Battery development

As I have said numerous times, we don't need to be involved in the first gen of electric cars.
(I've always been negative on the battery being the impasse)

There is a plethora of research being done in the battery field.

This looking promising (along with solid state). But both are still a way off.

Consumers would more readily accept this, than being tied to an umbilical cord (plus the visual pollution they create.) May even be integrated in the existing service station networks already in place.

Electric vehicle owners may soon be able to fully charge their cars in as little as 10 minutes, thanks to a new design that heats the battery to increase the reaction rate.

One major barrier to the uptake of electric cars is the length of time it takes to charge the battery compared with filling a car with petrol. So the key to making electric cars more commercially attractive lies in developing batteries that can reach 80 per cent charge – within 10 minutes, says Chao-Yang Wang at Penn State University.

But this requires batteries to rapidly take in 400 kilowatts of power, and those currently on the market can’t do this.

When the batteries are charged rapidly – during which lithium ions move from the positive to the negative electrode – there is a tendency for lithium to form plate-like deposits on the negative electrode’s surface that can shorten battery life.

Will be interesting to see if solid state or Lithium (tweaked) will dominate in the future.