Yeah I noticed that, no 3rd party tests or easily searchable datasheets for them yet so I wonder how it compares to the Sanyo cells, probably has better discharge properties though considering most Sanyo cells are budget cells with meh performance and high discharge LG cells are generally pretty good. Maybe I can squeeze an amp or two more out of them into a Storm of Ra, at least until the 30Ts come out. Not that there is any reason to do that, OK yeah I may have a problem with building lights that push high discharge battery tech, but all these new cells have gotten me excited to see what crazy pocket nukes can be built, pushing hand warmers that also happen to emit light to the limit!
Waited more than 3 weeks for FT to ship the INR21700-48G. So I cancelled the buy.
Then I found it in a small brick-and-mortar vape shop in Hilversum, 12 ml from home.
And here it is, and going into the Warsun whose body I reamed to 21.4mm.
Probably economy of scale. To get “volume pricing” on 1M units, a car that takes 500 more-or-less standard cells means getting there in 2,000 cars, whereas with a car that takes, say, 5 Übercells, you’d need to sell 200,000 cars.
(Dunno what Apple cells you’re referring to, so have to use my imagination…)
It is not merely a matter of pushing all the empty space out. That would be nice if it is only a backup storage unit.
It has to be charged and discharged often. That involves (a lot of) heat. So there has to be space, for cooling.
The “old” packs are air-cooled, The newest ones are liquid cooled.
I’m not very familiar with Apple’s electric car, but I haven’t seen anything indicating they’ll be using one big cell instead of many cells like everyone else.
I have had several macbook pro batteries in my hand and also the newer, glued-in variant. The ones I have seen dissected have multiple cells (battery packs) inside the battery. I am not referring to the new, split battery cell design in general, but the content inside the battery. The charge controller is typically on the motherboard and there is another chip on or near the connector where all the temp sensors are (Macbooks behave differently depending on whether battery is plugged in or not).
One of my older Macbook Pros had a “pregnant” battery (bulged out/non-charging) and actually fell apart. There were 3 packs inside, glued together with what I believe was Kapton tape. The individual packs looked like LiPo packs.
edit: the iPhone X battery also seems to have multiple cells
From an engineering standpoint it would be easier to protect future design changes with a flexible, multi-cell battery rather than a 1-battery pack that would have to be re-designed as well. plus all the efficiency/cooling/security aspects mentioned earlier. Imagine a huge, single cell blowing during a crash vs. very few cells in a multi-cell pack.