I think you're thinking of CATL's Freevoy battery: https://www.catl.com/en/news/6...

"Sodium-LFP Dual-Power Battery - It combines Naxtra with a LFP self-forming anode battery, fully utilizing the low-temperature performance of sodium-ion technology to provide users with an exceptional experience that excels in cold conditions while delivering extended range"

NB, the Li isn't there for speed, it's for range.

Although Gotion's new Gnascent chemistry may mean this is already out of date
https://cleantechnica.com/2026...

None of this is in a production EV yet, so far as I know

The rare earths are the 15 lanthanides, scandium and yttrium. Some are rare, some are abundant.

Other chemistries are not "cheaper" than lithium. They're cheaper without the quote marks. Sodium is 300x cheaper than lithium, because it's vastly more abundant (neither are rare, but abundance matters), cheap and easy to extract and obtain at gigantic commodity scales, and can be purified to the requisite standards for EV chemistries more easily. It's the frickin salt industry! Humanity has been trading it for thousands of years.

Sodium chemistries also have their own benefits over lithium for EVs beyond cost: cold weather performance, cycle life, and ability to discharge to zero. Lithium will continue to be wildly important for decades, but the advent of new chemistries is wonderful news.

You might sound like less of a dick if you knew that lithium isn't a rare earth

The thing is, your first post made a wildly wrong claim, didn't it? And I showed you how you were wrong with some very basic facts and maths.

So here's a new word for you: introspection.

The correct response to finding that you have a made a big claim and got it completely wrong is to introspect. It should lead to such questions as "why was I so confident in my belief?"; "how did I get it so wrong?"; "were my priors getting in the way of correct thinking?"; "does my education on this topic lack substance"; and of course, the biggie, "if I was so badly wrong on this argument, which of my other arguments on this topic are also wrong?".

I know this feels uncomfortable to confront, but it's such a better use of your time than immediately writing up nine further arguments for your position. All nine of your next arguments are equally as poorly conceived as the first one you made, and that's because you've not done the introspective work you need to. One time-honoured way of doing that is through playing devil's advocate, testing the strength of your own arguments by arguing against them; another is the socratic method, discussing them with an interlocutor, which can help you stimulate your critical thinking, uncover your hidden beliefs, and draw out the internal contradictions in your arguments. You can ask an AI to act as the interlocutor; they have endless patience.

Why not pop off and do that, and we can come back to this when you've constructed a slightly more sophisticated approach to your analysis than "what do ya do at night with solar, when there's no wind?"

My top suggestion for you, before anything else, is to reflect on why you don't understand a basic word like "falsified". I am referring to the technical sense, in that you're incapable of using the correct term in your sentence to describe what you're trying to describe. Because if you're so poorly educated that you can't use find the correct terms to use in your writing, then it's unlikely you can understand the things you read properly either. And if you can't read well, and you can't write well, then you are cut off from being able to think well. And if your education lacks these basics, there's no way you are sufficiently well educated to come to the correct conclusions on anything that requires critical thinking... such as the topic of renewables, although I do mean *anything* that requires critical thinking. The appropriate response, were I in your shoes, and discovered myself to be lacking these basic functional skills, would be to get off Slashdot and take some basic adult education classes and fix these issues. You have a pressing need, more important than attempting to argue about renewables here, where you will only get yourself in a pickle.

He’ll never know. He’s pig ignorant and ignores almost everything, certainly including anything that goes against his desires

It would have taken you a matter of minutes to check your intuition and find that it’s possible to generate 4 trillion kWh annually from 4000 square miles of SW American desert, ie 8% of the Mojave. That is a small slice of one existing desert with no competing land use. in total, there’s 1.3 *million* square miles of SW American desert. If you covered the whole thing with solar panels, it would generate 510,000 TWh annually, which is three times more than humanity’s annual primary energy output and 8 to 10 times the annual consumption of energy for real work (vs waste).

Workings for the first calculation:
Annual solar energy per metre squared in the SW American desert is 6kWh/m2/day * 365 = 2190kWh, giving 394kWh annual solar output from a panel per metre squared allowing for 18% efficiency.

4.1 * 10 to the 12 divided by 394 kWh / m2 = 10.4 * 10 to the 10 = 4015 square miles.

Your main problem is that your analysis is trite. You talk about primary energy, for example. Ember have written an entire report about why primary energy is weak way to understand energy systems. Its excellent, you should go read it:
https://ember-energy.org/lates...

It is also really time to stop worrying about cropland lost to renewables production if you’re not going to acknowledge that cropland (and actual ecosystems) are being lost at a way higher rate to climate change. It’s like idiots blathering on about birds and turbines while ignoring cats and climate change.

The data shows that the Straits attack had a substantial accelerative effect on sales of renewables (and EVs). There may be more to come as well, when the price shock kicks in properly later this year, although by that time the economic impacts may mean less ability to invest the capex too, sadly.

