It’s been sampling for a while but here’s a bit of news…
At 400W (non-continuous!) and 25A charging the cycle life will be short but sometimes performance is more important. 
I don’t yet know when I’ll have cells in for testing.
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Before the show, Molicel surprised the automotive market when they launched the INR-21700-P45B one and half years ago.
Based on when Molicel launched the P45B vs when they became generally available to us, how long do you think it will be for P50B to be generally available?
Soooo hard to say. It depends a lot on how many of the samples are left floating around. Those will probably be available before Summer, perhaps a lot sooner if full production starts soon. The retail vendors will each get some sample cells and that will be it for a while.
Getting regularly-shipped full production cells could take until Autumn or later but I’m hoping I’m wrong.
Too many variables to even guess at any of this actually…just winging it here.
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Four of them showed up today for testing…
Tentative datasheet specs are 4850mAh min/5000mAh typ, 60A non-continuous discharge, 25A charge (low cycle life running it this hard).
Production is rumored to start by the end of the year but hopefully, like the P42A and P45B, sample cells will be available much sooner than that. I am sure they will be priced pretty high though until production begins and a lot more of them are available.
My Patreon supporters will see the test results later this week but I’ll eventually be making the results public.
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So quite far off from 400w discharge?
Not at all.
400W wasn’t a rating. It’s just a capability with no regard for voltage sag or cycle life.
Basically, E-One Moli says you can run it for plenty of cycles at 60A (staying below 80°C) and get a reasonable number of cycles at a decent voltage level under load. But if you run it at 400W you’ll have huge voltage sag and might only get ten cycles (or some other low number, just guessing here) before the cell’s accelerated aging starts zapping its performance.
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I’ve noticed the P30B (production version) is starting to hit the street. Now my question is, how often, if ever, do you see differences in performance between the Moli pre-production samples and the production samples?
In the case of the P30B I’m wondering if anything has changed … With respect to the P50B, is it just a replacement for the P45B? Or M50A? Or Both?
I’ve often seen small differences, a couple percent in voltage under load and DC IR, but that’s about it.
E-One Moli can’t lower performance of the production cells versus the samples. But they can tweak things that could make the production cells look worse to us. For example, the DC IR might go up a percent or two and cause more voltage sag. We would hate this. But that might have happened because the cycle life of the cell was improved and this might be a higher priority for Moli’s big customers.
We’d never know that the cell had improvements made because cycle life testing is so rarely done by the various hobbyist communities.
I always retest Moli’s once the production cells have been out for a while but I won’t be doing that until Summer for the P30B (to make sure all samples are gone). If anything has changed though it will be small and will be an improvement in one or more areas.
The Moli web site shows the P30B, P45B, and P50B for their power cells. Others will probably be available for a while but it seems like those three will be the flagship cells.
The M50A is an energy cell, fundamentally different from the P50B and targets different markets at a lower price point. I expect the M50A to remain in the lineup until a dedicated replacement for it is developed (perhaps a 6Ah Molicel?).
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Thanks for joining the gang, ZEUS-FL!
