Batteries

For the past 50 years, the German auto industry has enjoyed quite the roll of growth and success in the U.S., built largely on its expertise with one specific technology: the internal combustion engine. But now the importance of that advantage is fading, with electric cars on the rise and the...

As part of its latest revelation of a new, mainstream electric SUV for 2021, startup automaker Fisker (the eponymous founder's second under his own name), implicitly made a somewhat startling admission: The solid-state batteries the company has been working on may not be ready any time soon...

Electric-car batteries need to get recycled or reused at the end of their road. And campers are always in need of more batteries to stay out longer and run more things without resorting to gas power. Combine the two needs and you get the Nissan x Opus, an inflatable, folding camping trailer that...

Falling reliability costs the Tesla Model 3 its Consumer Reports recommendation. Could high-speed rail be replaced with high-speed highways? Volvo is pulling depleted batteries out of electric buses to use as energy storage for solar in a large apartment complex in Sweden. Argonne National Lab has...

According to scientists at Purdue University, the best way to charge electric car batteries may be to take them to a gas station, and have them serviced at an instant oil-change shop. The two scientists have been testing a new type of flow battery in golf carts, and say the battery now develops...

Update: Toyota and Panasonic held a joint press conference in Japan on Tuesday to confirm details of the new joint venture. The two companies will contribute a total of 3,500 employees to the new entity, which will produce prismatic lithium-ion batteries at two Panasonic factories, one in Japan and...

Nissan unveiled Tuesday a new version of the 2019 Leaf electric car, called the Leaf Plus or Leaf e+, that can go well over 200 miles on a charge. Although such a model has been a long time coming, the 2019 Nissan Leaf Plus stands as strong evidence that in the eight years since the first...

Samsung might be supplying Tesla's promised new Autopilot chips in the spring. Honda reveals a new battery that could have 10 times the range of today's lithium-ion cells. And the U.S. hit a milestone for electric car sales last month, reaching 1 million plug-ins across the country. All this and...

Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz, last week revealed that it will be buying $23 billion in battery cells by 2030. What it didn’t fully reveal—its sources for those cells—says as much, if not more about a point of unease among German automakers. Battery packs—and...

If you happen to be in California, rejoice; the 2019 Hyundai Kona Electric will arrive at dealerships in January, at just $37,495. That brings the effective total to $29,995 for the Kona Electric, provided you have enough taxable income to receive the full the federal electric vehicle tax credit...

Toyota continues to stay the course with nickel-metal hydride battery cells for many of its hybrid vehicles, even though most other hybrid vehicles from other brands have moved on to using lithium-ion cells exclusively. According to Prius chief engineer Shoichi Kaneko, in an interview this past...

Envision Energy, a Chinese company that bought Nissan's former AESC battery business, says it will be able to make battery packs for less than $100 per kilowatt-hour in the next two years. That number is significant, because it's the threshold at which automakers and analysts say electric cars will...

While scientists and automakers around the world are racing to develop solid-state batteries for electric cars, Panasonic says don't hold your breath. In an interview, Panasonic North American chief executive officer Tom Gebhardt told Business Insider that the hotly-anticipated battery breakthrough...

UPDATE: The very premise of this piece has been shaken when Volkswagen told the original source of this report, Automotive News, that its chief executive had misstated the number of MEB vehicles it now planned to eventually build to be 50 million, not 15 million. The latter is not surprising based...

In a concept vehicle for the São Paulo Motor Show, Nissan has outfitted its local-market Frontier pickup with two Leaf battery packs—creating what it’s calling the Frontier Sentinel. But it’s not anything close to what you might suspect. The Sentinel isn’t...

As other battery scientists are working to develop the solid-state lithium batteries of tomorrow, technology entrepreneur Kenan Sahin is working to make the batteries of today more affordable. Sahin announced at a conference in Berlin this week that his company TIAX has invented a new battery...

The future may be coming for electric cars, but it's not yet clear what it will look like. When modern electric cars first launched between 2011 and 2014, many shared similar specs: about 80 miles of range, overnight charging, a five-passenger hatchback body, and a price starting around $28,000...

Automakers seem to be in agreement that the ‘skateboard’ location for heavy battery packs—low and wide beneath the passenger floor—is the ideal layout for electric vehicles. Decades from now that might not be the case. Researchers in Sweden have examined the possibility of...

Until now, solid-state lithium-ion cells have been the likely path forward for battery technology, potentially finding their way into some production vehicles by 2025. But one other battery possibility is increasingly looking viable for the near future: zinc-air. The firm NantEnergy has made some...

Teaming with a new Swedish battery supplier and a Belgian recycling company, BMW is aiming to build a fully sustainable future battery supply chain. The company announced on Monday that it formed a partnership with Northvolt, which is building Europe's largest battery factory for electric cars in...