Evaluation of Current, Future, and Beyond Li-Ion Batteries for the Electrification of Light Commercial Vehicles: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

While the electrification of the transportation sector is underway with a consistently increasing market share, segments like light commercial vehicles (LCVs) have not seen any significant market penetration. The major barriers are primarily in the shortcomings in specific energy, power, and cost associated with Li-ion batteries. With an initiative from several automakers to electrify other segments, there is a need to critically examine the performance requirements and to understand the factors governing such a transition in the near-term and long-term. In this study, we develop a systematic methodological framework to analyze the performance demands for electrification through an approach that couples considerations for battery chemistries, load profiles based on a set of vehiclespecific drive cycles, and finally applying these loads to a battery pack that solves a 1-D thermally coupled battery model within the AutoLion-ST framework. Using this framework, we analyze the performance of a fully electric LCV over its lifetime under various driving conditions and explore the trade-offs between battery metrics and vehicle design parameters. We find that in order to enable a driving range of over 400-miles for LCVs at a realistic battery pack weight, specific energies of over 400 Wh/kg at the cell-level and 200 Wh/kg at the pack-level needs to be achieved. A crucial factor that could bring down both the energy requirements and cost is through a vehicle re-design that lowers the drag coefficient to about 0. The complete electrification of the transportation sector is essential to reduce CO 2 emissions and improve air quality in densely populated cities.1 There has been remarkable progress toward electrification in the passenger sedan market, with a market share of more than a few hundred thousand vehicles, and reaching as high as 23% in Norway and 10% Netherlands.2 Light commercial vehicles (LCVs) form nearly one-tenth of the global market share 3 and about 30% in the United States where they account for approximately 30% of the greenhouse gas emissions of the transportation sector.4 Yet, the electrification of this segment is very limited, primarily due to the shortcomings of the current state of battery technology. [5][6][7][8] The average fuel economy for this segment has remained largely stagnant since 1985, while the engine fuel efficiency has been increasing continuously. 9 This is in large part due to automakers increasing the performance of the vehicles at the expense of fuel economy, thus, maintaining sustained demand for high-performance LCVs.Prior work has explored the implementation of hybrid electric pickup trucks 10 with the drivetrains utilizing internal combustion engines (ICEs) for longer distances. A few other studies 11,12 have discussed the potential use of a battery pack by retrofitting conventional pickup trucks with electric drivetrains. With major electric automakers such as Tesla Inc., announcing their work toward fully electric LCVs, 13 there is an urgent need to understand systematically th...

Exploring the Economic Potential of Sodium-Ion Batteries

“…Naturally, these (and thus also the final cell price) depend strongly on the plant size and the annual throughput. This is one of the reasons for the high variation in prices published in the literature, where values of between 145 and 289 €/kWh for NMC and between 225 and 303 €/kWh for LFP are given [17,[21][22][23][24][25][26][52][53][54], with the lower values originating from the most recent publications. The price estimations from this work are situated at the lower end of this range, corresponding with this trend towards decreasing battery prices.…”

Intrinsic Variability in the Degradation of a Batch of Commercial 18650 Lithium-Ion Cells

“…Some key markets for lithium-ion batteries include cell phones, notebook personal computers (PCs), electric vehicles [1], and grid storage [2]. In high output voltage applications, a number of lithium-ion cells are generally assembled in series to meet system requirements.…”

The feasibility of heavy battery electric trucks

“…Decarbonization of road freight by using heavy battery electric freight trucks is generally found to be of limited feasibility as a means of combating climate change, with high costs and low gravimetric-specific energy of batteries typically found to be the limiting factors. [1][2][3][4][5] Although some recent studies are more optimistic, pointing to the potential for reductions in lifecycle cost and CO 2 emissions, 1,3,[6][7][8] electrification based on batteries is found to be more feasible for lighter freight vehicles than for heavy freight vehicles. [1][2][3][9][10][11][12][13] Reviews on decarbonization strategies, thus, generally concludes that heavy battery electric freight trucks are likely to play a rather small role due to these technical limitations.…”