The CATL Naxtra sodium-ion battery will debut in the Changan Nevo A06 sedan, delivering an estimated range of around 400 kilometers (249 miles) on the China Light-Duty Test Cycle.
and
It delivers 175 watt-hours per kilogram of energy density, which is lower than nickel-rich chemistries but roughly on par with LFP
I thought the price differential was not going to happen as there was a serious drop in the price of Lithium over the past year; but I looked it up and the lithium price drop is more a 5 year trend, with the last few months having a sudden surge in the price.
Remember those Donut/Verge solid state batteries, which were supposed to ship in Q1 2026? That just slipped to the end of 2026 or 2027.[1] Supposedly they're delayed by needing "certification" for their motorcycle.
(The motorcycle is real, and has been out for years. This is just a battery upgrade.)
Apparently the article was updated to clarify the "delay" date was referring to the delivery dates of new/future orders and not referring to any delays for the very first orders.
Retaining 90% range at -40°C sounds like a game changer, almost too good to be true. I'm definitely going to need to see some third-party real-world range tests to validate those claims before getting too excited.
Note that this article's summary has a significant error compared to the original press release[1]. The article says "90% range", whereas the press release says "90% capacity retention".
This is a big difference because there are all kinds of other factors besides energy capacity that can affect the efficiency of the whole system, and therefore affect range.
Most notably, air is about 28% denser at -40°C than at 25°C, so drag is about 28% higher. So you would expect roughly 28% less range at high speeds even if the battery has no capacity loss whatsoever.
As someone else mentioned, climate control also consumes a lot more power when it has to maintain a larger temperature difference between inside and outside.
> Most notably, air is about 28% denser at -40°C than at 25°C, so drag is about 28% higher. So you would expect roughly 28% less range at high speeds even if the battery has no capacity loss whatsoever.
With my gas car, I haven't noticed 30% worse fuel consumption at –30°C compared to +30°C [0]. To be fair, I haven't closely measured the fuel consumption at different temperatures, but I probably would have noticed such a big difference. This is just anecdotal of course, so your values may actually be correct.
[0]: It does occasionally get down to –40°C here, but car won't usually start then, so I've slightly shifted your temperature range to the values where I've driven most.
Gas cars produce more power at lower temperatures - more oxygen gets into the combustion chamber, and the engine also can run more advanced spark timing without as much worry of detonation. This is why turbochargers have intercoolers.
It won't be as noticeable on a gas car because it is probably starting out around 30% efficiency (as compared with ~90% for an EV). This is a major advantage of gasoline, in a sense, because it means we have already engineered the package to account for a lot of wasted fuel.
Ah, so then the air temperature should reduce fuel consumption by 30%×30%=10%, which does seem to roughly match my experience. Thanks for pointing that out!
It's the majority, but overwhelming or not surprisingly appears to depend on car model, at least per some calculations someone on reddit ran [1].
I'd add though that rolling resistance tends to be higher, on average, in winter too. When there's often a bit of snow on the roads... Less so on high speed highways admittedly.
For most cars driving through air, at sea level, on planet Earth, at normal speed, the drag force F is proportional to the square of the speed (v^2).
That's not exponential because the speed (v) is not in the exponent. In fact, it's quadratic.
Corollaries: The power required to push the car at speed v will be proportional to Fv ~ v^3. The gas spent over time t ~ energy spent ~ power time ~ v^3 * time.
Define ‘high speeds’. There’s a reason race cars look like they do, to the point of having serious problems driving at speeds just a bit below highway speed limit.
I don't imagine the difference is very significant on long drives. If the car is cold soaked at -30, it uses about 10kW for the first 3km. Then everything is warmed up, and the ~25% difference is increased consumption, not decreased battery capacity.
As long as you have a heat pump harvesting the waste heat to keep the battery up to temp.
But might be significant on short drives, 10kW for the first 3 km is massive.
Yeah, this heat up effect is massive for around-town use. We have had below freezing weather for two weeks, which is very unusual here in Annapolis. That’s had a huge impact on my wife’s use case, which involves a bunch of 5-10 mile trips to drop the kids off at school, go on a grocery run, pick the kids up, take the kids to math tutoring, etc. She ran out of charge the other day during drop-off b/c the “37 miles left” we had the night before was actually a lot less than that accounting for warming the battery up the next day.
The temperature difference should in principle increase thermodynamic efficiency. You get loss of MPG from other factors though mentioned in the link, like increased friction of moving parts, idling to warm up (0MPG), defrosters/seat heaters, lower tire pressure, denser air to drive through, winter fuel mixes which may not have as much energy, etc.
> Fuel economy tests show that, in city driving, a conventional gasoline car's gas mileage is roughly 15% lower at 20°F than it would be at 77°F. It can drop as much as 24% for short (3- to 4-mile) trips.
Sticking a piece of cardboard over a portion of the radiator was a common sight during the winter when I was growing up in rural Ohio. I didn't think our winters were that cold, but maybe late 70s to early 80s vehicles were more susceptible to running cold.
I had a car that developed a stuck-open thermostat and did the cardboard trick to get by until I could replace the faulty part.
I've had that happen, too, on a [more] regular car. I drove a Mustang 5.0 from Oklahoma to Oregon, and as I went through eastern Colorado the coolant temperature steadily dropped until it was resting at the bottom of the gauge. I don't recall whether the gas mileage suffered noticeably or not during that phase of the drive.
