Lithium-ion batteries were invented in the United States. But years ago, as part of a push toward electric vehicles, China took the lead in mass-producing them.
Now there's a great race underway to see who will dominate the future of EV batteries.
Chinese automakers are announcing newer, better batteries at a breakneck speed, including vehicles promising 5-minute "flash charge" times first demonstrated this spring. And, not coincidentally, more than half of new cars sold in China come with a plug.
In the U.S., plug-in sales are lower and policies promoting EVs are politically divisive. The Trump administration has started the process of rolling back incentives, infrastructure and requirements encouraging them.
But globally, battery-powered cars remain a crucial part of plans to reduce the catastrophic impacts of climate change, thanks to their smaller carbon footprint. They're also widely believed to be the technology of the future, and companies want to make sure they can compete in tomorrow's auto market as well as today's. So U.S. companies are still feeling intense pressure to improve their battery offerings. Last week, General Motors engineers in Detroit announced a cheaper long-range battery, and work is frantically underway to unlock even more dramatic innovations.
"Unquestionably, the Chinese are ahead in manufacturing technology," says Bob Galyen, a retired executive whose long career in automotive batteries spanned both GM and the Chinese battery giant CATL. Today, profits from making batteries are being poured back into R&D in China, he says. "Clearly, the U.S. is lagging behind."
But, he says, American labs are still coming up with new ideas: "There is hope for us."
In Shanghai, a futuristic auto show
To enter the Shanghai Auto Show this spring, first visitors had to pass through facial recognition scanners. It was a taste of the technology on display inside, one of the main reasons why thousands of people, like Shanghai resident Dai Yiyao, flocked to the event.
Dai was accompanied by his 12-year-old son. "I brought my kid to see the development, to see what this era is like," Dai said. "He can't be ignorant of it."
Booth after booth, car company after car company, there was a lot to absorb. Cars that can pivot on the spot. Cars that can operate in water, like a boat. Concept cars with quadcopter rotors. BYD, the world's biggest EV maker by sales and China's top brand, put on display a drone pod that attaches to the roof of a car and opens automatically.
A salesman called it "the world's first drone system only designed for the vehicle." The drone, made by the Chinese company DJI, can follow the car automatically, or it can be controlled from inside the car — if there's a traffic jam, the salesman said, you can deploy it to see what's going on ahead of you.
A few steps away, BYD was demonstrating what is perhaps a more consequential development: "flash charging." It's car battery charging at 1 megawatt (1,000 kW) — far more power than competitors — with batteries designed to be so efficient that they don't overheat under the high power load.
"How fast is it? It can add two kilometers of range per second, or 400 kilometers in five minutes," said an engineer on site who declined to be named, citing company policy.
That's more than three times faster than U.S. market leader: Tesla's Supercharger.
"Charging a mobile phone is slower. We're faster," the engineer said.
BYD says it's pioneering fast charging to eliminate anxiety about charge times and limited vehicle range, a major concern for EV owners. It's planning to install 4,000 fast charging stations across China.
None, however, will be installed in the United States. Chinese cars are largely absent from U.S. roads, thanks to a combination of heavy tariffs and U.S. restrictions on web-enabled Chinese car tech.
As a result, U.S. consumers can't buy any of the buzzy Chinese EVs on the market — at least, for now.
In Detroit, remixing the battery "recipe"
But while Chinese EVs aren't on U.S. streets, they're very much on automakers' minds.
Executives from multiple companies have publicly acknowledged that trade barriers can only go so far. Eventually, companies will have to be able to go toe-to-toe with Chinese counterparts on their merits, or risk being relegated to irrelevance on the global market. And that means better EV batteries.
No American company has announced anything like five-minute charging. But companies are very focused on bringing down battery costs to make EVs more affordable — without sacrificing the long range and large vehicles that American buyers prefer.
GM's new battery chemistry, announced last week, is designed to do just that. It's a "lithium manganese-rich," or LMR, battery, to be produced in partnership with LG Energy Solutions and deployed in vehicles starting in 2028.
Lithium-ion batteries are made up of alternating layers of different chemicals, some of which are more expensive than others. GM says its new battery uses a lot more manganese — which is cheap — and less of pricey materials like nickel and cobalt.
GM says the battery can store almost as much energy as today's most expensive EV batteries, but at a cost comparable to the cheapest version, without compromising on lifespan. It's a little bit like if you made a cake cheaper by cutting back on expensive ingredients, like eggs and butter — but changed how you mixed and baked the cake to keep it just as tasty.
"It's all about: How much of each ingredient, how do you process it, how do you mix it?" says GM battery engineer Andy Oury. He points out that starting with eggs, milk and butter, you could wind up with anything from scrambled eggs to popovers. The steps you follow determine the final product.
