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The new car batteries that could power the electric vehicle revolution
Researchers are experimenting with different designs that could lower costs, extend vehicle ranges and offer other improvements.
Chinese manufacturers have announced budget cars for 2024 featuring batteries based not on the lithium that powers today’s best electric vehicles (EVs), but on cheap sodium — one of the most abundant elements in Earth’s crust. “I think lithium ion will for decades be the technology which powers electric cars, because it’s good enough,” says Winfried Wilcke, a recently retired scientist in Los Altos, California, who headed an IBM Research battery project from 2009 to 2015. Materials scientist Larry Curtiss at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, and his colleagues hit the headlines in 2023 with a surprising paper showing a solid-state, experimental lithium–air battery tested over 1,000 cycles in the lab 1.
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