Assuming you can get the car to start (mine needs an engine warmer at that temperature), it takes at least 15 minutes of driving to reach that temperature. Unless you’re going on a longer trip the engine most likely wont be warm by the time you reach your destination.
I had to drive in -30C once, the engine could not get up to final temperature after 2 hours of highway driving because I had to run cabin heater at full blast on windshield and side windows so they didn't cover with fog inside. But that was in very old low power car.
My tiny diesel car (2008 Toyota) needs its auxiliary heater below around -15 C for highway trips. It's a switch in my dash that burns extra fuel, otherwise the engine won't get up to or stay at temperate.
I once had a condo with parking in a cave that was above freezing even when outside was -30 C (or F, close enough at that part of the scale). It was a great winter perk.
There are a bunch of things going on, and some people's measure of efficiency needs work.
1) winter blend fuels have less energy per volume, that doesn't make your engine any less efficient by energy but it does by volume of gas
2) lots of temporary cold effects: fuel vaporization, thick lubricants, etc. these things become less of a problem as the engine warms up but some energy is still lost on long drives
3) air resistance: all aerodynamic forces are linearly proportional with air density. At a constant pressure there's about a 15% difference in air density between the hottest and coldest places you can drive (and thus 15% less drag on a hot summer day than a cold winter day). aerodynamic forces are proportional to the square of your velocity and they become the largest resistive force around 50mph -- so at highway speeds you're losing efficiency because you have to push more air out of the way
4) energy used to maintain temperature: this is hard to calculate but some engine power is lost because the energy is used heating up the engine block and lost to the environment
5) the Thermodynamics 101 engine efficiency goes UP with increased temperature, but it's got a lot of real world effects to compete with, no spherical cows and all
There's one. Go to a Car and Driver article about cars with extreme ranges, namely those over 650 miles, and they will start listing out particular years' models over a 10 year period in order to get to even ~10 models, and most of them are EcoBoost or variants or poor selling hybrid versions of other cars.
Assuming a 1000km range is a very strange thing to do, as it's a fringe feature that almost no one needs or wants! Recall that "almost no one" means that there's still some, an existence of a handful of people on HN is quite consistent with "almost none."
Of course I didn't pick it for range, I looked at price and miles of what the local carmax had and then separately looked up how tall the top of the windshield was.
Which I would expect to typically find something that's, um, fairly typical on characteristics I wasn't selecting on.
my 2010 F-150 with the notoriously terrible 5.4L gas engine seems to manage 1000km range. there's absolutely nothing efficient about it, it's just got a big gas tank.
Yep, Ford had to put really big tanks on even the F150 to make up for the horrid mileage. Even with a 36 gallon tank, when towing with an F150 you might only get 300 miles. It's one reason the Lightning had problems selling as many as they wanted (aside from the ridiculous pricing the first year or so). Most people who are serious about towing don't use an F150 anyway, but that doesn't mean that F150 buyers don't fantasize about their potential towing needs in the future.
Comparing range of gasoline cars is idiotic. There are plenty of cars with long range (1000km), and they all have 60L+ fuel tanks and most run on diesel (which gives you ~15% more range per liter). It'd even argue the same for BEVs. More battery is more range.
You mean EVs? Yeah, none that I'm aware of. But petrol/diesel cars? Loads of them. Even my 400bhp Volvo XC60 will easily do 650 miles on one tank of fuel. A diesel one will do 700-800. And a diesel Passat will go over 1000 miles on a tank without trying. Hell, even my basic 1.6dCI Qashqai could do 700 miles on its 55 litre tank
Cool, I guess when I did 700 miles on a single tank of fuel driving Switzerland to Italy and then again driving Italy to Austria and then again Austria to Netherlands this summer I just imagined it. My total for the 3000 miles was 38mpg(imperial).
Also you are quoting a value for the B5, which is not what I have, mine is a T8(and before you ask - no, I didn't have any opportunity to charge it anywhere on the way).
And human occupants will still run the heater more in winter. But it sounds like there could be a future where makers offer a sodium battery and heat pump version of their cars for sale in colder climates.
IIRC there are some surprising holdouts, at least in the NA market. For example as far as I'm aware the Mustang Mach-E still ships with a resistive heater.
Running a preheater loop for the heat pump from the systems than need to be cooled, inverter and motor that run better cold,and other optimisations could likely supply cabin heat with very little battery draw, solar pv blended into the exterior could zero that out on an average basis,but 40 below is nothing to play with unless you know exactly what you are doing, even if they say it will still work.
Since the Lithium battery prices dropped, there are many Sodium battery companies simply abandoning the research or shuttering. Not a good sign when smart people jump ship.
The Na cells also have lower energy-density, and currently fewer viable charge cycles. One can still buy evaluation samples, but it takes time to figure out if the technology will make economic sense.
More interesting is that they're claiming 248 miles (400km) on a 45kWh battery[0]. That calculates out to 5.5 miles/kWh, whereas the most efficient Tesla 3 right now only claims 4.5 miles/kWh - and even that is a very optimistic estimate (most people can't get 270 miles out of their 60kWh Tesla 3 standard range models) [1]
Question: if a LiIon battery can't deliver as much energy when cold, where does the lost energy go? Is it just unavailable, and becomes available again when warmed up? Is discharge less efficient, so the energy is wasted? Or does charging stop early when cold, so there's less to be discharged in the first place?
