A surprising breakthrough could help sodium-ion batteries rival lithium—and even turn seawater into drinking water. Scientists discovered that keeping water inside a key battery material, instead of removing it as traditionally done, dramatically boosts performance. The “wet” version stores nearly twice as much charge, charges faster, and remains stable for hundreds of cycles, placing it among the top-performing sodium battery materials ever reported.
Yes, because battery technology stagnated years ago…
Oh wait
I mean the first diagram is effectively useless without knowledge of battery density. They as well could compare the 2010 compacts with 2025s SUVs which have probably 2x the amount of total capacity.
For the other charts: Agreed.
Weird, I didn’t know Lithium-Ion batteries were still in the lab. I thought for sure we were using those already. I thought the batteries in the labs were various solid-state batteries like graphene or like this sodium-ion battery, where there’s been a rise in patents around it but not a lot delivered
There are a bunch of lithium ion chemistries that have come to market more recently.
LFP sits in the low cost marker while NCA is the highest performing of the mass market batteries, and NMC is somewhere in between.
Sodium might be coming for LFP’s low cost position, and is already beginning mass production (some Chinese manufacturers expect those models to hit the road in a few months).
If you think rechargeable battery R&D from 10 years ago isn’t making it into mass produced products today, you’re just not paying attention.
Great response, people just love to parrot easy dismissals without looking and the sheer magnitude on innovation and commercialisation going on in this sector
Well all those graphs show is that the cost of batteries has gone down and that as a result electric cars contain more batteries and therefore more range. It doesn’t actually show that the individual battery capacity has increased.
The third graph that indicates battery performance vs battery chemistry doesn’t really show incremental improvement it just shows general improvement but there’s plenty of battery chemistries that are worse than pre-existing ones.
Shhhh…we’re having a bullshit feel good moment…
It doesn’t really dispute it, though. Lithium-ion has seen a lot of improvement, yes, because it’s already a giant industry; other battery chemistries have a hard time breaking through because they require entirely different processes to manufacture.
I’m still rooting for it, but it’s not really the same thing.
This too is false, great progress has been made on for instance solid state batteries.
You can’t buy anything with solid state batteries yet, and when you can, they will cost a fortune.
Some progress is being made, but it hasn’t seen large-scale adoption yet. Which is the point, as I read it.
The “progress” is typical industry bullshit. See the absolute bullshit around the Donut SS battery.
Remember when Musk invented a battery with 30% better capacity? It was a 30% bigger battery.
SS batteries require manufacturing facilities with clean rooms on the order of chip fabs. You may see these in 2027, but only in expensive cars.
It takes time to scale production and even more time to adopt a new technology.
It takes time to scale up production, CATL is already building factories for it:
https://www.catl.com/en/news/6401.html
These press releases are weekly. Naxtra will be 30% cheaper, but also bigger and heavier. The problem here is the damn periodic table, someone should change it.
All that data says is batteries got cheaper so they are putting more of them into cars. Also 100 to 300 wh/kg is in labs. No explanation why it went from 175 to 100 Wh/kg 08-10.
No explanation? You might want to get checked for color blindness
TBF, there are a lot of “battery breakthroughs” that turn out to just be hot air. Battery technology has made tremendous progress though and there is still a lot of room for improvement.
There actually is not a lot of room for improvement. Highest energy will still be limited to lithium chemistry because of the periodic table.
That’s a limit on gravimetric energy density. There are plenty of other parameters that can be improved.
You don’t know that. This is chemistry, not Moore’s stupid law.