In GM's research and development labs north of Detroit, scientists have been working on this new battery recipe for years. Engineers say they've cracked the right one, and now it's about figuring out how to efficiently produce the battery in huge quantities. That's its own kind of challenge, a little bit like scaling up cake production from a home kitchen to Costco.
Leading journalists on a tour of GM's battery labs, Shriram Santhanagopalan, the company's senior manager of advanced battery cell development, pointed through a window into a sealed, humidity-controlled room featuring a waist-high silver metal device with tubes running in and out. It blends chemicals together, kind of like an oversized KitchenAid mixer, he said.
The chemicals do indeed have the texture of batter. They were about to go on a sheet of foil, get baked, then stacked up like a layer cake. (Tesla's process, by contrast, is to roll up the layers like a jelly roll.)
Santhanagopalan laughed. "When we hire people, we say that good cooks make good batteries," he said.
Bigger breakthroughs are on the horizon
The recipe that GM has cooked up is "exciting," says Evelina Stoikou, with the research company BloombergNEF. It should translate directly into longer range, she says, "which is quite important for consumers."
Sam Abuelsamid, a longtime auto analyst now with the strategic communications firm Telemetry, says it has other benefits too. For one thing, while China dominates existing battery supply chains, using more of a cheaper input like manganese can make it easier to find alternative supplies, he says: "You get that lower cost, but also you've got the ability to source the materials from more places." (GM has invested in a company called Element 25 that plans to build a U.S. refinery for Australian-sourced manganese.)
At the same time, they both point out, GM's announcement is essentially a tweak to today's battery recipes, offering higher performance at lower cost. It's "more about optimizing," Abuelsamid says, rather than being a "next-generation" battery — a radical change in chemistry or design that would lead to dramatically improved performance.
Companies around the world are racing to build those, too. They include batteries based on sodium, for instance, which is cheaper and more abundant than lithium. Or "solid-state" batteries, entirely made from solid components instead of the liquid electrolyte used in today's batteries. These have gotten particular attention from the industry and the press because of their potential to be safer and cheaper while storing more energy. A variety of companies are trying to perfect one that's ready for use in a mass-market EV.
No one has nailed it yet — although many companies say they're only a few years away.
Kurt Kelty is GM's vice president of battery, propulsion and sustainability, after an influential career at Panasonic, Tesla and the battery start-up Sila. He says GM is talking with start-ups about their solid-state technology and continuing to research other radically different battery recipes, while also rolling out more incremental improvements.
He acknowledges in the race for new battery tech, China has an advantage. "Some of these Chinese companies have massive R&D teams and they're getting a lot of funding from their governments," he says. "It's hard to compete against that, but we've got quite a good, nimble team here."
At the same time, he points out that the types of batteries that Chinese companies make so well today were developed in the U.S. before being scaled up in Asia, where the companies buying them were located.
Things could work out differently this time, he says — if American scientists can keep innovating new battery tech, and big companies can figure out how to commercialize them here and there's enough domestic demand. "We can build an amazing battery industry here," he says. "We have the opportunity here to really, really accelerate."
And it's worth noting that while the U.S. and China are competing, there could be room for collaboration, too. Ford is licensing some technology made by Chinese battery maker CATL for use in American-made vehicles. And many battery experts see the potential for more cooperation, when it makes business sense — even if political tensions and trade wars are a major barrier.
In Shanghai, a sense of confidence
Meanwhile China, which has already built up its domestic battery industry, is in the process of a global expansion.
At the Shanghai auto show, reporters and bloggers were flown in from around the world. Bloomberg reported that BYD alone "hosted some 150 journalists and influencers from Latin America."
Geo Taveras, an influencer from the Dominican Republic who makes videos about cars and said he had been flown, all expenses paid, to the show by BYD, was filming a demonstration of flash charging. "This is happening in real time," he said. "I mean, the technology is already developed. You took the same time when you go to the gas station to put gas in your car."
Chinese EV and battery companies, like BYD, have grown quickly on the back of strong government investment and subsidies. Years ago, the government recognized that batteries were going to be a key sector and made development of a battery supply chain, among other industries, a strategic priority.
The massive subsidies that followed are one reason they've built such enormous success — although Bob Galyen, who worked for years in China, said it's not the only reason. He said China's experience building consumer electronics for the rest of the world also positioned it for success in batteries — and the "development and education of the people that go into building batteries," including scientists, engineers and factory workers, was also crucial.
Ahead of the auto show, CATL announced that it, too, is rolling out ultra-fast-charging car batteries. It's also launching a battery powered by sodium.
Dai, the Shanghai resident who brought his son to the car show, said China's world-leading technologies are now the envy of the world.
"I told my son, it used to be that we were the ones with our pens out evaluating the cars. Now [foreigners] are taking out cameras, pens, color charts to evaluate our cars," he said. "The times have changed."
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