Last Thursday, the author was tricked by his own car.
I thought it was an ordinary working day, but when I hurried downstairs with Bao Xing in hand early in the morning, I suddenly found that the remote control key was invalid. After
used the emergency key to open the door and enter, he found that it could no longer start normally. It seems that it is not the key that is failing.
"The battery is over..."
You don't even need to send it for testing. This is something you can understand with common sense.
However, the subsequent maintenance was not very pleasant.
contacted the 4S store and asked to replace the battery. Not only did the other party give a four-digit price, but additional charges were required for door-to-door service. When questioning the price of accessories, the store told me that "the battery with the automatic start-stop function is the same price" and "the price is not set by our store."
The author is not driving a luxury car, just an ordinary A-class family car. The asking price for a 12V lead-acid battery is over a thousand, which is of course unacceptable.
In desperation, he found a matching battery on Taobao and offered a door-to-door trade-in service, which cost him a total of 630 yuan. Of course, the 4S store also emphasized to me on the phone in advance that we would not guarantee the automatic start-stop failure due to third-party accessories.
Vehicle-mounted lead-acid battery was first installed in a car in 1905 and was responsible for powering car lights. Beginning in 1914, 12V batteries were used to drive the engine flywheel to rotate to achieve electronic ignition of vehicles.
Since electronic ignition is far more convenient than a crank handle, this function has completely established the status of this component in automobiles.
The Cadillac Model 30, which began mass production in 1914, was nicknamed the "crankless car". Since then, electronic ignition has become standard equipment on vehicles. The vehicle-mounted lead-acid battery has also become one of the standard components of vehicles from this time
In the 107 years since then, although the various subsystems of the car have undergone earth-shaking changes, this battery alone has not changed in terms of structure or shape. Too big of a change. Comparable to the "living fossil" on the car.
However, the shortcomings of lead-acid batteries are also obvious. The first is the issue of life.
Although some companies claim in publicity that the life of their brand's 12V car lead-acid batteries can reach "7 years," in reality almost all car owners understand that the best life of car batteries is about 4 to 5 years. In reality, Not a few of them were scrapped in the past three years.
After all, no matter how much the manufacturer promotes, the cycle life of about 300 times is there. In the final analysis, the problem of irreversible vulcanization is a problem that the entire industry has struggled to solve for hundreds of years.
The vulcanization problem can be called the "terminator" of the battery and is the root cause of the low cycle number of lead-acid batteries.
The life problem is more obvious in various models with automatic start and stop functions, as the author's car is a typical example For example, it is usually scrapped in 2 to 3 years, which is normal. And there may be no warning when things go bad.
Then, there is the issue of contamination.
Lead-acid batteries, as the name suggests, contain a large amount of heavy metal lead and acidic substances. Especially lead, lead and its compounds seep into the environment during production or recycling. Once they enter the human body, they may cause harm to multiple systems such as nerves, hematopoiesis, digestion, kidneys, cardiovascular and endocrine systems, and even cause severe lead poisoning.
Regardless of production or scrapping, battery pollution is very alarming
In the production process of batteries, waste smoke, waste dust, waste water and other forms of pollution are present throughout the production process, especially lead powder manufacturing-grid casting-pole plate manufacturing- The plate formation process is subject to the existing technology, which will inevitably produce a large amount of acidic lead-containing sewage, lead dust, lead slag, lead smoke, and acid mist. The plate formation is still the process that consumes the most power, and the scrap rate of slicing and brushing is High, the process repetition rate is high, and the pollution caused is large.
In 2013, a lead pollution incident broke out at the production base of a well-known domestic lead-acid battery manufacturing giant in Shuyang, Suqian City, causing children in villages around the factory to have blood lead concentrations that seriously exceeded the standard and reached the level of lead poisoning. CCTV's "Economic Half Hour" program reported the incident in depth.
Children are our future. In order for this future to thrive, pollution should be blocked at the source
Since the 1990s, there have been countless lead pollution incidents caused by the domestic lead-acid battery industry, and a considerable number of them involve the production and recycling industry of lead-acid batteries. .
Due to various shortcomings and the excellent performance of the new generation of lithium batteries, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has included automotive lead-acid batteries in the catalog of backward production capacity that needs to be eliminated as early as 2011.
Modern cars are increasingly becoming more electrified, including central locking, interior lighting, wipers, electric windows, and on-board controllers, all of which rely on a reliable 12V power supply system. As a result, there is a pure electric vehicle whose power battery has been completely lithium-ionized for a long time, but it still needs to retain the "wonder" of 12V lead-acid battery.
Even if it is a pure electric car, a water lithium-ion power battery cannot escape the battery on the far right - this is somewhat embarrassing
The disadvantages of lead-acid batteries can be said to have been fully explained above. Car companies have long The reason for using it is not only simple and reliable, but also more like a kind of path dependence - most equipment in the low-voltage system is designed according to 12V. Directly plugging in a lead-acid battery is not only reliable, but also saves the trouble of voltage conversion.
So in a sense, lead-acid batteries have actually become the "appendix" of the car.
There are not many car companies that want to revolutionize the battery industry. As early as 2014, BYD launched a lead-free vehicle campaign, and the following year tried to use starter lithium iron phosphate batteries to replace lead-acid batteries on BYD e5, Qin DM, Tang DM and other models.
As years of practice have proven that lithium iron phosphate batteries can perfectly replace traditional lead-acid batteries, BYD has started a comprehensive replacement project since the beginning of this year, and has promoted the use of 12V batteries in all its DM-i hybrid models. Lithium battery replacement lead-acid" plan.
BYD 12V50A lithium battery with start-stop function
From the perspective of car owners, the most direct advantage of replacing lead-acid batteries with lithium batteries is a significant increase in lifespan. In view of the increasing maturity of lithium battery management systems in recent years and the continuous extension of battery life, it can basically have the same life span as the vehicle.
Assume that an ordinary family car has a lifespan of 15 years and the battery needs to be replaced every three years. This will save the car owner at least 3,000 to 4,000 yuan in lifetime costs.
Based on the new generation of battery cell production technology and more advanced battery management systems, the cycle life of current lithium-ion power batteries has generally exceeded 3,000 times or more. For new energy vehicles, this means a longer service life, or even the same lifespan of the battery and the entire vehicle. That is, there is no need to replace the battery during the entire vehicle life cycle. And if the marginal impact of a "sudden battery failure" is taken into account, it will not only save money, but also save worry.
Therefore, this process promoted by BYD has great benefits but no harm to car owners at home and abroad.
Replacing lead-acid batteries with lithium iron phosphate batteries can effectively improve the efficiency of the battery management system. Especially for some pure electric models, the system can automatically detect the power of the small battery and automatically replenish the small battery with the large battery. There will be no situation where the car is clearly powered but the car is short of power.
What's more, how can we ignore those "big" aspects?
In the 30 years since the comprehensive reform and opening up, China's economic construction has achieved world-renowned achievements. But what we must also see is that in the past 30 years, China and the Chinese people have also paid a very high cost in terms of the environment.
With the passage of time, when the model of relying solely on production capacity expansion to achieve growth has completely become a thing of the past, the practical problem of exploring and trying to take a sustainable development path is already in front of us. Since 2010, the Chinese government has been continuously promoting the elimination of backward production capacity, which is an important step towards sustainable development.
As General Secretary Xi said: Lucid waters and lush mountains are mountains of gold and silver. There is no doubt that lead-acid batteries are the most typical example of backward production capacity that is in urgent need of elimination. BYD Auto has taken the initiative to promote "lithium-ion small batteries" in the automotive industry, which can be said to have set an example for all Chinese car companies.
