being EV. However, those regions have a significantly higher percentage of households with multiple cars, and they have overall a significantly higher fraction of ICE cars in service than do the warmer areas.
This means you can't really make deductions about EV performance in very cold weather in those very cold regions without getting data on what the EVs are being used for. It could be most of them are in households where they have ICE cars to handle things where they need long range or when they need to tow or haul things, and the EVs are just used for things where loss of range and capacity doesn't matter much.
Probably has a lot to do with the incentives—tax rebates for EVs, taxes for ICE cars, cost of fuel, availability of fast chargers, etc. I’m glad Norway is pushing hard for greater adoption (and the US should too), but these things don’t make for a meaningful comparison.
Well no, and I agree with you - but I think it's a fair rebutal to someone saying that EV's can't work somewhere where it's really cold, like the only reason people in the northern united states or canada don't buy EVs is purely because of the cold - that's a factor, sure, but I think there's a lot of other reasons other than cold.
I’m the person to whom this rebuttal was originally made, and I did not say that EVs can’t work in the cold (I own one and I live in a northern state—they work, but not flawlessly).
I was only disagreeing with another commenter who claimed the status quo was fine. There’s a pretty big gap between “not fine” and “not workable”.
The taxes make it financially ruinous to make any other decision there
I own an EV and I’m a proponent of them. It’s still painful to have to deal with the winter range loss when driving outside my normal daily range.
Question: if a LiIon battery can't deliver as much energy when cold, where does the lost energy go? Is it just unavailable, and becomes available again when warmed up? Is discharge less efficient, so the energy is wasted? Or does charging stop early when cold, so there's less to be discharged in the first place?
This is an educated guess, but I think it becomes less efficient, so it heats up, and then performs better as it heats. I assume this to be the case because I charge my RC plane LiPos the same way every time, and they take the same amount of energy, but flying in the winter gives much shorter flight times. Since the battery is warm after a flight, even in the cold, I don't think the energy is still there the battery is still discharged when I take it home), so it must just be much less efficient and wasting a lot of energy as heat.
I assume it's just that its internal resistance rises when it's cold, but I might be wrong.
> Is discharge less efficient, so the energy is wasted?
Yes. It's mostly wasted as heat inside the battery. I think there's also a temperature relationship to open-circuit voltage? But the predominate effect is from elevated internal resistance.
I believe you are correct. Temp causes the voltage to drop faster. It does raise as the battery heats up.
Easiest way to model this is from the cells impedance. Essentially think of the cold limiting ion motility in the electrolyte phase, and that resulting in a higher impedance, that works out as a voltage drop at the cells terminals, so the cell has a limited depth of discharge, vs at higher temperatures.
You can read about EIS here: https://www.gamry.com/application-notes/EIS/basics-of-electr...
Batteries can freeze solid. It takes energy to keep them warm with an heater. Then there’s cabin heating which is usually warmed by heat from combustion in a gas engine.
Internal resistance increases, so the battery heats up more when delivering an amount of energy. So some of the battery's stored energy goes to waste as heat.
If this is “on par” with LFP energy density, I’m not sure there’s any need for LFP now. Sodium ion seems to thoroughly beat it in every other metric.
On par on a per kg basis, but is it on par on a volume basis? If it takes up more space, that might pose packaging challenges relative to LFP.
Sodium has greater density than lithium, while most other materials used in a battery have similar densities regardless if sodium or lithium is used, so if a Na-ion battery and a LFP battery have about the same mass and stored energy, it is likely that the sodium-ion battery has a smaller volume.
that doesn't check out, capacity depends on surface area, if the element that is on the surface is heavier then, all other things equal, the battery will be heavier for same kWh.
Sodium would need to be more efficient to be lighter, which it isn't
The maximum deliverable power depends on electrode area, through the maximum current density.
The capacity of storing energy does not depend at all on area, but only on the mass of sodium contained in the battery and on the efficiency of using it (i.e. between full discharge and full charge not 100% of the sodium or lithium is cycled between the 2 oxidation states, but a fraction, e.g. 90%).
Any battery has both an energy density and a power density, which are weakly correlated and the correlation may have opposite signs, i.e. for some batteries it may be possible to increase the power density if the energy density is lowered and vice-versa.
For a given stored energy in kWh, the required mass of sodium is several times greater than the corresponding mass of lithium, by a factor that is the product of the atomic mass ratio with the ratio between the battery voltages. The voltages are similar, with a slight advantage for sodium, so the required mass of sodium is about 3 times the corresponding mass of lithium.
