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BMW and Ford Team Up In the Most Expensive, Highest-Stakes Race in Batteries
They will battle VW, GM and Toyota to conquer the lithium metal anode
For seven months, lithium-metal darling QuantumScape has enjoyed an often-fanatical following as the front-runner in the attempt to commercialize next-generation electric vehicle batteries. Now, though, its arch enemy, Denver-based Solid Power, has unexpectedly emerged with a big, $130 million investment led by Ford and BMW on the promise of an industrial-size scaleup of its technology next year.
Which is to say: It’s a race.
Only a little over four months ago, Solid Power announced that it had produced a 22-layer pure lithium-metal test cell at a size of 20 amp-hours, an attempt to capture the much higher energy density possible in such a battery, far greater than ordinary lithium-ion. The cell was relatively large — a bit bigger than a smart phone, and much heftier than QuantumScape’s most recent 2 Ah cell, about the size of a postage stamp. Still, Solid Power’s achievement did nothing to dethrone QuantumScape, which continued to hog the attention.
Yesterday, though, Solid Power CEO Doug Campbell announced a vast improvement in his company’s work: As part of the Ford-BMW investment announcement, Campbell said the company…
