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If True, QuantumScape Has Made the Biggest Leap in Batteries Since the Debut of Lithium-Ion
But most battery researchers don’t believe it
On its first day of trading in November, shares of QuantumScape, a lithium-metal battery startup, surged by 57% in price. Then 10 days later, the price doubled, and less than two weeks after that, it was up another 72% — a total 5.7-fold increase in less than a month. The price has since plunged back to earth — sort of. As of the close of trading yesterday, it was up a mere 80% since its debut two months ago.
But the stock’s dramatic rise has its logic if you understand that QuantumScape is at the center of a whirlwind in lithium-ion battery technology. For four-and-a-half decades, ever since the invention of the first, primitive lithium storage device at Exxon, researchers have sought but failed to achieve what the oil company couldn’t: to make a battery powered by pure-lithium, the lightest metal on the periodic table. If they could, they would unlock immense power for electric vehicles — much more than the plain-Jane lithium-ion battery. But no one could navigate the stubborn metal.
The scourge was a sort of cancer — a nightmarish growth that tends to bloom from pure lithium metal while the battery is in use and trigger the device’s death. The dreaded growth is called dendrites, and researchers have failed to rid batteries of them, and even to discover what precisely causes them. The one thing the research community has done is agree that dendrites look horrible — like the craggy root of a tree, as some say, or spooky tendrils, spiky branches, or crawling moss. Whatever is most apt, researchers know that when dendrites burrow in, they can bid the battery they are working on goodbye.
In December, though, QuantumScape came out of a decade of stealth with remarkable data for a lithium-metal-based battery: If scaled up, its cells would charge up every time in 15 minutes and still retain 90% of their original capacity after 240,000 miles of driving. In one test, its cells even charged up in two minutes. Delirious excitement followed QuantumScape’s coming-out party on Wall Street and in the battery community.
But in an hour-long interview last week, two of QuantumScape’s founders were most…
