ColdFusion - Uber's Electric Flying Taxis | REVOLUTIONARY Battery Advances!

Starting point is 00:00:00 You are watching Cold Fusion TV. Hi, welcome to another Cold Fusion video. Uber, it's a company that's known for its disruption of the taxi industry. Their ride-sharing service made getting from place to place cheaper and easier. Now, the company is taking to the skies. In this video, we'll take a look at what's happening. It just might surprise you. Since the Ford Fiverr, an aircraft that was meant to be the Model T of the Scy of the Ski.

Starting point is 00:00:32 skies, it's widely been a dream to have mass-produced personal aircraft. Fast forward to the late 2010s and it seems like electrical personal aircraft are picking up steam. Electrical vertical take-off and landing aircraft or V-Tol aircraft for short are the perfect design for personal air taxis. E-V-toles are quiet, have no direct emissions and are relatively cheap, all of which are properties that helicopters don't share. On previous episodes on this channel, we've already seen the E-Hung-184 a Chinese semi-autonomous personal aircraft which is already starting flights in Dubai. We've also seen a scale-modelled test flight by the German company, Lilium. It seems that Uber doesn't want to miss out on this new emerging industry.

Starting point is 00:01:16 In October of last year, the company released a 98-page white paper. In the paper, they detailed the vision of being able to complete the distance of a two-hour drive in 15 minutes by air. According to studies, in cities such as Los Angeles and Sydney, residents spend seven whole working weeks each year commuting. In Mumbai in India, the average working commute is 90 minutes. Uber's solution is what they're calling on-demand aviation. They want to push for infrastructure that allows for an urban V-TOL network, claiming that this infrastructure will be significantly cheaper than building new roads. Very recently, technology advances have made it

Starting point is 00:01:56 practical to build a new class of VTOL aircraft. The white paper goes on to say that in order to make this a successful market, they must first overcome some barriers. These include but aren't limited to, the certification process, that is, getting a license to fly, battery technology, a revamping of the urban air traffic control system, vehicle efficiency, performance and reliability, and safety. In April of this year, Uber had their first conference. It was an array of experts working on the cutting edge of battery technology, aircraft manufacturing, charging technology, and also featured regulatory bodies and think tanks. They came together to cross-pollinate ideas. They pretty much addressed all of the problems in the white paper. I watched the stream event

Starting point is 00:02:40 online and I was actually surprised at a couple of things that I saw. It actually turns out that this time the battery technology as of this year now exists to make this a reality. We'll get to that bit later but before we get into the juicy details here's a bit from Bloomberg with an interview with Francois Chappard. Uber said it would like to see flying vehicles being demoed in 2020. Is this a reality? How quickly will you actually start to see Uber using these sorts of flying vehicles as taxis? So yeah, I think it's going to be a reality. It's going to happen much quicker than what we thought even a year ago because there's a couple of elements that are ready now. We look at the battery and battery they have the right density,

Starting point is 00:03:24 the right energy storage, so battery are okay, the supercharger they are ready to. So for small and short haul you're going to be able to refuel or recharge your vehicle in less than five minutes. What I really think is that we're going to see these first flying cars or at least new mode of transespation doing their first test flight by next year. That's for sure. Okay, so let's break all of this down. Uber is calling this new infrastructure the Uber Elevate Network. The point of the conference was to create new innovative aircraft that can revolutionize air transit. and package delivery. The company wants a flight range of about 25 to 60 miles or 40 to 100

Starting point is 00:04:05 kilometres and wants to carry about 2 to 5 passengers. They aim to start flights in Texas and Dubai in the year 2020. Some of the engineering teams getting behind the project come from companies such as Bell Helicopter Airbus which is also working on an air traffic control system called Skyways and also Pippestrel the Slovenian electric light plane manufacturer that was featured on this channel a couple of weeks ago. Also there was the young German team, Lillium, and also a company called Aurora. As it turns out, Uber decided to use Aurora as its primary partner. Aurora's immediate plan was to build an autonomous aircraft with a safety backup pilot and room for two passengers or 220 kilograms of luggage. The top speed

Starting point is 00:04:49 will be 200 kilometres an hour and the travel distance will be 40 kilometres. The design One looks rather clunky because they wanted the simplest design possible, no tilt rotors, direct drive motors only, and the whole thing has to be built on existing tech. They've already actually achieved a quarter-scale model test flight and although it looks small, it's about two by two meters in size. This aircraft is loosely based on the XV 24A X plane, an aircraft that's being developed for the US Department of Defense. The company has also partnered with NASA and DARPA.

Starting point is 00:05:21 Okay, so let's talk about batteries. Absolutely none of this would make any sense if the battery tech wasn't there. Well, what may be surprising is that there's actually been a lot of progress made in the past year due to the growing acceptance that electric cars are on the horizon. Battery suppliers and others that are in the battery industry are forced to push the limits of their technology in the hope that they can be a player in this emerging market. David Baxter, co-founder and vice president and the man in charge of hardware engineering at the company called Chargeport, gave a presentation on the current technology that they have.

