Egregoros

One of our clients had us do an energy consumption survey of a typical 4 seat GA aircraft for a three-hour cross-country IFR flight (plus enough energy to fly to an alternate and hold for 30 mins), as they are currently developing flouride-ion, sodium-ion & sulfur-ion battery systems.

While the state of the art in motor & controllers is definately ready for electric cars & flight, we are still a long way away from batteries that could not only hold enough energy to do the job for that aforementioned flight, but to also satisfy the tight physical constraints of mass & volume, as well as meeting necessary safety & durability requirements.....let alone be affordable, or capable of charging in a reasonable amount of time.

I can certainly respect the allure of electric transportation, as it is quiet with little vibration and low maintenance. I can't say clean yet- modern high-performing (but fragile) Li-Ion Polymer systems are full of atrociously toxic materials. The toxicity of those batteries are among the many reasons why there has been significant interest in pursuing alternatives.

We are getting there by the day.

It's a nice demo, but of course they're showing off a solution to the easy problem here. Power density in EV motors is pretty insane, and battery discharge rates as well - since they need all of that in order to fast charge.

I was thinking is it's probably possible to fit prismatic cells in the wings if they're re-engineered a little bit, then you don't need that giant nose. Whatever weight you were holding in fuel is the weight of batteries you can hold, so your range is 1/4 or 1/5 of what it was.