Chinese EV manufacturer trials Sodium-Ion batteries

[dan_b]

Yet another Chinese EV brand you've never heard of, HINA, but the huge interest here is their trial use of Sodium Ion battery chemistry in an EV as opposed to Lithium - either LFP or otherwise.

https://www.electrive.com/2023/02/23/hi ... -vehicles/

[marshman]

Yet another Chinese EV brand you've never heard of, HINA, but the huge interest here is their trial use of Sodium Ion battery chemistry in an EV as opposed to Lithium - either LFP or otherwise.

https://www.electrive.com/2023/02/23/hi ... -vehicles/

Never mind the battery technology testing, why can't we have the EX10 EV over here?, ticks most, if not all of my boxes - cheap (ish), small, with decent range (for a local run about).

[GarethC]

Commercialisation of sodium ion batteries is a big deal due to abundance of materials and low cost. I'm surprised, if heartened, to read about their usage in vehicles, as I expected them to make inroads into the storage market primarily. Will follow this with interest.

[spread-tee]

Commercialisation of sodium ion batteries is a big deal due to abundance of materials and low cost. I'm surprised, if heartened, to read about their usage in vehicles, as I expected them to make inroads into the storage market primarily. Will follow this with interest.

My brother-in-laws collegue at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburg invented a Sodium Ion battery in 2007 and spent an awful lot of money getting it to market, but sadly they filed for bankruptcy in 2017 due to lack of interest from investors. Maybe the Chinese have worked out a new technique or have deeper pockets.

Shame really there was very vague talk about becoming involved as a distributor. Oh well this "time next year Rodders"

Desp

[Mr Gus]

Any english speaking reviews on that vehicle M.M. ?

[Mart]

Commercialisation of sodium ion batteries is a big deal due to abundance of materials and low cost. I'm surprised, if heartened, to read about their usage in vehicles, as I expected them to make inroads into the storage market primarily. Will follow this with interest.

My brother-in-laws collegue at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburg invented a Sodium Ion battery in 2007 and spent an awful lot of money getting it to market, but sadly they filed for bankruptcy in 2017 due to lack of interest from investors. Maybe the Chinese have worked out a new technique or have deeper pockets.

Shame really there was very vague talk about becoming involved as a distributor. Oh well this "time next year Rodders"

Desp

Hi Desp. That's a real shame. Maybe similar to the US (I believe) patenting LFP, then selling it all to the Chinese. At least that has now come out of patent in the last year or two.

Use of sodium would suggest the possibility of being cheaper than LFP, but even if that didn't happen, just spreading battery demand across more materials would benefit everyone. Maybe even a weird bit of supply and demand economics, with sodium being viable due to rising lithium costs, then sodium reducing demand on lithium, and LFP (for example) falling in cost ...... a weird economic battle raging based purely on lithium extraction production costs?

Seems to me that sodium only needs to be economically viable against lithium for stationary storage, and that alone will be a massive success for both technologies.

[dan_b]

That was my thinking also - if sodium ion batteries become available at scale, then that creates a new entirely independent material supplychain for batteries which is beneficial for everything. My understanding is that due to the (currently) lower energy density vs Li NMC chemistries, sodium has the best early potential in stationary batteries - indeed there are already companies making commercial products for just that. If that means that stationary storage is ,increasingly fulfilled with cheaper Sodium leaving more lithium chemistry batteries to go round for mobile/EV applications, then that's an all round good.