Starting point is 00:05:54 They have a charging station that can charge batteries from 0 to 25% in 5 minutes and 25% to 90% in 15 minutes. The secret that enables them to do all of this is the liquid cooling in their charging cable. ChargePoint states that they already have the existing technology in their product called the Express Charge, which was released in early 2017. Originally designed for electric cars, the charger can output 400 kilowatts and the modules that make up the station have 96% efficiency and are capable of pushing out a whopping 1,250 amps at a thousand volts. We're here with charge points Pasquale Romano.

Starting point is 00:06:33 Talk about the new liquid cooled CCS combo charger. Yeah, so the goal for this is to enable a consumer to be able to dispense about as much energy as it takes to run a Costco without noticing it. So what we did here is we used a gasoline hose as the benchmark because everyone knows how to use that. Liquid-cooled proprietary technology that gets a 400 kilowatt capable connector to be small, light, flexible, easy to manipulate into your car. That is capable of 400 amps and 1,000 volts. Okay.

Starting point is 00:07:14 The company states that their cooling technology can actually call their cooling technology can actually cool aircraft batteries itself, reducing energy use. And in addition to this, the system is also highly scalable. Nick Scherstuyak, chief technology officer at G batteries, states that since its introduction in 1991, lithium iron batteries have actually been improving every year. But to make EVTol feasible, a power to weight ratio of 300 watt hours per kilogram and a cost of $400 per kilowatt hour is needed. But in mass production, the most you can get is about 150,000. watt hours per kilogram and that's happening by Tesla. For comparison a Tesla model S is about 130 watt hours per kilogram and a Nissan leaf about 80 watt hours per kilogram. And the second goal of

Starting point is 00:08:04 $400 per kilowatt hour has already been achieved. The real problem is that the charging rate and the life cycles aren't up to scratch for these high energy density batteries. Nick states that the reason for this is that the protocol for charging batteries has remained unchanged for 100 years. It's completely unoptimized. Nick likens the moving lithium ions to a packed freeway that's densely populated and uncontrolled yet people want to move fast. The pile-ups and crashes that inevitably happen are pretty much the same as when lithium ions create irreversible chemical reactions. In other words a loss of battery cycle life. A new technology offered by G batteries called active battery management

Starting point is 00:08:43 systems use a special algorithm to tackle this problem. On a 3,000 milliamph hour battery, not unlike something that you you'll find in your regular smartphone, they were getting, get this, a zero to 50% charge in five minutes while more than doubling the long-term battery life. In more tests, even outside the lab, they saw a 600% improvement in the charging rate and a two to 10 times improvement in long-term battery life. These tests were done on real-world batteries in products or batteries that you can pick up at the store. So it looks like this algorithm really seems to work and there's hard data to back it up. I'll leave a link in

Starting point is 00:09:21 description to the full torque so you can look and see for yourself. So how does it work? Well without going into too much detail, the algorithm stops the loss of cyclable lithium in the anode of the battery. There was a couple of other talks on battery technology, but another one that I found interesting was solid energy, a company formed three years ago. They're claiming the lightest rechargeable batteries ever made with a density at half the size compared to comparable batteries.

Starting point is 00:09:47 So electric aviation simply will not be possible with a current battery technology. If Uber Elevate is going to succeed, we need an entirely new battery. We need a paradigm shift in terms of how we approach batteries. And today I want to talk about how we solve these challenges and also how solid energy can enable the future of electric aviation. The innovation is something that they're calling lithium metal. It involves a liquid solvent in a salt electrolyte, and it seems like their new battery technology is already working pretty well in industry situations. And the most exciting part, the most exciting part, part of my job is to see the exciting feedback from customers that have tested Hermes.

Starting point is 00:10:26 This is data from an aerospace company. They've been working on this project for about 10 years, and so far they've been just making baby steps because of battery limitations. They try lithium sulfur, they try silicon lithium ion, but they're just not ideal. Then they tried our Hermes, and right away, they start breaking all kinds of world records. And right now their product is commercially available. they tell us that we are time travelers from the future to help them. And I believe the same thing will happen for the EVTOL applications.

Starting point is 00:11:00 I think it's important that as a battery company that we stop playing with fancy science and focus on real-world results. The state of empty promises and fake news in the battery industry must stop. So in conclusion, with the major hurdle of batteries coming close to being overcome, It seems like Uber's vision of a personal air taxi network could actually become a reality. Whether this all happens or not still remains to be seen, but I'm cautiously optimistic about all of this. If nothing else, the push for stronger battery technology could trickle down to consumer devices

Starting point is 00:11:33 benefiting us all. On a side note, the personal aircraft industry actually has a close personal tie to me. A company that I'm working at, Electro Aero, is producing electric ducted fans for sustainable aviation. The key goal for our company is propulsion systems that are efficient while having a compact footprint. So seeing all of these advances being pushed under the umbrella of Uber is actually really interesting to me. If you want to check out what my company is doing, I'll leave a link below in the description. We've already got contracts with large aerospace companies and have been making

Starting point is 00:12:05 developments in partnership with NASA. So some very interesting times indeed. Anyway, thanks for watching this video. This has been to go-go. You're watching Cold Fusion. If you did like the video, give it a thumbs up if you need to the channel feel free to subscribe and I'll see you again soon for the next video. Cheers guys have a good one.

ColdFusion - Uber's Electric Flying Taxis | REVOLUTIONARY Battery Advances!

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.