Beyond Lithium: VW Eyes Prototype Success as Solid-State Battery Puzzle Nears Solution

The drive to develop a “solid-state” electric car battery — with solid electrolytes rather than liquid ones — that’s lighter and faster to charge is becoming one of the biggest challenges for the EV industry. This technology has the potential to transform EVs by increasing their range to 400 miles and shortening charging time to 20 minutes, allowing them to be driven daily without range anxiety.

The German auto giant Volkswagen, whose venture with U.S. startup QuantumScape to build this type of battery has been dogged by delays, is casting its net wider in pursuit of the potentially game-changing technology. It’s holding talks with France’s Blue Solutions, which already produces solid-state batteries for Daimler electric buses, about adapting the design for cars. A source with direct knowledge of the discussions told Reuters.

The collaboration could speed up VW’s plans to build 3 million electric vehicles across all its brands by 2025. It may also allow the company to avoid investing in its battery production, as it’s currently doing, through issuing billions of dollars worth of supply contracts with existing battery makers.

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As a result, it’s become increasingly crucial for Volkswagen to find ways to improve its battery-building capabilities. The company’s latest development is a new dry coating process that will cut the energy needed in battery production by 30 percent. That would save the cost of building a battery by several hundred euros, a critical factor in driving down the overall price of electric vehicles.

It’s a big step forward in a long road to commercializing this battery technology. Its early promise was that it would be safer and more energy-efficient than lithium-ion batteries, which have been used for decades in mobile phones and laptop computers. But the technology still needs to live up to that promise, and many investors have walked away from it.

A significant obstacle to making solid-state batteries is figuring out how to assemble the cells in such a way that they perform as designed. When a prototype passes the demanding 800-cycle test, it will be sent to Volkswagen and its other automotive partners to be used in testing programs. Then, it’s on to a second prototype, known as an A sample, which will be built using tooling similar but not quite the same as what’s planned for the series cell manufacturing process.