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The biggest barriers to widespread adoption of electric vehicles are their limited range and long charging times compared to gasoline cars. But the release of test results from a startup building a new solid-state battery suggests we may soon blast past that barrier.
Claims of “revolutionary” new battery technologies are a dime a dozen these days, but none so far have come close to knocking lithium-ion off its perch. Its balance of cost and energy density are hard to beat, and with prices still dropping fast, it’s the go-to technology for everything from smartphones to drones.
So when battery startup QuantumScape announced in September that it had cracked the “Holy Grail” of battery technology—a solid-state lithium metal battery—it didn’t generate much buzz.