The apparent contradiction stems from what China is actually doing with coal and coal plants, which is to say, retiring old coal plants and replacing with new ones which it uses as backup for renewables. So utilisation of these new plants is pretty low.

I've been in a taxi and on a bus this very morning. And on a train too, and walked. Mixed mode transport is the best for me and for tens of millions of others.

The article didn't spell that out because the article is written for typical readers, not idiots who are looking to be pedantic because of their priors.

I've no idea if Musk does or doesn't want to make the claim you said, because I don't follow him. But fleet operators care about charging costs and that means Wh/mile. It's not the only thing they care about, otherwise Western taxi fleet operators would all be using electric three wheeled rickshaws, as is common in so many countries. But they obviously do care about it, because they're not fucking idiots and they want to keep charging bills down.

You're a complete dipshit. The Chinese OEM ecosystem is astounding, and incredibly impressive, and you are reading your own weird bitter priors into what I wrote. I will never buy a Tesla and would absolutely buy a Chinese OEM car for my next car. You're just a dingbat making stupid assumptions.

Extra-urban doesn't mean rural, you idiot. It just means "not inside the city", ie it includes suburban and highway driving. And the entire fucking point is that US conurbation driving includes more extra-urban driving than elsewhere. For example, driving around LA frequently requires use of fast roads, whereas driving round London rarely does. So a taxi in London can afford to be less efficient at higher speeds without hurting fleet TCO.

This isn't a spreadsheet advance either, dipshit. It's an EPA test. Will it scale? Who the fuck knows. But it's a tangible product that's been tested by the EPA, just like other vehicles. It doesn't mean I think you or I or anyone else has to like Tesla now, or think that the M3 isn't stale or whatevs.

You're like the personification of the opposite of dispassionate analysis.

You people are absolutely batshit crazy. You cannot countenance the mere possibility that anyone might say "this is good engineering" if it's about Tesla. i don't like the company, I loathe the owner, I've had four EVs so far and none of them is a Tesla, and in multiple ways, other OEMs have clearly surpassed them, but I'm not completely deranged by my dislike and can recognise when they have built something impressive, a feat that appears entirely beyond you.

Your response here is complete idiocy.

- Your statement about incentivisation is gibberish, it's not written in comprehensible English.
- I'm not an imbecile, "sodium-based cars" is clearly an abbreviation for cars using sodium chemistries in their batteries of the sort that BYD, CATL and Gotion have announced. And the entire fucking point is that sodium chemistries lag on gravimetric power density compared to NMC but are cheaper, so you can *make up* for that relatively lower power density by improving overall efficiency to get the same range with a sodium chemistry as with LFP but for lower cost. Jesus fucking christ, you're a complete dumbshit. You can't even understand basic things because you can't read properly.

I fear I am going to have to spell this out for you:
1. A BYD Dolphin typically achieves a range of about 230 miles from a 57kwh usable LFP battery. It therefore has an efficiency of about 250Wh/mile

2. BYD will be able to make a cheaper Dolphin with better cold weather performance by switching to an Na battery. The pack-level gravimetric density will be about 30% worse. So instead of a 57kWh LFP battery, it will only fit a 42kWh Na battery. The smaller volume pack enables small thermal management systems, lighter structures, lighter brakes and suspension, enabling some clawing back of mass, but the net effect is likely an inherent efficiency improvement from 250 to say 225 Wh/mile from lower rolling resistance, inertial losses, etc. So the 42kWh Na pack means the Dolphin can go 190 miles, a 40 mile worse range than the LFP version but at lower cost.

3. If BYD then applies some of the efficiency improvements that Tesla has implemented such as SiC inverters, better aero, integrated thermal management, etc, it may be able to improve efficiency from 225 Wh/mile to say 200Wh/mile, and the range improves to about 210 miles. Now you have a cheaper Dolphin with better cold weather performance from a sodium battery that can travel 210 miles, only a 20 mile range penalty compared to the LFP version.

This wasn't that hard for you to follow, was it? And this relies on Chinese OEM ingenuity. It's not about Tesla, except they provided some inspiration.

- "Their own competitive edge in autonomy" referred to Chinese OEMs, not Tesla, you fucking muppet.

You are a complete and utter imbecile, unable to follow the basics of what other people write. You start from your priors and mislead yourself right up your own bottom like an idiot. And you assume everyone else is as moronic as you, and thus cannot deal with any shorthand at all, whether it's "sodium cars" when this obviously means "cars with Na-based chemistries" or "the cybertaxi market" when it means "the nascent cybertaxi that may never fully develop but actually may, because it's multiple companies around the world pushing for autonomy and some making some modest progress although the problems remain really hard".

Go chew on your priors, dipshit