Electric vehicles may have become a whole lot more popular over the past five years or so, but that’s despite some issues they still face regarding things like limited range and slow charging speeds. The result of these issues is that plenty of buyers are unsure about whether an EV might be for them. But there’s one technology that has been hailed as a savior for all of the EV issues related to batteries, and that’s solid-state battery tech.
This technology has been so hyped for so long that, at this point in time, it seems not only almost mythical, but as if we might never actually see it in the real world. So, what’s the state of solid-state batteries right now, and how far are we from finally seeing them and reaping their rewards? Here’s a look. What are solid-state batteries? What is a solid-state battery in the first place? Solid-state batteries keep the fundamentals of traditional battery design, offering an anode and a cathode with a porous separator in the middle, and a substance through which electrons flow from one side to the other.
This, in turn, creates a circuit. But while a conventional battery is built with a liquid electrolyte solution on the inside, a solid-state battery instead makes the separator between the anode and the cathode the electrolyte itself. The end result? The battery is much more energy-dense, allowing manufacturers to fit more energy in the same size package or build batteries of a similar energy level that are much smaller.
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