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China's new iron battery hits 99.4 percent efficiency over 6000 cycles
(interestingengineering.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
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Technology
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The problem is that 6000 cycles in laboratory are not the same than 6000 cycles in real life scenarios.
It would be interesting to put that battery out in the field and to see how it perform in real life conditions (assuming that they are cheap enough to be produced in large volumes)
If they are really that good you are right, but there are always a lot of revolutionary advance in lab that never leave it.
I've seen some incredible innovations in batteries performing really well in cold temperatures. So the idea of these becoming battle tested seems more feasible today than it did even a couple years ago.
Indeed: electric vehicle batteries are lasting even longer than estimated. All the constant breaks from use that the batteries get has been interestingly improving their durability (which makes me think that shutting off our phones for 1 whole day per week or even month could improve their lifespan, even for the 40-80% lithium-ion boundary keepers).
Just make hot swapping batteries normal again like it used to be.
When was hot-swapping batteries normal? What was the backup power source? I'd only ever seen normally swappable batteries where the phone would need to power off and back on.
I’ve never owned a flip phone that I couldn’t plug in and swap the battery with a new one without it turning off. If that wasn’t normal with your phones I’m not sure why, maybe different circuitry?
Regardless making devices easy to repair, and thus open and maintainable was what I was getting at.
Somehow, I forgot about charging cables.
There actually was a Chinese EV startup that had battery swap stations: drive up onto the system, and the battery is directly under your car; the swap takes <1 minute. I don't remember what it was called, though, nor if it ever made it.
Tom Scott did a video on it. In all honesty, there are a number of things about this system that I just don’t see working well in the long term, but it’s an interesting prototype nonetheless.
https://youtu.be/hNZy603as5w
That's it: Nio! Yeah, I dislike the reliability on the company, too.
There was one like that in Taiwan for scooters.
Breaks from use makes perfect sense though, it allows the electrolyte to diffuse evenly. During charge /discharge cycles there's always more or less active electrolyte being consumed/produced at the anodes and cathodes, resting means it can equalize.
It really depends on the charge/discharge conditions that the particular test is using. You can do testing in the lab that is way harsher than typical usage or you can make it easier. In terms of this cycle testing for Li-ion I would say that typically the lab testing would be harsher than real world primarily because lab testing is done between 0% and 100% depth of discharge constantly where most people are charging their batteries much before then and only cycling them at high rates periodically.