THE BIG IDEA A Better Battery and Beyond
As with a child's first steps, the automotive industry's halting and at times bumpy adoption of electrification is to be celebrated—but more is expected. To maximize initial momentum, automakers have latched on to lithium-ion, the battery tech that's currently most cost-effective for production. But they'll soon need to let go if real advancement is to be made.
“We started, as an industry, with electric cars less than 10 years ago. There's so much that we need to learn,” says Pablo Di Si, president and CEO, Volkswagen Group of America. “Remember cell phones 30 years ago?”
Today's rechargeable lithiumion setup relies on minerals—nickel, magnesium, cobalt, and graphite—that require extensive mining, and the liquid electrolyte is highly flammable.
“There will be a lot of change,” says Dr. Uwe Keller, head of battery development for Mercedes-Benz. “At the moment, we're all working on getting cobalt-free cathode materials, and on the anode side, we are looking to introduce silica,” which allows for greater battery capacity. According to Keller, this represents “a big potential for increasing the energy density” while simultaneously reducing battery weight. In layman's terms, that means shorter charge times and better overall drive dynamics.
The elusive panacea is solid-state, an approach that replaces the combustible electrolyte fluid withgraphene, an incredibly strong hexagonal carbon matrix that's a single atom thick, which, as Keller explains, gives it “very high thermal and electrical conductivity,” though he adds that it's currently very expensive and challenging to produce.