If the complete batteries have about the same mass, that means that other components of the sodium-ion battery are smaller and/or lighter.
Energy density of Na cells is lower, but it is the viable charge cycle count that is the show stopper issue for most markets. =3
They are also safer.
Na will be big in grid storage, it's a perfect fit.
It is all about cost and efficiency... There is a classic 1913 electric vehicle that ran NiFe packs for many years, and were only replaced because the container rotted away. Sustainable storage costs real money, but has existed for over a century. =3
https://www.veva.ca/1913detroitelectric
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery
I have no idea about the characteristics of these new sodium-ion batteries, but there is a great likelihood that they auto-discharge much faster than LFP batteries.
This means that if you do not use the car for some time, you may need to recharge it before you can use it again. This may be a problem if the car is left far from a charger.
Otherwise I agree with what you said.
citation needed
I haven’t seen any info on charging speed. Can you recharge these as quickly as LFP?
CATL's Naxtra cells apparently have a c rating of 5C. Which boils down to about 12 minutes for a full charge with the right charger. So, as fast or faster than LFP would be the answer here.
If they have a 5C rating from 0 to 100 that would be a real game changer. I look forward to the days we don't need caveats like "only up to 80%".
100% is a soft limit in many batteries. The battery management system actually prevents you from charging too much. Pushing it too far can damage the battery so they don't let you completely charge it.
A lot of EV drivers optimize to minimize waiting time. Mostly you try to charge while you are doing something else (sleeping, working, eating, shopping, etc.). So, you are not actually waiting for it and sitting in the car bored.
Charging speeds are non linear. The last few percent take a bit more waiting. But you don't actually have to charge the battery to 100% all the time. Two 10-80% charge breaks might be a lot less less time than one 10-100% charge break and it will get you a lot more miles.
When you are driving long distance, you can plan to top up while having breaks, lunch, etc. Just top it back up to whatever the time allows. You don't have to drive the battery to empty either. And destination charging is a thing as well.
You can trade off not having to stop for a bit more against the charging time. Charging to 100% at night is a good use of time. Because you are probably sleeping/resting. Interrupting your journey to do the same is probably not a great use of your time. Two 10-80% charge breaks might be a lot less less time than one 10-100% charge break and it will get you a lot more miles.
Of course on longer journeys, planning for 45 minute charging breaks is a lot more annoying than planning for 15 minute charging breaks. Which is what 5C charging should enable given the right cell and charger combination. With a normal EV (medium sized battery) that's once every 3-4 hours roughly. A bit longer if your car is more economical with the battery. That's actually not a horrible frequency for taking a short break. Even if you drive a petrol car.
And if you are really anxious about that, get an EV with a bigger battery. 300 miles. 400 miles. There are even some 500 mile batteries in some cars now. It will cost you of course. Financially it's probably not a great choice for most people.
Most people posting about 80% seem to talking about charging at home. If you are charging overnight, why are you restricting charge level if it doesn’t really matter to longevity? Is it just left over advice that no longer applies?
“As always, we’ll have to wait for independent testing for real-world results.”
interested in hot desert weather performance which often gets lost in the averages.
Generally just not an issue. The biggest problem with deserts is battery degradation and not so much range problems.
Air conditioning from 110F to 75F really drags down the range.
Had a thermometer read 170F 76C inside my black on black vehicle with windows cracked.
Decided to keep my battery devices in a cooler with cool and frozen water bottles to drink when I return. Phone, camera batteries, and a portable vehicle starter.
More interesting is that they're claiming 248 miles (400km) on a 45kWh battery[0]. That calculates out to 5.5 miles/kWh, whereas the most efficient Tesla 3 right now only claims 4.5 miles/kWh - and even that is a very optimistic estimate (most people can't get 270 miles out of their 60kWh Tesla 3 standard range models) [1]
[0] https://cdn.motor1.com/images/custom/worlds-first-mass-produ...
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/719013/2024-tesla-model3-epa-rang...
The old Nissan Leafs that look like bugs can easily get 5+ miles per kWh in warm weather with careful driving. Car shape does a lot here.
In China the Tesla Model 3 gets 634km/394miles out of 62.5kWh battery on CLTC, which is 6.3 miles/kWh.
The Chinese EV test cycle typically gives like 30-50% more than than the EPA's
This is awesome and I'm really happy to see this progress. Landing a new chemistry in a production car THIS YEAR is some crazy velocity, especially compared to where other Na-Ion batteries are in the development cycle elsewhere. Is anyone else even close to having a car on the road with their cells?
