From The Mobilist Inbox This Week
Dendrites, demand signal, and a battery report
Each Wednesday, The Mobilist highlights reader articles on Medium, comments, and updates.
The world of lithium dendrites: There was much chatter on Twitter, Slack, and LinkedIn around yesterday’s story on QuantumScape’s 10-year quest to produce a working solid separator for a lithium-metal electric vehicle (EV) battery. But on Twitter, Mobilist reader Jordi Sastre, a PhD researcher at Empa/ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, voiced a primary ask of QuantumScape: “I understand that they want to keep their ‘magic tricks’ secret, but I would love to see those results published in a scientific journal at some point.”
Waiting for the EV signal: As certain as the EV age seems, given the ton of new models coming onto the market, it isn’t sure at all. What we are watching is a supply signal — carmakers are making a big bet that we are in a transformational period to electrics. What we still don’t have is a clear sign from mass-market consumers that they will buy EVs. We should know by the middle of the decade whether the transformation is real. But Brian Heligman, a PhD student at the University of Texas, Austin, tweets that the signal is already here: “When you already see $50,000 luxury EVs, $5,000 EVs with damn respectable specs, and $500 electric rickshaw batteries, [it] seems like a sure thing.”
How were batteries in 2020: Battery Brunch and Intercalation Station produced a “State of Batteries” report for last year.
