What's in the Hybrid Battery

[John Ratsey]

I was reading this interesting article https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/11/07/how-to-hybridise-batteries-and-supercapacitors about the batteries for hybrid vehicles. It highlights the limitations on the charge / discharge rate of lithium based batteries (there's an indicative 1/10th kW per kg of battery) but notes that super-capacitors can charge and discharge much more quickly although the maximum charge per kg they can hold is much less than the lithium battery.

Given that the Mk 4 Jazz's battery seems to be capable of delivering a useful amount of short-term power from its nominal 1kWh battery (which should only weight a few kg) I have to wonder if there's also a super-capacitor embedded in the HV battery pack. Perhaps it's this super-capacitor which handles most of the charging / discharging with the lithium battery sitting in the background providing some longer-term storage capacity. This would also make sense in terms of the life of the battery back as the lithium chemistry is only good for a few thousand charge cycles whereas capacitors can handle millions of charge cycles.

[Kremmen]

Most new dashcam models are now supercapacitors instead of battery making them far more reliable and longer lasting. Nextbase are having problems with some of their recent models suffering premature battery failure and it's not easily user replaceable.