11-23-2017, 12:36 PM
The end for gasoline cars is near..
Electric vehicles will soon be superior to gasoline-powered vehicles in every single respect — with longer range and possibly even faster fueling. That’s the key takeaway from the latest product announcements by Tesla’s Elon Musk and other car companies. Major media coverage in recent days has focused on Musk’s unveiling of a sleek new electric truck with a 500-mile range. But the news of the last week also includes Musk rolling out the Tesla “Roadster” with a 620-mile range “to give a hard-core smackdown to gasoline cars. You’ll be able to drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco and back” without recharging.
To much less fanfare, however, Fisker Inc. (formerly Fisker Automotive) filed patents last week on a solid-state battery that “delivers 2.5 times the energy density of typical lithium-ion batteries, with the potential of costing one third of the 2020 projected price of those batteries,” Green Car Congress reported. Such batteries could be charged in one minute. Many other companies including Toyota are working on solid-state batteries (see below).
And the cost and performance gains are projected to continue rapidly for many years, if not decades, especially with so many car companies working on solid-state batteries. As Chemical & Engineering News explained Monday, “by getting flammable liquid electrolytes out of lithium-ion batteries and replacing them with solid electrolytes, solid-state battery makers hope to usher in an era of safer, more compact, higher-capacity energy storage devices.” Last year, Boston-based SolidEnergy Systems announced it had developed a virtually “anode-free” lithium metal battery that was twice as energy dense but longer lasting and potentially safer than lithium-ion batteries, as ThinkProgress reported. The batteries replace the traditional graphite anode with a “very thin, high-energy lithium-metal foil.””
Would you buy a 500-mile range electric car that charges in one minute? – ThinkProgress