Solid state battery approved by Tesla co-founder

From CleanTechnica

Mercedes-Benz is piling on to the solid-state electric car battery stampede with a bang. The company has just inked a deal with the advanced energy storage firm ProLogium Technology, which cites Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard among the fans of its new ceramic-based solid-state energy storage platform for electric cars.

For those of you keeping score at home, Martin Eberhard co-founded Tesla with Marc Tarpenning in 2003, after reportedly having been inspired to fill in the electric mobility gap left when GM pulled the ill-fated EV1 off the market. Elon Musk got the company rolling in 2004 as an investor, and the rest is automotive history.

EV batteries certainly have come a long way since 2003. Our friends over at Car and Driver remind us that the original EV1 sported 26 lead-acid batteries for propulsion, good for just 55 miles of range a far cry from today’s lithium-ion technology.

The driving public had to wait a few years before lithium-ion electric car batteries entered the scene. Mitsubishi is credited with getting the first highway-legal, mass-produced EV with a lithium-ion battery pack off the ground in 2009 under the name i-MiEV, though some auto industry observers credit Tesla with delivering the first Tesla Roadster in 2008.

Tesla Motors previewed the Roadster Li-ion battery pack in 2006. A Tesla document on file at Stanford University describes it as “one of the largest and technically most advanced Li-ion battery packs in the world.”

“It is capable of delivering enough power to accelerate the Tesla Roadster from 0 to 60 mph in about 4 seconds,” the authors noted. “Meanwhile, the battery stores enough energy for the vehicle to travel more than 200 miles (based on EPA city/highway cycle) without recharging, something no production electric vehicle in history can claim.”

Be that as it may, the first iteration of the Roadster was expensive, and production maxed out at approximately 2,500 units in 2012. That’s somewhat ironic, considering that GM was roundly criticized for pulling EV1 after reaching a similar point in a similar timeframe, topping out at approximately 1,000 units. The i-MiEV fared much better than both cars, though it still only managed a little over 31,000 units in 10 years.

Lithium-ion EV battery technology has improved exponentially since those first two Li-ion EVs, but the technology still relies on a liquid electrolyte. Various attempts to replace it with a solid electrolyte have surfaced in recent years, in an attempt to improve battery range while cutting costs, streamlining the supply chain and reducing lifecycle impacts.

In 2017 the US Department of Energy noted that a solid-state EV battery could be forthcoming within the next few years, and it looks like its energy storage forecast has come true. All the leading automakers are piling on, even though the technology is not quite ready for its closeup.

The solid-state EV battery of the future is coming close, though. That brings us to ProLogium Technology, a Taiwanese firm founded and helmed by Vincent Yang, who launched the company 15 years ago with the vision of inventing a better battery. ProLogium bills itself as “a global leader in high-performing, safe, and cost-effective battery technologies in EV, consumer, and industrial applications” and the first to “successfully develop, mass produce, and commercialize the solid-state lithium ceramic battery.”

The company already has a pile of commercial accounts under its belt and a major scale-up is in the works (more on that in a sec).

And yes, ProlLogium has also enlisted Martin Eberhart’s opinion on its ceramic battery. In press release last April, the company cited this observation from the Tesla co-founder (and original CEO, for the record):

“ProLogium’s solid-state electrolyte battery technology is the most exciting new development I have seen in this field. The combination of safety, aging characteristics, fast charge rate, and bipolar packaging, all without sacrifice energy density, and at a competitive price, make ProLogium cells the best I have seen for automotive applications.”

Things have moved along at a quick pace since then. Last October, ProLogium announced the completion of a $326 million round of financing, which will be deployed to develop and expand Prologium factories in Asia, Europe, and the US in the coming years.

That brings us to the new Mercedes-Benz deal. A hint regarding the automaker’s interest in a solid-state EV battery surfaced last year, when Stellantis and Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler put their money on the solid-state battery firm Factorial.

The ProLogium deal was announced on January 27, which set the wheels in motion for Mercedes-Benz, though it will be some time before Mercedes-Benz customers get their hands on the new technology. The automaker expects to receive its ProLogium solid-state EV battery for test vehicles over the next several years, with full integration across a number of models expected after 2025.

As for the benefits of a solid-state EV battery over its liquid-electrolyte cousin, Markus Schäfer, Member of the Board of Management of Daimler AG and Mercedes-Benz AG, Chief Technology Officer responsible for Development and Procurement, noted that solid-state technology helps to reduce the size of the battery, which would provide high-end automakers with more design flexibility.

“This is why we are partnering with companies like ProLogium to ensure that Mercedes-Benz continues to break new ground in the automotive sector – for the benefit of our customers,” Schäfer said.

Automakers are scrambling to clean up their supply chains in order to satisfy the demands of car buyers and investors who want to drive around without killing the planet, so it’s no surprise the ProLogium emphasizes ease of recycling and reusing, as well as sustainable and ethical sourcing, for its solid-state EV battery.

