Carmakers want to ditch battery packs, use auto bodies for energy storage

&gt;[Musk] hailed Tesla’s structural battery as a “revolution” in <i>engineering</i>—but for some battery researchers, Musk’s future looked a lot like the past.<p>&gt;“He’s essentially doing something that we did 10 years ago,” says Emile Greenhalgh, a materials scientist at Imperial College London<p>Doing something under research conditions and doing it in a mass-produced commercial product are separate accomplishments. Both are important and impressive and should be celebrated.

Passenger cars all moved from a body-on-frame structure to a more integrated unibody construction where a lot of the rigidity is provided by other parts that happen to be located on the underside of the car. In an electric car that has a battery on the underside, delegating some of that structural integrity to the fairly rigid battery pack seems like an obvious extension of that trend. I&#x27;m pretty sure that&#x27;s what Musk means when he talks about structural batteries. That will probably mean some changes to the battery packs to make them more fit for that purpose (that could mean changes to the cells, but doesn&#x27;t have to)<p>Integrating battery packs anywhere else in the body of the car seems much less practical. These car batteries aren&#x27;t like notebook batteries: they have dedicated heating and cooling systems in addition to high current connectors, fire proof casings, emergency shutoffs etc. You can&#x27;t just pepper those around the car.

No they don&#x27;t. Researchers propose they (the carmakers) do.<p>I can&#x27;t even imagine the maintenance or repair considerations of a pack that&#x27;s embedded inside of the frame or a monocoque chassis.<p>Lastly this isn&#x27;t even an Ars article, it&#x27;s from Wired. It really is a terrible click-bait headline. The article, imho isn&#x27;t much better.

Does this mean giving up on every being able to replace the battery pack if it&#x27;s integrated into the frame? Tesla battery packs are only warrantied for 8 years, and after that you need to pay ~$7k to replace them. Are they developing new battery tech to make this time period longer?

I would like to understand what happens when you are in the accident? Does this increase the risk of fire&#x2F;explosions no matter where you get hit? I still remember driving by the burnt-out Tesla on 101 &amp; 95 intersection.

What happens in an accident, or when someone drills a hole through the frame?

What do they mean by Musk is incorporating the batteries into the frame? They just introduced a larger cylindrical cell. Cylindrical cells don’t get embedded, unless you mean as in a flashlight.<p>In some other generation of battery tech, there’s plenty of gray area here that still provides benefit. A stiffer battery requires less housing. A stiff enough battery only requires shielding against punctures. Stronger still, and you can bolt it between two frame elements and have it function like a cross brace, while still being able to remove it for servicing.

I know that some container ships are using sails once again to help with fuel costs.<p>It would be a neat triple play to have the sails be solar panels and the batteries, too.

A big issue with this would be safety. You don’t want your car to explode if someone runs opens their door into the side of your car. Also, repair costs would be crazy. You probably could not bang out dents, but would have to replace the entire (very expensive) structural battery quarter panel.

Hm. Inevitably that would raise the center of mass, right? The Tesla battery is currently the floor of the vehicle I think. Now it&#x27;ll be threaded through the body, which brings weight upward. It&#x27;ll have to be done carefully, to keep it handling well.

Interesting concept but I guess there will be <i>huge</i> investments needed into material science - we can model how a metal or carbon composite frame will react when exposed to impacts or general mechanical stress, how much load a given part can bear under which circumstances after many decades of data gathering, but for a battery that <i>is</i> the structure we don&#x27;t have experience.

&gt; Its battery pack will be integrated into the chassis so that it provides mechanical support in addition to energy, a design that Musk claimed will reduce the car’s weight by 10 percent and improve its mileage by even more.<p>i wonder if it also reduces the possibility (or increases the cost) of recycling used battery packs by 80%.

Sustainability? Can these new carbodybatteries be recycled when they can&#x27;t take a charge? Can I replaces some of the car for a complete charge? or do I have to ditch the whole thing when the first component fails?

The news to me is now arstechnica.com is syndicating content from wired.com ... And as far as I&#x27;m concerned, no good can come from that...<p>... starting with this article which gives credence to these Asp and Greenhalgh fellows, who have deemed the current situation with batteries as a &quot;structural parasite&quot; while at the same time proposing to incorporate them into the skin of the vehicle, which moves mass way upwards and way outwards-- both of the no-nos in regards to stability. The negative effects from just the shifting of mass will likely outweigh any of the gains using their method, which so far seem to be a bit nebulous. And that&#x27;s ignoring many of the obvious safety, reparability, and complexity concerns...

reminds me of a scene in some TV show long ago where (Howard Hughes perhaps??) the character threw a hammer I tothe side of his steam car, where it gushed steam, and announced that he was no longer in the steam car business. I would not want to be inside a vehicle whose body panels were filled with something like lithium!! a sealed box underneath is acceptable if it passes crash tests, door panels, no way.

Explosive skin on a vehicle...<p>The military name for this is ‘reactive armor’. Imagine backing into a quarter panel in a parking lot - Boom!

Are you supposed to flag for misleading titles? This isn&#x27;t &quot;carmakers&quot;, it&#x27;s random material scientists.

The only reason EVs don&#x27;t handle like complete ass despite being relatively heavy is all the weight is concentrated in the floor with a skateboard battery pack design.<p>This is stupid on multiple levels.