This is an educated guess, but I think it becomes less efficient, so it heats up, and then performs better as it heats. I assume this to be the case because I charge my RC plane LiPos the same way every time, and they take the same amount of energy, but flying in the winter gives much shorter flight times. Since the battery is warm after a flight, even in the cold, I don't think the energy is still there the battery is still discharged when I take it home), so it must just be much less efficient and wasting a lot of energy as heat.
I assume it's just that its internal resistance rises when it's cold, but I might be wrong.
Easiest way to model this is from the cells impedance. Essentially think of the cold limiting ion motility in the electrolyte phase, and that resulting in a higher impedance, that works out as a voltage drop at the cells terminals, so the cell has a limited depth of discharge, vs at higher temperatures.
> Is discharge less efficient, so the energy is wasted?
Yes. It's mostly wasted as heat inside the battery. I think there's also a temperature relationship to open-circuit voltage? But the predominate effect is from elevated internal resistance.
Batteries can freeze solid. It takes energy to keep them warm with an heater. Then there’s cabin heating which is usually warmed by heat from combustion in a gas engine.
Do any US automakers have anything in the pipes using Sodium-Ion batteries? A quick search turned up info on a plant mass producing the batteries in Holland, MI but no mention of when they would be available. As someone in the market for an EV within the next year or 2, and also currently enduring a month long stretch of temps in the single digits and below, cold weather performance has suddenly become a huge consideration.
Likely No. Undecided with Matt Ferrell recently did a video on how sodium ion batterys startup in the US (not necessarily for EVs, but other power applications) have had challenges largely due to the falling price of lithium making sodium batteries less competitive on price the past couple years: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nrTCgZmUFCY
OTOH, there are seemingly more lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery ev options now - rivian now uses LFP, Ford mustang mach-e has had a LFP variant since fall 2023 (and should have other models using LFP in 2027), I think the 2026 chevy bolt uses LFP, etc.
LFP battery production in the US only recently reached larger scale; so I expect it will be a while before they get around to sodium ion. With all the tariffs, they'd have to license technology and build local factories to get started. That will probably be a few years at least. Or the tariffs might become more reasonable at some point and they could import battery cells a bit sooner than that. But probably not until the end of this decade.
Cold weather performance with heat pumps and lithium batteries is fine. Don't worry about it. I wouldn't try to hold my breath until a US automaker produces a sodium battery EV.
It’s only “fine” if you live in the southern US where freezing conditions are rare and/or never drive anywhere near your winter range and you have a garage charger or some other easy access to a charge station. Anything outside of those conditions and winter range issues are painful.
Why do you imagine that average miles per day matters? I don’t drive anywhere near 200 miles/day, but any time I have to drive across the state (or farther) in the winter I have to recharge a lot more frequently, and the charging stations are busier and fewer in number (usually more are out of service in the winter either because the snow has drifted over them or because the cable was left in the snow and is now frozen over or a plow damaged the unit). Worse still, if you don’t have a charging cable in your parking space, you will have to drive to a charging station much more frequently (because the idle battery usage is much higher).
But yeah, if you have a garage with a charger and you never exceed your winter range then it’s fine, per my previous comment.
More than 60 million Americans own a home with a garage (where a charger can be installed) and most are within 100 miles of a fast DC charger. Edge cases continue to shrink and be solved for, electricity is ubiquitous and batteries keep improving rapidly.
I think proportion is more useful that quantity. 66% of housing units (that's all forms of housing, not just single-family homes) have a garage or carport. Also, given that there are ~145 million housing units, 60 million would be a bad situation.
> most are within 100 miles of a fast DC charger
That's not good enough. No one can spend 3-4 hours to drive 200 miles round trip, or even 100 miles, to charge quickly.
There needs to be a good solution for the 33% of households that don't have access to EV charging as part of their home. Until it becomes really plentiful, part of the solution may involve fast charging that only the 33% can use or that favors the 33%; people who can charge overnight at home should charge overnight at home.
Agreed. However, the number of people who live 100+ miles from a fast charger rounds to zero. Something like 85-90% of the US population lives within a metro area, and even in the least "EV friendly" states probably has a fast charger within 10-20 miles at most.
Fast chargers colocated at grocery stores people shop at at least weekly are a solution, Tesla did this (Meijer partnership), as did Electrify America. Walmart is rolling out charging at most of their US stores. Home charging is a solution, but so is workplace level 2 charging.
Can you charge at home? Do so. Can you charge at work? Do so. Can you charge at a grocery store or other location your task will take longer than the charging? Do so. This works for most Americans, while charging infrastructure continues to be rapidly deployed. The gaps will be filled, how fast is a function of will and investment.
Nah dude, I live in Canada, we're having a record cold winter here, and it's really not bad. My car (Polestar 2) is one of the least efficient, has no heat pump in my year, and only has a ~225km effective range in winter (~300 in summer) but .. I have zero range anxiety, there's no pain, it's not annoying. The number of times one is driving that far in a single trip is miniscule, but there's DC fast chargers all along the highways that take the edge off, and there are cars with far larger range anyways.
