Recent travails in the electric vehicle (EV) market are raising questions about the EV's most important component: the battery.
Of late, there's been a battery fire in a parked Chevy Volt and one in a GM lab. (See: Don't Worry, Your EV Battery Won't Explode.) There has also been a raging debate over a $40,000 bricked Tesla Roadster battery, and there has been a whopping $55 million product recall for A123 Systems.
More importantly, sluggish EV sales are highlighting the shortcomings of today's batteries -- low energy and high cost. After millions of dollars have been invested by government agencies and millions more by private investors, some are asking why EV battery development still seems so excruciatingly slow.
The simple answer: Battery development is hard, slow work. Throwing loads of money at it will help, but it will not make it happen overnight, as so many EV proponents have predicted. "There are no specific moving parts in a battery, but it's one of the most complicated things to develop, in terms of all the things happening inside," Luis Ortiz, chief operating officer of Liquid Metal Battery Corp., told us. "You've got multiple materials trying to come together in one place. It's volatile. And there are a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong." Liquid Metal Battery, an MIT spinoff, builds grid storage systems.
"It's a matter of thermodynamics," said Ralph J. Brodd, president of the battery consulting firm Broddarp of Nevada. "There aren't any things you can just grab off the shelf whenever you want higher energy."
Most of the battery experts that I've interviewed over the years say it's unfair to compare the rapid development of electronics to that of batteries. Electronics have been using the same material (silicon) for more than a half-century. To reduce the feature sizes of their chips, semiconductor manufacturers keep improving their chemical deposition processes and photolithography techniques. Their efforts are essentially a triumph of manufacturing.
In contrast, battery makers are constantly searching for new materials, combining them, testing them, and then waiting for the results. It's a physical sciences challenge. And it's limited by nature. "You're always working with something new, like a cobalt oxide one day and a manganese oxide the next," Brodd said. "You can do anything you want to those materials, but you aren't ever going to get any more energy out of them than the thermodynamics allow."
That's the main reason we're still searching for the ultimate EV battery 100 years after the New York Times declared that the technology had arrived. It's a painstaking process. Battery makers know this, but with venture capital at stake, they often project their capabilities in ways that are part fact, part hope. If they don't, funding may not follow as rapidly. The result is that hopes are raised and then dashed, as they have been over the past few months.
Outside the prescribed boundaries of the battery industry, the general public blames some entity -- auto companies or oil executives -- for suppressing a technology that could change the world. To this day, there's no shortage of individuals who are convinced that GM or Ford has a cheap, high-energy battery wrapped in oily rags in a basement somewhere.
The truth, though, is much more boring. Battery development is just hard, slow work.
Related posts:
For a close-up look at GM's Chevy Volt, go to the Drive for Innovation site and follow the cross-country journey of EE Life editorial director Brian Fuller.
A great, reminder, Chuck, that great innovation requires patience and long, laborious work. In our fast-moving, immediate gratification society, we tend to forget that. We look at how fast technologies have come on board (cell phones, smart phones, the Internet) and expect that everything follows the same rapid-fire trajectory. Some things, as you well said, can't be rushed.
It sounds like the venture capital industry needs educating on how different the development of some technologies--like batteries--are from the typical curves for semiconductors. Or maybe the funding sources just need to be constructed in a different way for funding such slower, longer-cycle technology development. The semiconductor R&D model, and for that matter, its manufacturing model, are not always transferrable to other tech sectors, such as batteries or vision and optics.
The softening of the EV market can't be helping in the support of battery development. The recall has got to hurt. And Ann is right. The venture capital world is accustomed to Moore's Law.
I agree, Ann. The investment focus should be on applied research and even basic research, rather than on car companies that are making incremental improvements. Incremental improvements might help with plug-in hybrids, but they will limit the acceptance of pure electric cars to early adopters.
Yes, the softening of the EV market isn't helping, Rob. Recently, car reviewers have seemed shocked when they've looked at the prices of the most recent EVs. Toyota's RAV4 EV came in at $50,000; Ford's Focus came in just under $40,000 and the tiny Mitsubishi i-MiEV clocked in at $31,125, base price. A Wall Street Journal reviewer who admits he's wanted an electric car for a decade seemed dumbfounded by the price of the RAV4 EV, writing, "I can't imagine more than a handful of people willing to spend twice the cost of a gasoline-powered RAV4 to have an electric version." The problem is, everyone's waiting for EVs to follow the path of PC technology, and it isn't happening.
I don't think that we necessarily need a breakthrough in new materials for a better battery. I think what the EV industry really needs is a battery manufacturing breakthrough to make current battery technology cheaper. If we could just make our current Lithium Ion technolgy 50% cheaper that would go a long way in lowering the price of electric vehicles. While electric cars would of course benefit from smaller and lighter batteries with higher energy density, what we have today is good enough if it could be manufactured more affordably.
Energy storage is just basic physics. If we can find just the right material and process, it will be like a magical genie that's released to serve our bidding. Which is why there is an almost religeous component to the desire to have an electric car (with the necessary energy storage). Reality is less rosey: eventually it might happen (if someone makes the right discovery), or maybe not.
Last week I just pulled an old model train power supply from the attic and discovered that the diode used to rectify the AC to DC was not silicon but the old selenium type. Seems unrelated, except that this reminds me of the history of semiconductor development which seems apropos.
Back in the day, electronics were all based on vacuum tubes. These were hot, large, didn't scale smaller well, and wasted lots of power. At least they were better than the mechanical devices used before tubes. Everybody searched high and low for a better device for decades (sound familiar?). The only available solid state devices in wide use were whisker diodes (handmade, they were not very good signal diodes and certainly couldn't be used for power) and selenium diodes (better for power, but they were very leaky and not as good as vaccuum tubes).
It took the discovery of that magical combination of silicon doped with impurities that can be, for all intents and purposes, printed to create a REAL alternative to tubes. It would seem battery development is going down EXACTLY the same path as semiconductors. Moore's law won't apply until that magical discovery is made.
A further note on the vehicle prices, these are typically "sold-at-a-loss prices".
We really don't know what it costs to actually make these cars, much less what it would take to make them profitably at those prices. We are not even close to being able to make EVs profitably at competitve prices with conventional vehicles.
This is a big point Volt fans often miss. Yes, you got a neat piece of technology and a cool little car for $32-35K. GM lost money on it and the Govt subsidized both the technology and your purchase. It is not a matter of getting the price down from $40k, they still need to get the cost down below $40k. Way below. The cost of producing an EV needs to get low enough to make them profitable in the $30k or below range.
That is a long way off. Toyota knows cost on commercially successful battery volumes pretty well by now. They estimate $500/mile of range.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 3
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
A quick look into the merger of two powerhouse 3D printing OEMs and the new leader in rapid prototyping solutions, Stratasys. The industrial revolution is now led by 3D printing and engineers are given the opportunity to fully maximize their design capabilities, reduce their time-to-market and functionally test prototypes cheaper, faster and easier. Bruce Bradshaw, Director of Marketing in North America, will explore the large product offering and variety of materials that will help CAD designers articulate their product design with actual, physical prototypes. This broadcast will dive deep into technical information including application specific stories from real world customers and their experiences with 3D printing. 3D Printing is
To save this item to your list of favorite Design News content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
If you found this interesting or useful, please use the links to the services below to share it with other readers. You will need a free account with each service to share an item via that service.
Tweet This
20 
