A surprising breakthrough could help sodium-ion batteries rival lithium—and even turn seawater into drinking water. Scientists discovered that keeping water inside a key battery material, instead of removing it as traditionally done, dramatically boosts performance. The “wet” version stores nearly twice as much charge, charges faster, and remains stable for hundreds of cycles, placing it among the top-performing sodium battery materials ever reported.
Great response, people just love to parrot easy dismissals without looking and the sheer magnitude on innovation and commercialisation going on in this sector
Well all those graphs show is that the cost of batteries has gone down and that as a result electric cars contain more batteries and therefore more range. It doesn’t actually show that the individual battery capacity has increased.
The third graph that indicates battery performance vs battery chemistry doesn’t really show incremental improvement it just shows general improvement but there’s plenty of battery chemistries that are worse than pre-existing ones.
@[email protected] The hero we need!
Did you mean to tag me?
You are a literal scientist or something that always answers these questions. We need you!
Start of my villain arc right here. Like unidan, but with more buttholes.
Uh yeah, not a good idea now that I think about it, apologies.
But since you are already here, the guy above me says batteries have not improved much, and I’m too dumb to argue.
I won’t let it go to my head. I promise. Probably.
Anyways tho for an actual opinion:
This thread is a bit of a mess and I would caution taking anything being said (except by me, the absolute authority) without a large grain of salt - however mostly people aren’t contradicting each other, it’s just a hugely complex topic that quickly devolves into semantic-adjacent arguments about how we should be comparing battery chemistries (on market / in lab / cross-chemistry) and what degree we should be considering the “soft factors”; things like the number of recharge cycles, robustness of the cells to damage, cost of manufacturing and/or recycling the cells, etc.
Sodium batteries are a big deal, and as far as I’ve seen we’re finally at the point where they’re starting to become market viable, but they’re still a largely unproven technology. Arguing that battery tech hasn’t improved in the last decade is obviously wrong, but it’s also not wrong to say that there hasn’t been any dramatic improvement in the technology in the last decade. None of the many “miracle battery tech” announcements that promise to have double-or-better the capacity of lithium chemistries has panned out, we’ve just been making slow gains across many chemistries and those cumulative 10% improvements to battery life year-over-year are finally starting to add up to where the average consumer can really notice them.
Thank you hero!
Shhhh…we’re having a bullshit feel good moment…
It doesn’t really dispute it, though. Lithium-ion has seen a lot of improvement, yes, because it’s already a giant industry; other battery chemistries have a hard time breaking through because they require entirely different processes to manufacture.
I’m still rooting for it, but it’s not really the same thing.
This too is false, great progress has been made on for instance solid state batteries.
You can’t buy anything with solid state batteries yet, and when you can, they will cost a fortune.
Some progress is being made, but it hasn’t seen large-scale adoption yet. Which is the point, as I read it.
The “progress” is typical industry bullshit. See the absolute bullshit around the Donut SS battery.
Remember when Musk invented a battery with 30% better capacity? It was a 30% bigger battery.
SS batteries require manufacturing facilities with clean rooms on the order of chip fabs. You may see these in 2027, but only in expensive cars.
It takes time to scale up production, CATL is already building factories for it:
https://www.catl.com/en/news/6401.html
These press releases are weekly. Naxtra will be 30% cheaper, but also bigger and heavier. The problem here is the damn periodic table, someone should change it.
It takes time to scale production and even more time to adopt a new technology.