Long term reliability is not nearly as important a feature for rechargeable AA batteries, since you’re not going to get stranded on the freeway if your TV remote dies. As we’ve written about before, electric car batteries use different materials (including nanomaterials!) that allow them to be re-charged over and over again without losing significant capacity. There are other reasons we don’t use AA batteries to power cars, of course. No problem, right?ĭespite these seemingly reasonable calculations, the video does a great job of illustrating some of the impracticalities of executing this particular design. I shudder at the thought of having to make sure 10,000 batteries were all lined up and snugly connected end-to-end anytime I wanted to pull out of my driveway… Okay, but could you even fit 10,000 AAs in the Mercedes’ engine compartment? The batteries are about 2 inches long with a quarter inch radius, so again at a very rough estimate you get a volume of 10,000 x 2πr 2 = 3,925 cubic inches, or only 2.3 cubic feet. For the Leaf it would be 6,153, so the SNL estimate turns out to be pretty realistic!
1 If we assume that the imaginary Mercedes AA+ is more like a Tesla than a Leaf, we can calculate that the battery requirement would be 54 / 0.0039 = 13,846. So how many AA batteries would it really take to power a car? According to the sketch, the Mercedes AA+ requires 9,648 AA batteries - but could that actually work?Īccording to, the battery capacity of the Nissan Leaf is 24 kWh, while the Tesla Roadster‘s is 54 kWh.
Saturday Night Live recently tackled this question, in what they probably did not intend as a science education sketch: A typical AA battery contains about 3.9 watt-hours, or 0.0039 kilowatt-hours, which is plenty of energy to keep your small flashlight bulb lit for hours before you have to change the batteries.īut what about an electric car? A 3,000-pound vehicle is not going to go very far on the amount of energy it takes to run an electric toothbrush. Electricity is measured in kilowatt-hours (kWh), a unit of energy that defines how many thousands of watts of power get used up by a particular electrical circuit in an hour (you can see the kWh in action on your home electricity bill). Most small items run on two or maybe four AAs, because they only need a small amount of electricity to do what they do. So what does that have to do with a Mercedes? Some run-of-the-mill rechargeable AA batteries (image from Pixabay) (And yes, I know you can get rechargeable AA batteries – yay!) They’re not as ubiquitous as they used to be – I try to buy mostly rechargeable electronics nowadays, but those AAs still go into so many things, from TV remotes to flashlights to bathroom gadgets.
If you’re like me, you probably have a drawer full of AA batteries at home somewhere, just in case you need them.