The reason this is so exciting for me personally is for stationary energy. Because the raw materials are so abundant and have good cold weather performance, both grid and home level energy storage costs should come down significantly as this is commercialized further.
This with 500-600 miles range means the end of ICE. 250 is still too little since that will realistically be closer to 150-160 if you’re consistently driving 74-80 mph.
Unfortunately sodium ion is less dense than lithium ion, so range is lower too.
Since it's also cheaper, it's likely that Na-ion will be adopted by cheaper city runabout type EVs, while premium long range EVs will continue using Li-ion.
I saw a CATL presentation where they were hyping a hybrid lithium-sodium pack. Their version of sodium ion could charge/discharge faster than LFP, and handle lower temperatures. The hybrid then gives you a nice combination of features. You get better density/range from LFP, but if you have to start in the cold, the sodium-ion can get you going, and then with active cooling you can heat the LFP using the waste heat from the sodium ion for the rest of the trip. Since the sodium ion charges faster, you can charge part of the overall pack really fast, so you can make a quick trip to the charger and add ~50%. If you live in a cold climate area it seems like a very good combination.
If it can charge as fast as filling up a tank, who cares?
There are already large battery swapping schemes in China with thousands of stations. Even if we don't get to 5-100 charging at 5C+ there's nothing stopping this from not being a problem.
If the arrow of time is to be believed, many of the complaints and gripes and "well aktuallys" from 10 years ago are solved already. And there seems to be no slowing down.
You can’t realistically swap out the battery on a full sized vehicle. It’s too large. The Chinese battery swaps are mostly for bikes and smaller vehicles.
Fast charging would fix it. If you could go from 15 to 80% in truly under 10 mins that would work too.
That assumes there are chargers and that they're available. Not a problem in big cities, but it will complicate road trips, and "range anxiety" remains a real concern for first time EV buyers.
Battery swapping is talked about a lot but AFAICT it hasn't really been successful anywhere. It just seems like a lot more hassle than plugging in, and with charging speeds constantly increasing the payoff is shrinking too.
Dumb question but I’ve always wondered if we could make a giant reusable “hand warmer” type chemistry around the battery and use that to get it going in cold environments.
Looking into it more. Maybe something like supersaturated solution of sodium acetate (plus water) in a sealed pouch with a metal disc. Bending the disc triggers crystallization, releasing stored heat (around 130–140°F for 20–60 minutes). Boil them to reset.
So you could boil and reset them during charging and click them off if needed in cold weather.
One way I've seen of doing this is to include a PTC heater. It's a heating element that you feed DC. It has a positive coefficient of resistivity vs. temperature, so it'll asymptotically approach a temperature defined by the structure of the material. No PID controller required, it's just a sheet of material you include in the battery structure.
Granted, you have a minor bootstrapping issue wherein you need the battery to be warm before you use battery power, but at very low % of the battery's power capacity I suspect it's less of an issue.
I don't think it's a dumb question at all. Storing thermal energy separately from electrical energy would make plenty of sense if we could store the thermal energy better (cheaper, lighter) than the electrical energy.
A quick search suggests that sodium acetate used like this stores 230kj/kg (i.e. 64 Wh/kg in the units used for batteries) [1] which is significantly worse than the sodium ion batteries being discussed. Same order of magnitude though, so maybe there's a better material that would make it work.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13594...
Out the gate, sodium ion advantages are so significant that unless there is some surprise show-stopper it will likely become the dominant energy storage medium.
Crustal abundance up to 1000x that of lithium - pretty much every nation has effectively unlimited supply, it's no longer a barrier or a geographically limited resource like lithium.
No significant damage going down to 0V, can even be stored at 0V - much safer than lithium which gets excitable once out of its prefered voltage range.
Cold weather performance down to -30C - northern latitude users don't have as much range anxiety in the winter.
Basically, the only problem I see is that companies that have made significant long-term investments in lithium could take a big hit. Countries that banked on their lithium reserves as a key future resource for will have to adjust their strategy.
Lithium batteries will likely still have a place in the high performance realm but but for the majority of run-of-the-mill applications - everything from customer electronics to EVs to offgrid storage - it's hard to see how sodium-ion wouldn't quickly replace it.
Energy density matters a lot for many applications, including customer electroncs and EVs. Sodium ion is at a fundamental disadvantage (sodium is heavier than lithium).
