Welcome to
On Feet Nation
Electric cars: are solid-state batteries the future?
Electric cars will soon cost the same to own as petrol ones – dearer to buy, cheaper to run. But range will still be a bit less and charging a bit slower. So people go looking for game-changers in those fields.Lithium Battery Cell voltage
Solid-state batteries get a lot of airtime. Small wonder. They replace the wet electrolyte in today’s lithium-ion batteries with a solid. Because they’re simpler they could be a lot cheaper, and lighter, and they won’t need liquid cooling. They should also be longer-lasting and fireproof. Possibly much faster-charging too – provided you can find an outlet much more powerful than the 350kW top-end jobs of today.
This isn’t crazy car-runs-on-tap-water nonsense. It’s been done in the lab. Dyson has staked its new car on the technology. Toyota is all over it. Caterpillar has recently invested in Fisker, citing Fisker’s solid-state technology as a reason. The eminently respectable Swiss Fraunhofer Institute has a major project going, with partners including Cambridge University.
But even if they get it right, the industry won’t adopt these new batteries all at once. Companies have only comparatively recently invested hugely in plants to make today’s cells and batteries. They won’t just shut those down – the financial imperative is to amortise them over decades to come. But apart from Tesla’s Gigafactory, those plants are mostly in Asia. Fraunhofer points out that if Europe leads with solid-state and starts making it here, that’s a strategic win for the continent.
Meanwhile, charge points are still too scarce and people are queuing for them. How about leap-frogging them altogether? Bury inductive charge-pads under the surface. Not just at car parks, or traffic lights, but in the road itself, so cars charge as they drive. It has actually been demonstrated by Renault with Qualcomm. The car handshakes with, then picks up energy from, one coil after the other in quick succession.
But it seems like a mad solution that’ll be overtaken by other developments. The project was planned when long-range batteries cost a fortune. Charging on the move seemed like a neat way to allow a small-battery EV to do roadtrips. Now we have better batteries and faster charging, with more to come if the solid-state scientists do their thing. Anyone for digging up the motorways to run coils underneath? Thought not. Oh and someone recently pointed out to me that coils get warm, so animals like to sleep on them. Road-kill apocalypse ahoy.
© 2024 Created by PH the vintage.
Powered by
You need to be a member of On Feet Nation to add comments!
Join On Feet Nation