I thought they would have been pushing for sodium ion batteries instead. Lead acid batteries are a bad choice for anything that needs to be cycled frequently.
Last part of the article basically says sodium ion batteries are where they’re going next.
They’re a also bad choice for e-bikes because they’re heavy as hell. I had an e-bike a while back that had two lead acid batteries, and they were about 15 lbs each. The added weight made it almost impossible to go uphill with the motor, so you’d have to pedal a much heavier bike up hills. Not a good experience at all.
I mean there are quite many fires in China started by those e-bikes but I thought it was because of bad quality.
There are chemistries that are less volatile But they’re less energy dense as well.
The biggest problem I see on most of the Chinese stuff is a lack of safety in the battery packs. They’re just mass-producing cells and shoving them together, It wouldn’t be very expensive to put a small battery management system on every cell. Watch each cell for voltage and temperature. Have them shut down when they’re out of safety margins
Thermal runaway probably shouldn’t be a realistic consequence of bad quality in any consumer product.
newer
lead acid
Uh, wtf?
The headline means newly manufactured e-bikes with lead acid batteries.
That doesn’t explain why the new bikes have older technology than the bikes they’re urging people to trade in.
It’s in the article:
Over the last decade or so, China has seen a shift from older AGM batteries, which are heavy and bulky, toward lighter and longer-lasting lithium-ion batteries.
However, safety concerns regarding rare yet dangerous lithium-ion battery fires have put a pause on that proliferation. The government instituted new safety standards for lithium-ion batteries in e-bikes last year, but there’s also been a major pushback toward AGM batteries for the domestic market.
Because new items can still use old technologies if it makes more sense to do so?
A 2025 vehicle with a manual radio sold for $30,000 might still sell better than a 2020 vehicle with a touchscreen dash for $25,000
Yeah, they should have just gone to the frontier of technology with carbon-air cells. It’s weird, right? I thought China was a first mover in tech.
Ehh they need to do sodium batteries
Damn I’d have atleast waited until sodium ion was built out