Mercedes-Benz is among those scrambling to carve out a sustainability space for automotive technology in the sparkling green future. In a press release dated January 27, Mercedes-Benz touted an environmental validation audit for its oversized EQS 450+ electric car, and detailed its efforts to build recyclability and ethical sourcing into its liquid electrolyte EV battery. The company should find the going a little smoother once it transitions into the solid-state EV battery field.

For the record, Mercedes-Benz is not ProLogium’s first automaker. The Vietnamese automaker Vinfast, which first popped up on the CleanTechnica radar back in 2020, zeroed in on ProLogium for its EV batteries last year, so stay tuned for more on that.

 

A ground-breaking electric car from 1908

 From The Drive

Electric vehicles are a much more long-standing tradition of car culture than we often give them credit for. Ask someone the first EV that pops to mind, and the usual responses will be from the past couple of decades—the original Tesla Roadster, perhaps the late 1990s GM EV1, maybe in rare cases the awkward '70s wedge-shaped Comuta-Car. But well before any of these modern electric cars were dreamt up, there was a battle between EVs and ICE cars that was so fierce it made today's market look like a church bake sale.

We know how it turned out: The gas stations situated on every highway and thoroughfare throughout the country compared with often pitiful and scant electric charging infrastructure is proof that gasoline won the first battles. But it wasn’t for a lack of effort or well-built cars.

Source: Victoria Scott

 

This is a 1908 Columbia Electric Victoria Phaeton. Built by the Columbia Automobile Company, it represents the final glory days for a marque that once was poised to become an automotive Goliath on par with General Motors, and instead ended its history as a bankrupt footnote just four years after this carriage rolled off the assembly line.

It's rolling, driving proof that there was a vibrant electric vehicle market over a century ago—although it’s more appropriate to call it an electric horseless carriage than a car.

To fully appreciate this car—and understand how a company that was the first to ever sell 1,000 cars in a year, ever became little more than a niche curiosity—some background is necessary.

At the dawn of the 20th century, there existed three options to propel a carriage that wasn't a horse: steam, gasoline, and electricity. Steam was popular for its familiarity. Steam for power generation had been in use for decades at that point, but steam power requires a massive, high-pressure boiler (known for its propensity to explode), onboard water storage or an expensive and high-maintenance condenser, and immense amounts of time to get a motor actually running. Starting a steam car could take over 45 minutes on a cold day.

Believe it or not, gasoline cars were not much better in the early 1900s. Before the invention of conveniences such as the electric starter (patented in 1903 and implemented for the first time in 1912 by Cadillac) or the muffler (invented in 1899 by Columbia’s own Hiram Percy Maxim, the same man that invented the first working firearm silencers), gasoline-powered cars were extremely dirty, loud, and difficult to operate.

A misfire while hand-cranking could easily result in a broken arm or dislocated shoulder, and even when early internal combustion engines worked perfectly, hand-cranking required enormous amounts of strength and effort to overcome the inertia of enormous pistons and relatively high compression.

Juxtaposed against these two inconvenient, dangerous propulsion mechanisms, electric cars were massively popular. They benefited from the same attributes that have made them popular in their resurgence in recent times: They promised maintenance-free, silent, clean operation, and a fully contained and reliable source of power that required very little effort to run.

Charging, amazingly, was straightforward as well, with home charging stations available for owners with their own parking spots or "electric garages" that offered vast recharge stations to owners who couldn't justify their own in-home unit. By 1900, with 4,192 known registered vehicles on the streets of America, over 1,500 of them were early EVs, versus the less than 1,000 internal combustion engine-powered vehicles.

And despite this fiercely competitive nascent market—there were over 2,000 companies building cars in America from 1900 to 1919 in some form—Columbia was an early dominant name. The company originally started when its founder, Albert Pope, turned to automobile production in the early 1890s after making his fortune in bicycle manufacturing after the end of the Civil War. As bicycle demand finally began to evaporate and cars became more commonplace, his company built its first EV prototype in 1896 and was producing roadworthy consumer models by mid-May of 1897.

Accolades quickly followed. By 1900, Columbia set the record for the furthest range ever achieved with an electric car, driving 96 miles on a single charge with an early Runabout model. By 1902, it had become the first manufacturer to deliver over 1,000 cars in a year, beating Oldsmobile to the sales record.

Unfortunately, Columbia started running into financial issues as the decade wore on, spurred on by poor management and an inability to update its models rapidly enough for the quickly changing market. By 1910, the company had fallen into receivership, and by 1913, the holding company it had reorganized under, the United States Motor Company, a conglomerate meant to take on General Motors, had collapsed completely. Columbia never made another car.


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1903 EV charging

EVs were around when the first petrol cars started.  But the lead-acid batteries they had then just didn't have the energy density compared with petrol (gasoline) engines.

From the NY P ublic Library's digital collection
I love the early 'fast charger'

 

This car is a Rauch and Lang EV from 1919.  The Rauch and Lang company has a surprisingly long and complicated history, producing bodywork for other car manufacturers as well as an electric automatic transmission 30 years before the competition, and also inventing the electric forklift.  

The low energy density of the lead-acid battery continued to hold back EVs, with GM's EV1 which used lead-acid batteries, being withdrawn and crushed by the company.  The good news is that GM's piece of spite led to the foundation of Tesla.