In his early twenties, Gene Berdichevsky took 6931 laptop batteries and stuck them in the first Tesla Roadster to prove what, at the time, seemed a fanciful idea: that you could build an electric car that actually performed and that people would want to buy.
Tesla’s road from those scrappy start-up days in 2004 to the world’s most valuable carmaker was littered with countless brushes with bankruptcy.
Berdichevsky, 37, the former technical lead for Tesla’s battery team, left in 2008 but his time at the electric car pioneer left him convinced of two things: that the car industry would go all-electric, and that it would need wildly more efficient batteries to do so.
He set about working on the latter. In 2011, he founded Sila Nanotechnologies, based in Alameda, California.
Ten years and nearly $US1bn ($1.4bn) in venture capital later, the company last month announced the first consumer product powered by its radically improved batteries. He reckons that advance will supercharge the electrification of not just cars but other parts of the economy, such as power utilities.
Sila’s breakthrough material is a silicon-based composite that is 20 per cent more energy-dense than anything else on the market.
The challenge was that silicon was less durable – wearing out 10 times as fast as the material typically used, graphite.
The company went through 55,000 iterations to engineer a silicon alternative that is just as durable and can be dropped into existing battery manufacturing lines without any retooling. For a technology that typically measures improvements in fractions of a per cent, the implications are dramatic.
Tesla Roadster. 2010 picture.
Tesla Roadster electric car.
The reason for Berdichevsky’s optimism boils down to cost and efficiency.
When he was tinkering with laptop batteries in 2004, the cost of commercial-grade lithium ion batteries was about $US1000 per kilowatt hour of capacity. Today it has fallen to $US100/KWh amid a huge ramp-up powered first by smartphone and device giants, and now by the car industry. With Sila’s breakthrough, and others in the works, there is a path to bring that down to as little as $US50/ KWh.
At that point electric cars, for which the single costliest component is the battery, can approach price parity with petrol and diesel rivals.
“The world changed about a year and a half ago, which you can correlate to Tesla’s stock price increasing by a factor of 10,” Berdichevsky says.
“Institutional investors became convinced the world’s going 100 per cent electric.”
Indeed, Ford last week unveiled an $US11.4bn plan to build an electric truck plant and three battery factories.
Sila is not alone. Quantumscape has raised more than $US1bn to develop a solid-state battery, while Enovix has attracted hundreds of millions for its silicon-based formulation.
Sila is the first, however, to get its product out into the wild. Whoop, a start-up that makes a popular fitness tracker, was the first customer to include its material in its product.
Vehicles are the ultimate goal. Sam Jaffe, of Cairn Energy Research, said: “A lighter and smaller battery pack gives cars longer range and makes them cost less. Sila is at the forefront of a battery materials technology revolution.” Sila’s factory can produce enough material for millions of small devices such as fitness trackers, but will need a much bigger plant for cars.
Berdichevksy reckons that by the end of the decade, with new chemistries and the monumental scale-up by industry, a 30-year “forever battery” will be achieved.
He said: “Eventually, you will replace your car, not your battery.”
The Sunday TImes
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