And yet, some of the biggest proponents of EVs live in frigid areas of Canada and the US. As it turns out, range loss is not really a huge deal for a lot of people, but being able to get in your car and drive without worrying about whether it will start at all is nice. No plugging in a block heater, no worry about fuel gelling, no warm up time. And you can pre-condition the interior so it is warm when you get in. With a modern EV you could lose 50% range and still have plenty for your daily commute. Even a fairly long commute.
Norway regularly sees -30C in winter and EVs account for like 99% of sales there, it made the news that in January only 7 ICE cars were sold in the entire country.
It's also a different country with a different culture, etc. Norwegians drive roughly 50% less than people in the US. There's probably a bunch of contributing factors, but the point is that reduced range is less of a problem if you drive less.
I'll be the first to say we need less range anxiety, and Norway is awesome. But we need to be careful comparing the US to Norway here.
Axed EV subsidization, openly called EVs -- and climate change -- a scam, and then made noises about cutting emissions standards, and aggressively pursued fossil fuel expansion?
That and threw tariffs on the auto makers parts and imports such that their businesses are under threat?
GM just axed the Bolt again. The only domestic affordable EV. Stellantis killed all of theirs, from what I hear. And Ford has pulled back as well.
> The US administration has basically told them to do so.
Any US automaker relying on Trump staying in office is playing with fire. Yes, you may see reduced or zero press releases and budgets for EV research being "reallocated" on paper so the toddler in chief doesn't get a public tantrum - but assuming there will be free and fair elections this year, it is highly, highly likely that Congress will be solid blue and reinstate a lot of what Trump has cut down, only this time as an actual law that is far harder to cancel than executive orders.
And everyone not hedging for this possibility will wreck their company's future.
There is no realistic path to a veto-proof majority for Democrats in the midterm elections. If there was, Trump would be impeached and removed before EVs were addressed.
Don't expect any movement on EV legislation unless and until Democrats take back the White House in 2028
I would prefer that when the dems dive back into EV subsidies, they fly them under the radar instead of using tax credits for buyers. Lots of people actually believe that their fossil fuel is not subsidized, so we need to use the same techniques to actually help manufacturers bring competitive EVs to market.
It would be better for governments to provide tax credits / subsidies to battery manufacturing facilities than it would be to directly subsidize consumers. The hope being the cheaper battery component cost gets passed onto consumers.
Vehicle sales subsidies frankly just end up rolled into the price as a markup.
The Canadian government here partially has the right idea in only subsidizing vehicles under a 50k CAD ($36k USD) price tier -- unless they're manufactured in Canada. But I don't think that barrier is low enough. Should be $40k or even less. Our subsidy also takes the form of a direct cash subsidy instead of a tax credit -- which is regressive and helps people less in lower income tiers who don't pay much in income taxes.
Sodium has greater density than lithium, while most other materials used in a battery have similar densities regardless if sodium or lithium is used, so if a Na-ion battery and a LFP battery have about the same mass and stored energy, it is likely that the sodium-ion battery has a smaller volume.
that doesn't check out, capacity depends on surface area, if the element that is on the surface is heavier then, all other things equal, the battery will be heavier for same kWh.
Sodium would need to be more efficient to be lighter, which it isn't
The maximum deliverable power depends on electrode area, through the maximum current density.
The capacity of storing energy does not depend at all on area, but only on the mass of sodium contained in the battery and on the efficiency of using it (i.e. between full discharge and full charge not 100% of the sodium or lithium is cycled between the 2 oxidation states, but a fraction, e.g. 90%).
Any battery has both an energy density and a power density, which are weakly correlated and the correlation may have opposite signs, i.e. for some batteries it may be possible to increase the power density if the energy density is lowered and vice-versa.
For a given stored energy in kWh, the required mass of sodium is several times greater than the corresponding mass of lithium, by a factor that is the product of the atomic mass ratio with the ratio between the battery voltages. The voltages are similar, with a slight advantage for sodium, so the required mass of sodium is about 3 times the corresponding mass of lithium.
If the complete batteries have about the same mass, that means that other components of the sodium-ion battery are smaller and/or lighter.
It is all about cost and efficiency... There is a classic 1913 electric vehicle that ran NiFe packs for many years, and were only replaced because the container rotted away. Sustainable storage costs real money, but has existed for over a century. =3
I have no idea about the characteristics of these new sodium-ion batteries, but there is a great likelihood that they auto-discharge much faster than LFP batteries.
This means that if you do not use the car for some time, you may need to recharge it before you can use it again. This may be a problem if the car is left far from a charger.
CATL's Naxtra cells apparently have a c rating of 5C. Which boils down to about 12 minutes for a full charge with the right charger. So, as fast or faster than LFP would be the answer here.
Dumb question but I’ve always wondered if we could make a giant reusable “hand warmer” type chemistry around the battery and use that to get it going in cold environments.
Looking into it more. Maybe something like supersaturated solution of sodium acetate (plus water) in a sealed pouch with a metal disc. Bending the disc triggers crystallization, releasing stored heat (around 130–140°F for 20–60 minutes). Boil them to reset.
So you could boil and reset them during charging and click them off if needed in cold weather.
One way I've seen of doing this is to include a PTC heater. It's a heating element that you feed DC. It has a positive coefficient of resistivity vs. temperature, so it'll asymptotically approach a temperature defined by the structure of the material. No PID controller required, it's just a sheet of material you include in the battery structure.
