DID YOU KNOW:
...That electric vehicle manufacturers are still working with a number of different battery companies to develop the best and most advanced battery to use in their pure-electric vehicles? If at first brush that sounds pretty simple, you might be surprised at the current deltas required: Clearly range and power are the most obvious, but add to that safety (unit-fire), weight, cost, lifespan and environmental requirements for both construction of the battery and disposal once depleted. Oh, and one last thing and it’s a biggie: Charge time and cycles. As you can see, battery tech is required to power the coming mass of new pure-electric vehicles and it is under serious pressure.
How quickly things change. Lithium-ion, largely controlled by LG Chem and Panasonic, have been the center stage for the last few years and just when it looked like they would own the EV market, a new technology gets introduced and shows even more promise. It's called solid-state and it's currently being developed (along with support from Ford, BMW and Hyundai) by a couple companies with an apparent head start by the names of Solid-Power and QuantumScape. The big advantage to this new tech is no liquid in the battery, lowering fire risk and making it safer to manufacture as well easy to recycle when depleted. This new style of battery claims to be 10-15% more powerful which obviously would translate into increased range. Solid-state batteries claim to recharge fast as well. In short (no pun intended), there’s a lot going on in the EV battery game.
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