You’ve seen the headlines: This battery breakthrough is going to change the electric vehicle forever. And then … silence. You head to the local showroom, and the cars all kind of look and feel the same.
WIRED got annoyed about this phenomenon. So we talked to battery technology experts about what’s really going on in electric vehicle batteries. Which technologies are here? Which will be, probably, but aren’t yet, so don’t hold your breath? What’s probably not coming anytime soon?
“It’s easy to get excited about these things, because batteries are so complex,” says Pranav Jaswani, a technology analyst at IDTechEx, a market intelligence firm. “Many little things are going to have such a big effect.” That’s why so many companies, including automakers, their suppliers, and battery-makers, are experimenting with so many bit parts of the battery. Swap one electrical conductor material for another, and an electric vehicle battery’s range might increase by 50 miles. Rejigger how battery packs are put together, and an automaker might bring down manufacturing costs enough to give consumers a break on the sales lot.
Still, experts say, it can take a long time to get even small tweaks into production cars—sometimes 10 years or more. “Obviously, we want to make sure that whatever we put in an EV works well and it passes safety standards,” says Evelina Stoikou, who leads the battery technology and supply chain team at BloombergNEF, a research firm. Ensuring that means scientists coming up with new ideas, and suppliers figuring out how to execute them; the automakers, in turn, rigorously test each iteration. All the while, everyone’s asking the most important question: Does this improvement make financial sense?
So it’s only logical that not every breakthrough in the lab makes it to the road. Here are the ones that really count—and the ones that haven’t quite panned out, at least so far.
It’s Really Happening
The big deal battery breakthroughs all have something in common: They’re related to the lithium-ion battery. Other battery chemistries are out there—more on them later—but in the next decade, it’s going to be hard to catch up with the dominant battery form. “Lithium-ion is already very mature,” says Stoikou. Lots of players have invested big money in the technology, so “any new one is going to have to compete with the status quo.”
Lithium Iron Phosphate
Why it’s exciting: LFP batteries use iron and phosphate instead of pricier and harder-to-source nickel and cobalt, which are found in conventional lithium-ion batteries. They’re also more stable and slower to degrade after multiple charges. The upshot: LFP batteries can help bring down the cost of manufacturing an EV, an especially important data point while Western electrics struggle to compete, cost-wise, with conventional gas-powered cars. LFP batteries are already common in China, and they’re set to become more popular in European and American electric vehicles in the coming years.
Why it’s hard: LFP is less energy dense than alternatives, meaning you can’t pack as much charge—or range—into each battery.
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