Granted, you have a minor bootstrapping issue wherein you need the battery to be warm before you use battery power, but at very low % of the battery's power capacity I suspect it's less of an issue.
This is awesome and I'm really happy to see this progress. Landing a new chemistry in a production car THIS YEAR is some crazy velocity, especially compared to where other Na-Ion batteries are in the development cycle elsewhere. Is anyone else even close to having a car on the road with their cells?
The reason this is so exciting for me personally is for stationary energy. Because the raw materials are so abundant and have good cold weather performance, both grid and home level energy storage costs should come down significantly as this is commercialized further.
EV fetishist? Is this some kind of reverse psychology thing, like accusing everyone else of having TDS? Does that even work on someone who isn't already afflicted?
Out the gate, sodium ion advantages are so significant that unless there is some surprise show-stopper it will likely become the dominant energy storage medium.
Crustal abundance up to 1000x that of lithium - pretty much every nation has effectively unlimited supply, it's no longer a barrier or a geographically limited resource like lithium.
No significant damage going down to 0V, can even be stored at 0V - much safer than lithium which gets excitable once out of its prefered voltage range.
Cold weather performance down to -30C - northern latitude users don't have as much range anxiety in the winter.
Basically, the only problem I see is that companies that have made significant long-term investments in lithium could take a big hit. Countries that banked on their lithium reserves as a key future resource for will have to adjust their strategy.
Lithium batteries will likely still have a place in the high performance realm but but for the majority of run-of-the-mill applications - everything from customer electronics to EVs to offgrid storage - it's hard to see how sodium-ion wouldn't quickly replace it.
Energy density matters a lot for many applications, including customer electroncs and EVs. Sodium ion is at a fundamental disadvantage (sodium is heavier than lithium).
I don't doubt that sodium ion has a place... but whether it takes over as the dominant battery type for portable applications strikes me as very dependent on the future of lithium extraction. It seems like a place that has a lot of room to grow more efficient and thus more competitive on cost.
No mention of degradation as a result of recharge cycles. So many of my electronic devices have had to be disposed of because the battery would no longer hold a charge. This is also a big factor in EVs and their loss of value over time.
It is impossible for sodium-ion batteries to reach the same energy density as the best lithium-ion batteries.
So lithium-ion batteries will never be replaced in smartphones or laptops by sodium-ion batteries.
But there are plenty of applications where the energy density of sodium-ion batteries is sufficient. Eventually sodium-ion batteries will be much cheaper and this is why they will replace lithium-ion batteries in all cheap cars and for most stationary energy storage (except when lower auto-discharge is desired).
That seems really out of proportion with the experience of others, you may want to get it checked out. Do you have an older model with resistive heat and no seat heaters?
My EV is absolutely terrible range wise at cold weather. It is EPA rated at 220miles of range. I only see that when the temperature is at or above 80F.
Most of the winter it tells me I can only do between 100 and 120 miles. It is definitely half the EPA range with climate controls disabled at 0F. (Ask me how I know).
I love driving it in the winter.
I don't have a pressing need to go long distances, so that is not a current concern. Not having to stand outside in the bitter cold to fuel up in absolutely awesome.
There are EVs on the market that do much, much better than mine in cool weather and I now know what to look for.
To really penetrate the midwest it will take a car that can realistically do a road trip to Florida from say Duluth, MN or Michigan's UP in the winter.
Because not only do folks in the midwest drive long distances without a second thought, they sometimes do it in the cold of winter so they can get a break from the snow.
So yes still getting 90% of the range at -40C does sound attractive.
That right there is a big problem to begin with. The headline EPA number only reflects reality if you have a mix of city and highway driving. The problem is that people only care about range when driving 75mph. I think the headline EPA number should reflect that reality.
This with 500-600 miles range means the end of ICE. 250 is still too little since that will realistically be closer to 150-160 if you’re consistently driving 74-80 mph.
Unfortunately sodium ion is less dense than lithium ion, so range is lower too.
Since it's also cheaper, it's likely that Na-ion will be adopted by cheaper city runabout type EVs, while premium long range EVs will continue using Li-ion.
I saw a CATL presentation where they were hyping a hybrid lithium-sodium pack. Their version of sodium ion could charge/discharge faster than LFP, and handle lower temperatures. The hybrid then gives you a nice combination of features. You get better density/range from LFP, but if you have to start in the cold, the sodium-ion can get you going, and then with active cooling you can heat the LFP using the waste heat from the sodium ion for the rest of the trip. Since the sodium ion charges faster, you can charge part of the overall pack really fast, so you can make a quick trip to the charger and add ~50%. If you live in a cold climate area it seems like a very good combination.
I suspect we will be finding this technology being used a fair bit in aerospace tech like satellites to compliment the onboard solar, given the low-temp operational capability.
Given the difficulty of radiating heat away I would have expected the opposite.
Especially considering the incentive to send up as little battery as possible, and the very predictable day/night cycle leading to the ability to precisely predict how small a battery you can get away with...
Nothing in the article really substantiates the headline (currently "The First Sodium-Ion Battery EV IS a Winter Range Monster").
