A new type of battery could finally make electric cars as co | Tech Updates and News
A new type of battery could finally make electric cars as convenient and cheap as gas ones.
For all the hype and hope around electric vehicles, they’re simply too expensive, their range is too limited, and charging them isn’t nearly as quick and convenient as refueling at the pump for many buyers.
Making electric cars more competitive with gas-powered ones will require a breakthrough battery that remedies those shortcomings. That, at least, is the argument of Jagdeep Singh, chief executive of QuantumScape, a Silicon Valley startup that claims to have developed just such a technology.
The company asserts it did so by solving a chemistry puzzle that has stumped researchers for nearly half a century: how to use lithium, the lightest metal on the periodic table, to boost the amount of energy that can be packed into a battery without posing a routine risk of fire or otherwise sacrificing performance.
VW was impressed enough to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in QuantumScape. The German auto giant also agreed to set up a joint venture with the company to mass-produce the batteries and says they’ll be in its electric cars and trucks on the road by 2025.
