Most learner drivers on public roads still cut their teeth on gasoline vehicles, for the simple reason that electric versions are still quite rare. Their instructors teach them to drive consistently, because this saves fuel and ‘you don’t want to hammer the motor’. While in the case of electric vehicles, drivers could be dynamically extending battery lifetime by varying their driving style.
A New Way to Dynamically Extend Battery Life
A team from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University published a report on December 9, 2024, that we link to below. They note in their introduction how much electric battery research in laboratories relies on steady battery discharge patterns.
However, the Stanford team also found reports using data from dynamic discharging regimes. Surprisingly, they found that varying the discharge rate by alternating driving styles “led to an increase of up to 38% in equivalent full cycles at end of life”.
The team then turned to artificial intelligence-based ‘explainable machine learning,’ for an answer. This logic revealed ‘the importance of both low-frequency current pulses, and time-induced ageing under realistic discharge conditions’.
A New Insight Into the Future of Electric Vehicles
The future of electric vehicles is inevitably linked to battery calendar life. This new way of extending it, may come as surprise to electric vehicle drivers on long trips on highways, They may not know that their stop-start, commuting counterparts could have considerably better battery life.
“We’ve not been testing EV batteries the right way,” senior author and associate professor of energy science and engineering at Stanford believes. We need to incorporate dynamically extending battery lifetime in our studies.
“To our surprise,” he continues as relayed by Elektrek, “real driving with frequent acceleration, braking that charges the batteries a bit, stopping to pop into a store, and letting the batteries rest for hours at a time helps batteries last longer, than we had thought based on industry-standard lab tests.”
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