I don't doubt that sodium ion has a place... but whether it takes over as the dominant battery type for portable applications strikes me as very dependent on the future of lithium extraction. It seems like a place that has a lot of room to grow more efficient and thus more competitive on cost.
No mention of degradation as a result of recharge cycles. So many of my electronic devices have had to be disposed of because the battery would no longer hold a charge. This is also a big factor in EVs and their loss of value over time.
CATL claims 10,000 cycles for the Naxtra:
https://battery-news.de/en/2026/01/26/catl-presents-sodium-i...
It is a big issue only for the ignorant (which is great for those that buy used). EV batteries are warranted for 60%-70% of capacity at eight years, which means most manufacturers expect batteries to do better, and actual real world experience shows much better.
Can/will sodium ion go spicy pillow?
It seems the remaining disadvantage is energy density. If they can figure that out, it should win?
It is impossible for sodium-ion batteries to reach the same energy density as the best lithium-ion batteries.
So lithium-ion batteries will never be replaced in smartphones or laptops by sodium-ion batteries.
But there are plenty of applications where the energy density of sodium-ion batteries is sufficient. Eventually sodium-ion batteries will be much cheaper and this is why they will replace lithium-ion batteries in all cheap cars and for most stationary energy storage (except when lower auto-discharge is desired).
How much less density are we talking? I'd accept a modest reduction in my smartphone battery capacity if the trade-off was a 10,000 cycle battery.
For the same amount of stored energy, one needs a triple mass of sodium vs. lithium.
However, sodium-ion batteries and lithium-ion batteries do not have metal electrodes (because for now it is not known how to ensure that those will survive an acceptable number of cycles), so the actual mass and volume of the electrodes are significantly greater than that of the sodium or lithium that is used.
Because of that, the difference in energy densities is much lower than the mass ratio seems to imply.
The parent article claims that the energy density of the Na-ion batteries is in the same range with that of the LFP batteries (i.e. lower than that of the Li-ion batteries with Ni or Co based electrodes).
Two things EVs need to be everywhere for me. Range and STOP MAKING UGLY SUVs.
I'd also go for "less computer". Just because it's an EV doesn't mean I don't want what is basically a bog standard Corolla. Physical switches. Not 5 massive touchscreens that all suck. Cloth seats. No mega futuristic design. Just a damn car.
Because batteries are still expensive, this is a tough sell for most of the market. You would be removing lots of things that most buyers associate with more luxury cars, but not actually saving much of the cost and therefore not reducing the price that much.
I think (hope) this niche will start to make a comeback as the underlying tech continues to get cheaper. You are starting to see glimmers of it in the low low end with some micromobility cars in Europe just providing phone holders instead of screens.
Not true in China. The luxury angle is pure american consumer.
Theres some EV owner costs because of infrastructure, but the base cost is not as luxury. Its luxury because americans refused to see value.
I suspect we will be finding this technology being used a fair bit in aerospace tech like satellites to compliment the onboard solar, given the low-temp operational capability.
Do satellite batteries run cold?
Given the difficulty of radiating heat away I would have expected the opposite.
Especially considering the incentive to send up as little battery as possible, and the very predictable day/night cycle leading to the ability to precisely predict how small a battery you can get away with...
Generally it's hard to control: it'll be hot sometimes and cold other times, so a wide operating time is useful.
I don't understand what these headlines are really about, given that 75% of the range loss in my EV is from CABIN climate control.
That seems really out of proportion with the experience of others, you may want to get it checked out. Do you have an older model with resistive heat and no seat heaters?
My car has a heat pump. I am basing the numbers off of the range estimates the car provides when I turn off cabin climate. The range is still lower, but I assume another chunk of that is from heating the battery when it's 10°F outside.
Rated: 230 miles
10°F with 70°F climate: 160 miles
10°F with no climate: 190-200 miles
My EV is absolutely terrible range wise at cold weather. It is EPA rated at 220miles of range. I only see that when the temperature is at or above 80F.
Most of the winter it tells me I can only do between 100 and 120 miles. It is definitely half the EPA range with climate controls disabled at 0F. (Ask me how I know).
I love driving it in the winter. I don't have a pressing need to go long distances, so that is not a current concern. Not having to stand outside in the bitter cold to fuel up in absolutely awesome.
There are EVs on the market that do much, much better than mine in cool weather and I now know what to look for.
To really penetrate the midwest it will take a car that can realistically do a road trip to Florida from say Duluth, MN or Michigan's UP in the winter.
Because not only do folks in the midwest drive long distances without a second thought, they sometimes do it in the cold of winter so they can get a break from the snow.