The EV described in the article has a standardized range of 250 miles. This isn't a range monster in any condition. There is some gesturing that Sodium batteries don't require as much active heating in cold conditions. But nothing is quantified.
As usual with sci-tech broadly and batteries specifically: it's exciting that sodium batteries are coming to market; we can be optimistic that maybe in the future they will provide lots of range, or be less expensive, or maybe less flammable than today's lithium batteries. But the marketing hype is running miles ahead of reality.
That's a new one. How common are fires after accidents, and what fraction of those burn the car up while someone is trapped inside? I know people occasionally die in regular gasoline vehicles in this exact situation, so is it statistically a higher risk in EVs?
Unlike in traditional vehicles, most EVs have such a robust firewall between the battery and the passenger compartments you literally have 1+ minute to get out, compared to often seconds in a traditional vehicle.
And I've been following Polish firefighters reports about EV fires and they are very interesting - basically saying that in all recent cases of EV fires they were contained so quickly even the interior was largely undamaged - something that practically never happens with regular cars. Some of these have been in underground garages too, with difficulty of access - but nowadays they just know how to approach an EV fire and containment isn't a problem.
> Unlike LFP or nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) packs, it reportedly avoids severe winter range loss, retaining more than 90% of its range at -40 degrees C (-40 degrees F). Power delivery is also said to remain stable at temperatures as low as -50 degrees C (-58 degrees F).
"The Long-Range Version sets a new record for light commercial vehicles with a single-pack capacity of 253 kWh, achieving a maximum range of 800km."
That would be some 720 km at -40 C if the numbers are correct. I'm not well versed in this area and not sure if these batteries are comparable to those in personal vehicles, but the ones I've heard owners talk about have a reach at about half that if it's cold at all.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
I've seen that repeated a lot but I still can't buy sodium batteries cheaper than lifepo...
(The motorcycle is real, and has been out for years. This is just a battery upgrade.)
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/786388/verge-motorcycles-donut-la...
This is a big difference because there are all kinds of other factors besides energy capacity that can affect the efficiency of the whole system, and therefore affect range.
Most notably, air is about 28% denser at -40°C than at 25°C, so drag is about 28% higher. So you would expect roughly 28% less range at high speeds even if the battery has no capacity loss whatsoever.
As someone else mentioned, climate control also consumes a lot more power when it has to maintain a larger temperature difference between inside and outside.
[1]: https://www.catl.com/en/news/6720.html
With my gas car, I haven't noticed 30% worse fuel consumption at –30°C compared to +30°C [0]. To be fair, I haven't closely measured the fuel consumption at different temperatures, but I probably would have noticed such a big difference. This is just anecdotal of course, so your values may actually be correct.
[0]: It does occasionally get down to –40°C here, but car won't usually start then, so I've slightly shifted your temperature range to the values where I've driven most.
But TBF same factors affect ICE cars
I'd add though that rolling resistance tends to be higher, on average, in winter too. When there's often a bit of snow on the roads... Less so on high speed highways admittedly.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l2cq6b/comment/...
Even at 30kmph it's already the majority of the resistance and it scales exponentially with speed so you can imagine how much it matters.
That's not exponential because the speed (v) is not in the exponent. In fact, it's quadratic.
Corollaries: The power required to push the car at speed v will be proportional to Fv ~ v^3. The gas spent over time t ~ energy spent ~ power time ~ v^3 * time.
Those two things very different.
As long as you have a heat pump harvesting the waste heat to keep the battery up to temp.
But might be significant on short drives, 10kW for the first 3 km is massive.
https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/fuel-economy-cold-weather
At -40F (-40C), it's generally good practice to just stay inside and not drive at all...
Is that actually true once the engine has reached operating temperature?
> Fuel economy tests show that, in city driving, a conventional gasoline car's gas mileage is roughly 15% lower at 20°F than it would be at 77°F. It can drop as much as 24% for short (3- to 4-mile) trips.
Not sure the engine ever reached "operating temperature" on that drive.
I had a car that developed a stuck-open thermostat and did the cardboard trick to get by until I could replace the faulty part.
1) winter blend fuels have less energy per volume, that doesn't make your engine any less efficient by energy but it does by volume of gas
2) lots of temporary cold effects: fuel vaporization, thick lubricants, etc. these things become less of a problem as the engine warms up but some energy is still lost on long drives
3) air resistance: all aerodynamic forces are linearly proportional with air density. At a constant pressure there's about a 15% difference in air density between the hottest and coldest places you can drive (and thus 15% less drag on a hot summer day than a cold winter day). aerodynamic forces are proportional to the square of your velocity and they become the largest resistive force around 50mph -- so at highway speeds you're losing efficiency because you have to push more air out of the way
4) energy used to maintain temperature: this is hard to calculate but some engine power is lost because the energy is used heating up the engine block and lost to the environment
5) the Thermodynamics 101 engine efficiency goes UP with increased temperature, but it's got a lot of real world effects to compete with, no spherical cows and all
'22 Ford Escape hybrid
The remaining miles thing shows less than that on a full tank, but I've been pretty consistently getting upper-600s between fill-ups.
I suppose it would probably be less if I went on the interstate more.
Assuming a 1000km range is a very strange thing to do, as it's a fringe feature that almost no one needs or wants! Recall that "almost no one" means that there's still some, an existence of a handful of people on HN is quite consistent with "almost none."
