This new technology could
mean recharging a car in
the same time required to
fill a gas tank.
Olympics, where Toyota, working with Pana-
sonic, outfitted a f leet of its LQ concept cars.
The bubble-shaped LQs could be seen follow-
ing the men’s and women’s marathons and
even starred in commercials for the resched-
uled Olympic Games.
These demonstrations are exciting—
despite Toyota releasing no further details
on the LQ’s batteries—but we’re still years
from seeing a lithium-metal battery reach
a showroom. Solid Power CEO Doug Camp-
bell says the company is five years out from
putting their batteries into consumer vehi-
cles—BMW and Ford have signed on as
partners. The company’s current target is an
OEM batter y that’s almost t wice the energ y
density of today’s auto cells and that charges
to 20 percent in just 10 minutes.
The company, he adds, is years ahead of
most rivals, thanks to its research on adapt-
ing existing lithium-ion manufacturing
technolog y.
“Most other groups, with the exception
of a few behemoths based in Asia, are still
entrenched in that research and develop-
ment phase,” Campbell says. Toyota, for
example, says their solid-state battery is
likely to come in 2025—no car included.
Sakamoto runs a solid-state-battery startup,
in addition to his work at the University
of Michigan, and says the recent push to
develop lithium-metal batteries arose after
electric vehicles became viable and in-
demand. “I’m surprised how quickly a light
went on and at this outpouring of financial
support and interest in solid-state bat-
teries,” he says. “There’s no commercial
product yet, but there’s all this investment.”
The push for solid-state batteries can
give us a world in which electric vehicles
recharge in minutes and pacemaker bat-
teries last half a century. There’s only the
question of when we’ll get there.news in May 2021 when they published find-
ings that their lithium-metal cell held its
charge over an astonishing 10,000 cycles.
At 10,000 cycles, we could reset our
expectations for battery life, says Xin Li,
Ph.D., one of the Harvard researchers
behind the battery. “[It] could be as long as
25 years or even half a century.”
However, Harvard’s battery is a paper-
thin version of a coin cell—like a watch or
hearing aid batter y. And these proportions
are likely not the same ones for most com-
mercial applications down the road, where
batteries will be much larger and thicker,
and have different ratios of materials.
The Harvard findings, however, still get
more impressive. Their lithium-metal bat-
tery cell was able to recharge in just three
minutes. If this technology can reach elec-
tric vehicles, that would mean being able
to recharge a car in the same time (or less)
required to fill a gas tank. Most EVs cur-
rently need at least three hours to recharge.
THE WORLD GOT its first look at a solid-
state-battery electric vehicle at the Tokyo
January/February 2022 47