So yes still getting 90% of the range at -40C does sound attractive.
> EPA rated at 220miles of range
That right there is a big problem to begin with. The headline EPA number only reflects reality if you have a mix of city and highway driving. The problem is that people only care about range when driving 75mph. I think the headline EPA number should reflect that reality.
You are right - very few are doing 200 miles of city only driving between charges.
Does your vehicle have a heat pump?
Yes, although I think the benefit is minimal when it's <20°F out which it has been a for most of the past month (Massachusetts)
Incrementally better. But not a monster.
[flagged]
EV fetishist? Is this some kind of reverse psychology thing, like accusing everyone else of having TDS? Does that even work on someone who isn't already afflicted?
Nothing in the article really substantiates the headline (currently "The First Sodium-Ion Battery EV IS a Winter Range Monster").
The EV described in the article has a standardized range of 250 miles. This isn't a range monster in any condition. There is some gesturing that Sodium batteries don't require as much active heating in cold conditions. But nothing is quantified.
As usual with sci-tech broadly and batteries specifically: it's exciting that sodium batteries are coming to market; we can be optimistic that maybe in the future they will provide lots of range, or be less expensive, or maybe less flammable than today's lithium batteries. But the marketing hype is running miles ahead of reality.
> Unlike LFP or nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) packs, it reportedly avoids severe winter range loss, retaining more than 90% of its range at -40 degrees C (-40 degrees F). Power delivery is also said to remain stable at temperatures as low as -50 degrees C (-58 degrees F).
That is exactly the substance of the headline.
It doesn't quantify winter range. It gestures at possible benefit; without comparison to the state of the art, it's not especially meaningful. Nevermind that losing less than 10% of 250 miles is not a ton of range.
The absolute range is not the point. You can increase absolute range for any battery by having a bigger battery. The point is the low percentage lost due to cold.
Again, it does not compare this against the state of the art. We know how to heat battery technologies that are more sensitive to lower temperatures. So the interesting question would be, how does the combined efficiency compare? No such comparison is made.
> less flammable than today's lithium batteries
If we put aside the politics, what are the actual statistics behind lithium battery fires today? And don't LFP's have negligible fire risk?
I feel like my gasser F250 had a higher risk of spontaneously combusting.
The problem isn't spontaneous combustion, it's having an accident where the battery is damaged, causing runaway combustion.
No one burned to death inside a Tesla while driving normally. It's always following a crash.
Unlike in traditional vehicles, most EVs have such a robust firewall between the battery and the passenger compartments you literally have 1+ minute to get out, compared to often seconds in a traditional vehicle.
And I've been following Polish firefighters reports about EV fires and they are very interesting - basically saying that in all recent cases of EV fires they were contained so quickly even the interior was largely undamaged - something that practically never happens with regular cars. Some of these have been in underground garages too, with difficulty of access - but nowadays they just know how to approach an EV fire and containment isn't a problem.
That's a new one. How common are fires after accidents, and what fraction of those burn the car up while someone is trapped inside? I know people occasionally die in regular gasoline vehicles in this exact situation, so is it statistically a higher risk in EVs?
I'd imagine if tesla stared to burn they wouldn't "drive normally"...
It makes this claim:
"The Long-Range Version sets a new record for light commercial vehicles with a single-pack capacity of 253 kWh, achieving a maximum range of 800km."
That would be some 720 km at -40 C if the numbers are correct. I'm not well versed in this area and not sure if these batteries are comparable to those in personal vehicles, but the ones I've heard owners talk about have a reach at about half that if it's cold at all.
800 km from 253 kWh is 316 Wh/km somewhat worse than my ancient (2015) Tesla Model S. newer versions, models, and brands do better. So for most buyers this is not an improvement. Also performance at -40 C is irrelevant to the vast majority of drivers.
You are correct that range for many cars with Lithium (NMC) batteries is halved when the ambient temperature is below about -10 C. But an important caveat is that this applies principally to short trips where the battery never warms up such as driving 10 km into town and back to do some shopping. On long continuous journeys the decrease in range is much less marked.
> The Long-Range Version sets a new record for light commercial vehicles with a single-pack capacity of 253 kWh, achieving a maximum range of 800km.
This text is not present in the article. Are you looking at a different article?
No, I think they removed a paragraph.
Even 620 would be absolutely not an issue, this is the difference I get from my diesel car basically
> But the marketing hype is running miles ahead of reality.
The marketing hype is the true range monster