Here is The 2021 battery technology roadmap from the Journal of Applied Physics.
A roadmap presents an overview of the current state of various kinds of batteries, such as the Li/Na/Zn/Al/K-ion battery, Li–S battery, Li–O2 battery, and flow battery.
Above- Ragone plot illustrating the performances of specific power vs specific energy for different electrical energy-storage technologies. Times shown in the plot are the discharge time, obtained by dividing the energy density by the power density.
SOURCES – Journal of Applied Physics
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.cmo
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Sadly nobody is pursing efforts in civil solar flare/EMP protection to an extent to justify a small fleet of nearly pure analog dieselpunk style hardware. Are demilitarized hummers which can move still EMP protected, or is that stripped out as part of the demilitarization work?
Wait, as in BEV only, or PHEV is sorta okay for parts of the fleet?
The recent US postal service local delivery truck replacement contract was a bit of a debacle in that it wasn't at least mostly PHEV with some play in the range extender component (gas, diesel, CNG, hydrogen for a fuel cell) using a common swappable generator pack module which could be replaced by yet another battery module as a build option to make a BEV.
And Biden is ordering that the entire federal vehical fleet go electric…
I have said for a while that emergency vehicles need to stay diesel, at least for now. You can offset any carbon emission worries by using biodiesel, so that's no problem.
If there's an EMP, older diesel engines will be unaffected. Make these vehicles diesel.
Further, use onboard computers to maintain engine efficiency, but have the computers make adjustments mechanically. Then if an EMP fries out all the computer parts, the vehicles will still run. They will even run efficiently, at least for a few months. Then if/when we get the country back up and running, we replace all the fried computer components.
Well, if nothing else, the government would nominally have a mandate to use hybrid electric vehicles at least to be off-grid capable as part of disaster response. So that means police/fire/ambulance at a minimum, and a certain percentage of general government fleet vehicles (particular those operating in remote regions far from a charger).
You're not going to have a reasonable mobile fast charger system that is affordable for most towns as part of disaster response, barring maybe large cities maybe, but then you'd effectively have a centralized recharge issue since your only fast charger is a semi trailer with a jet turbine generator. Disasters are by their nature decentralized, so having a refueling system that can be done ad hoc, from tanker trucks down to jerry cans, is a serious concern.
Everybody else, the incentives are pushing towards pure electric. Whether that works out depends to an extent on how V2G grid balancing and load management evolves in my opinion.
Looking at that first chart, could you make a hybrid L-Ion/L-Air BEV?
Maybe some of the problems of using air for the latter (e.g. water vapor and other contaminants) could be avoided by putting in a tank for liquid oxygen that you only have to fill when you take a long trip. L-Air also doesn't charge as efficiently, but that seems less critical if you only use it for occasional long trips.
Give it ~100 miles of L-Ion range for driving around town and normal commutes. Then maybe ~1000 miles of Lithium-Air range (probably about 2x the L-Ion battery weight?). But only give it LOX capacity for about 500 miles, to keep LOX weight down while still allowing 'topping off' the LOX to drive farther in a day. With a total of 1100miles of range you'd usually only have to charge the L-Air battery overnight, even if you drove fast and got less than the nominal range.
Given its lower power density, the L-Air battery would just keep topping up the L-Ion battery toward around 70% as you drive and any time you stop it could keep doing so.
LOX is pretty cheap in volume. With a well insulated tank, if you're driving continuously, the boil-off losses should be very small, since you could be using the excess pressure before it built up to the safety limit where it has to blow off gas.
Based on that chart, it appears that the ICE will be impossible to make obsolete, as it dominates in both energy and power density. And yet, everyone is switching to electric cars.
That chart doesn't tell a complete story. There must be something important missing.
Energy density is good enough. What we need to improve is cost and recharge time.
There is something odd about that plot.
The combustion engine is placed where the run time is less than a minute, but any car will run for several hours on a full tank of fuel.
Is that something silly like how long the engine will run on just the fuel in the fuel line?