Which I would expect to typically find something that's, um, fairly typical on characteristics I wasn't selecting on.
It has an 18.8 gallon fuel capacity (https://www.volvocars.com/lb/support/car/xc60/article/dfc6f0...)
That’s a max range of 470 miles. You would need much greater fuel efficiency above 34 mpg to get to 650 miles on an 18.8 gallon tank.
Also you are quoting a value for the B5, which is not what I have, mine is a T8(and before you ask - no, I didn't have any opportunity to charge it anywhere on the way).
AFAIK most EVs already use heat pumps today, so the future happens whenever sodium batteries become mainstream.
Nope, the Mach E and Lightning both have a heat pump (well, just the Mach E now, I suppose, since the Lightning is out of production).
But if they add buttons back as planned, I might be willing to try a new id.4 in 5-10 years.
https://electrek.co/2026/02/05/first-sodium-ion-battery-ev-d...
Since the Lithium battery prices dropped, there are many Sodium battery companies simply abandoning the research or shuttering. Not a good sign when smart people jump ship.
The Na cells also have lower energy-density, and currently fewer viable charge cycles. One can still buy evaluation samples, but it takes time to figure out if the technology will make economic sense.
Best regards =3
There could be other reasons. Maybe they just cannot compete with CATL.
[0] https://cdn.motor1.com/images/custom/worlds-first-mass-produ...
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/719013/2024-tesla-model3-epa-rang...
https://carnewschina.com/2026/01/22/catl-unveils-worlds-firs...
I assume it's just that its internal resistance rises when it's cold, but I might be wrong.
You can read about EIS here: https://www.gamry.com/application-notes/EIS/basics-of-electr...
Yes. It's mostly wasted as heat inside the battery. I think there's also a temperature relationship to open-circuit voltage? But the predominate effect is from elevated internal resistance.
OTOH, there are seemingly more lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery ev options now - rivian now uses LFP, Ford mustang mach-e has had a LFP variant since fall 2023 (and should have other models using LFP in 2027), I think the 2026 chevy bolt uses LFP, etc.
But yeah, if you have a garage with a charger and you never exceed your winter range then it’s fine, per my previous comment.
> most are within 100 miles of a fast DC charger
That's not good enough. No one can spend 3-4 hours to drive 200 miles round trip, or even 100 miles, to charge quickly.
There needs to be a good solution for the 33% of households that don't have access to EV charging as part of their home. Until it becomes really plentiful, part of the solution may involve fast charging that only the 33% can use or that favors the 33%; people who can charge overnight at home should charge overnight at home.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1268-dece...
Agreed. However, the number of people who live 100+ miles from a fast charger rounds to zero. Something like 85-90% of the US population lives within a metro area, and even in the least "EV friendly" states probably has a fast charger within 10-20 miles at most.
Can you charge at home? Do so. Can you charge at work? Do so. Can you charge at a grocery store or other location your task will take longer than the charging? Do so. This works for most Americans, while charging infrastructure continues to be rapidly deployed. The gaps will be filled, how fast is a function of will and investment.
US Gains 11,300 Ultra-Fast Chargers in Bet to Lure More EV Drivers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46815932 - January 2026 (11 comments)
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=walmart+ev
https://supercharge.info/map
https://www.plugshare.com/
I'll be the first to say we need less range anxiety, and Norway is awesome. But we need to be careful comparing the US to Norway here.
The US administration has basically told them to do so.
So don't expect any innovation on this front from the middle of the North American continent. It's being actively sabotaged.
That and threw tariffs on the auto makers parts and imports such that their businesses are under threat?
GM just axed the Bolt again. The only domestic affordable EV. Stellantis killed all of theirs, from what I hear. And Ford has pulled back as well.
Any US automaker relying on Trump staying in office is playing with fire. Yes, you may see reduced or zero press releases and budgets for EV research being "reallocated" on paper so the toddler in chief doesn't get a public tantrum - but assuming there will be free and fair elections this year, it is highly, highly likely that Congress will be solid blue and reinstate a lot of what Trump has cut down, only this time as an actual law that is far harder to cancel than executive orders.
And everyone not hedging for this possibility will wreck their company's future.
Don't expect any movement on EV legislation unless and until Democrats take back the White House in 2028
Vehicle sales subsidies frankly just end up rolled into the price as a markup.
The Canadian government here partially has the right idea in only subsidizing vehicles under a 50k CAD ($36k USD) price tier -- unless they're manufactured in Canada. But I don't think that barrier is low enough. Should be $40k or even less. Our subsidy also takes the form of a direct cash subsidy instead of a tax credit -- which is regressive and helps people less in lower income tiers who don't pay much in income taxes.
interested in hot desert weather performance which often gets lost in the averages.
Sodium would need to be more efficient to be lighter, which it isn't
The capacity of storing energy does not depend at all on area, but only on the mass of sodium contained in the battery and on the efficiency of using it (i.e. between full discharge and full charge not 100% of the sodium or lithium is cycled between the 2 oxidation states, but a fraction, e.g. 90%).
Any battery has both an energy density and a power density, which are weakly correlated and the correlation may have opposite signs, i.e. for some batteries it may be possible to increase the power density if the energy density is lowered and vice-versa.
