The EV Battery of Your Dreams Is Coming
In the next five years, significant upgrades to the batteries in electric vehicles should finally hit the market. In the works for decades, these changes are likely to mean that by 2030, gas vehicles will cost more than their electric equivalents; some EVs will charge as quickly as filling up at a gas station; and super long-range EVs will make the phrase “range anxiety” seem quaint.
One reason you might not be aware of these impending technological leaps is that they’ve long been overshadowed by flashier efforts at replacing existing lithium-ion battery tech in EVs altogether. Again and again, those promised battery “breakthroughs” failed to break through, which has left investors holding the bag and consumers disappointed.
Almost all of these coming developments are upgrades to the same tried-and-true lithium batteries that others have promised to disrupt. This gives them a huge advantage: They can be manufactured in existing facilities, and fit into existing supply chains. This matters because previous investments in battery-manufacturing capacity are so enormous—more than $30 billion in 2023 alone, according to BloombergNEF—that they make it that much harder for any technology that can’t be manufactured in those facilities to be competitive.
BMW’s 2025 battery rollout
It’s possible to optimize many features in a battery, from how fast it can charge to how many years it can last. One of the most important measures of a battery’s performance is how much energy a manufacturer can cram into a given battery cell, which is known as its energy density. Typically, that energy density has gone up a few percentage points a year, and it’s those slow, cumulative, hard-won gains that have gotten us to where we are today.
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/ev-battery-developments-five-years-d306be44?st=xmiz9zb38nik89y&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
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The electric vehicles will prevail as soon as they become more profitable to manufacture and sell than the gasoline-powered vehicles. We haven't reached parity yet, but we get a little closer each year.
