Battery breakthrough could change everything

Okay, this is a little more information than we had a couple of weeks ago [0].<p>Sounds like these could beat lithium batteries on cost, even if their energy density and power density aren&#x27;t at the same levels. (Not saying they won&#x27;t be, but we haven&#x27;t seen any numbers yet.)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14941624" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14941624</a>

I personally think that, for electric cars at least, there are two main things in battery tech holding them back:<p>Capacity and charging time<p>Basically, if we could get a battery cell that was no bigger than say, the lithium cells used by Tesla (sub-C size? I can&#x27;t recall what they used), and with about the same mass, but had double the capacity - in theory, Tesla could swap out one for the other and instantly double the range of their vehicles. That would instantly put them in line with the range of a gasoline powered vehicle (to be honest, though, they are already there or close enough - provided you aren&#x27;t too aggressive with the pedal).<p>But extra range is just one component. The battery also needs to be able to be charged in a reasonable amount of time. I would personally like to see 5 minutes tops to a full 100% charge. I want to be able to travel cross country, and if I don&#x27;t want to do an extended stop, I&#x27;d like to get out, charge the car to 100% in 5 minutes, and then drive on. I don&#x27;t want to have to wait, I want to be able to do the same as I can do today with a gasoline powered vehicle.<p>I honestly don&#x27;t know if such a scheme is even possible within the laws of physics, while still being safe for the consumer. It might be a case where a different form of infrastructure needs to be created to handle charging, due to likely high currents and&#x2F;or higher voltages involved. It doesn&#x27;t seem possible to offer this as a &quot;plug in&quot; style recharging system, but perhaps something you drive into, and large contacts or something from the bottom rise up and &quot;plug in&quot; to ports on the underside of the vehicle could work? There are also the &quot;battery swap&quot; schemes, but this seems like something that could take longer than 5 minutes. Regardless, just about anything will ultimately require some kind of standards for car manufacturers to adhere to so it all works (imagine if there were different size nozzles for each manufactured vehicle for gasoline).<p>Note that I don&#x27;t expect for &quot;overnight charging&quot; to happen quickly; existing charger designs (or similar) could likely handle this for home or on-the-road use (when there isn&#x27;t another option, or for perhaps plugging in while staying at a hotel or something).<p>Until these two items are solved, though, I don&#x27;t see electric cars being as widespread among consumers as many think they will be.

Summary of tech: But in this battery, you have no liquid. You have just a plastic, a polymer, that replaces the liquid, so it’s solid. To be solid instead of liquid is something people have been striving for for 100 years. Michael Zimmerman was the expert on a certain class of polymers. He invented a new ionic conduction mechanism.

My main concern with the electric vehicle hockey stick growth curve is sourcing the cobalt required in Li-ion battery chemistry (although there are non cobalt versions LiFePo with worse metrics). One of the basic problems is how does a cobalt miner know whether or not something like this article&#x27;s battery doesn&#x27;t pop into existence just as soon as they put in billions of dollars to get a cobalt mine going. I have a suspicion that Tesla is waiting to be more clearly stable financially and then they will do something to derisk cobalt miners (like promise the purchase of a boatload of cobalt at a certain price).

Aside from a little bit of mainstream tech journalist misinformation (Bill Joy being co-inventor of Java? News to me, and presumably the inventors of Java listed on Wikipedia), glad to see this article, the development being described is very promising. I have a bit more hope in this than in most battery breakthroughs, the fundamental idea seems sound, will be interested to see how it develops.