For a given stored energy in kWh, the required mass of sodium is several times greater than the corresponding mass of lithium, by a factor that is the product of the atomic mass ratio with the ratio between the battery voltages. The voltages are similar, with a slight advantage for sodium, so the required mass of sodium is about 3 times the corresponding mass of lithium.
If the complete batteries have about the same mass, that means that other components of the sodium-ion battery are smaller and/or lighter.
Na will be big in grid storage, it's a perfect fit.
https://www.veva.ca/1913detroitelectric
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery
This means that if you do not use the car for some time, you may need to recharge it before you can use it again. This may be a problem if the car is left far from a charger.
Otherwise I agree with what you said.
Looking into it more. Maybe something like supersaturated solution of sodium acetate (plus water) in a sealed pouch with a metal disc. Bending the disc triggers crystallization, releasing stored heat (around 130–140°F for 20–60 minutes). Boil them to reset.
So you could boil and reset them during charging and click them off if needed in cold weather.
Granted, you have a minor bootstrapping issue wherein you need the battery to be warm before you use battery power, but at very low % of the battery's power capacity I suspect it's less of an issue.
The reason this is so exciting for me personally is for stationary energy. Because the raw materials are so abundant and have good cold weather performance, both grid and home level energy storage costs should come down significantly as this is commercialized further.
Crustal abundance up to 1000x that of lithium - pretty much every nation has effectively unlimited supply, it's no longer a barrier or a geographically limited resource like lithium.
No significant damage going down to 0V, can even be stored at 0V - much safer than lithium which gets excitable once out of its prefered voltage range.
Cold weather performance down to -30C - northern latitude users don't have as much range anxiety in the winter.
Basically, the only problem I see is that companies that have made significant long-term investments in lithium could take a big hit. Countries that banked on their lithium reserves as a key future resource for will have to adjust their strategy.
Lithium batteries will likely still have a place in the high performance realm but but for the majority of run-of-the-mill applications - everything from customer electronics to EVs to offgrid storage - it's hard to see how sodium-ion wouldn't quickly replace it.
I don't doubt that sodium ion has a place... but whether it takes over as the dominant battery type for portable applications strikes me as very dependent on the future of lithium extraction. It seems like a place that has a lot of room to grow more efficient and thus more competitive on cost.
https://battery-news.de/en/2026/01/26/catl-presents-sodium-i...
So lithium-ion batteries will never be replaced in smartphones or laptops by sodium-ion batteries.
But there are plenty of applications where the energy density of sodium-ion batteries is sufficient. Eventually sodium-ion batteries will be much cheaper and this is why they will replace lithium-ion batteries in all cheap cars and for most stationary energy storage (except when lower auto-discharge is desired).
Most of the winter it tells me I can only do between 100 and 120 miles. It is definitely half the EPA range with climate controls disabled at 0F. (Ask me how I know).
I love driving it in the winter. I don't have a pressing need to go long distances, so that is not a current concern. Not having to stand outside in the bitter cold to fuel up in absolutely awesome.
There are EVs on the market that do much, much better than mine in cool weather and I now know what to look for.
To really penetrate the midwest it will take a car that can realistically do a road trip to Florida from say Duluth, MN or Michigan's UP in the winter.
Because not only do folks in the midwest drive long distances without a second thought, they sometimes do it in the cold of winter so they can get a break from the snow.
So yes still getting 90% of the range at -40C does sound attractive.
That right there is a big problem to begin with. The headline EPA number only reflects reality if you have a mix of city and highway driving. The problem is that people only care about range when driving 75mph. I think the headline EPA number should reflect that reality.
Since it's also cheaper, it's likely that Na-ion will be adopted by cheaper city runabout type EVs, while premium long range EVs will continue using Li-ion.
Given the difficulty of radiating heat away I would have expected the opposite.
Especially considering the incentive to send up as little battery as possible, and the very predictable day/night cycle leading to the ability to precisely predict how small a battery you can get away with...
The EV described in the article has a standardized range of 250 miles. This isn't a range monster in any condition. There is some gesturing that Sodium batteries don't require as much active heating in cold conditions. But nothing is quantified.
As usual with sci-tech broadly and batteries specifically: it's exciting that sodium batteries are coming to market; we can be optimistic that maybe in the future they will provide lots of range, or be less expensive, or maybe less flammable than today's lithium batteries. But the marketing hype is running miles ahead of reality.
If we put aside the politics, what are the actual statistics behind lithium battery fires today? And don't LFP's have negligible fire risk?
I feel like my gasser F250 had a higher risk of spontaneously combusting.
No one burned to death inside a Tesla while driving normally. It's always following a crash.
And I've been following Polish firefighters reports about EV fires and they are very interesting - basically saying that in all recent cases of EV fires they were contained so quickly even the interior was largely undamaged - something that practically never happens with regular cars. Some of these have been in underground garages too, with difficulty of access - but nowadays they just know how to approach an EV fire and containment isn't a problem.
That is exactly the substance of the headline.
"The Long-Range Version sets a new record for light commercial vehicles with a single-pack capacity of 253 kWh, achieving a maximum range of 800km."
That would be some 720 km at -40 C if the numbers are correct. I'm not well versed in this area and not sure if these batteries are comparable to those in personal vehicles, but the ones I've heard owners talk about have a reach at about half that if it's cold at all.
The marketing hype is the true range monster