The Battery(s) Is the Achilles' Heel Of The Electric Car But New Tech Is Coming

In a recent Business Insider column, they report on a Tesla Buyer who freaked out when he went through a carwash, wrecked his battery, and was hit with a $21K replacement charge. It was worse for me, in my Jaguar I-Pace a tow truck driver improperly strapped the car down, warped, and broke batter containment and the estimate to replace both the battery and the containment unit cost over $100K effectively totaling the car. We’ve recently talked about the cost of public charging which often exceeds the cost per mile of using a gas car (though most of us that have electrics also charge at home and a significant number of us have solar on those homes).

Where an ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) car has as its weakness the extremely complex gas engine, we’ve been making them for decades and have learned to make them, given their complexity, well. But Lithium-Ion batteries were initially conceived to power small electronics and even when we moved them to laptop computers, we had issues with thermal overload, fires, and failures due to poor charging practices and electronics.

In addition, electric cars have two battery problems, the main battery which drives the car, and the 12-volt battery that powers the car’s electronics. This is a holdover from the ICE cars but ironically, even if you have a fully charged main battery, if the 12-volt battery doesn’t have enough charge, or has failed, the car will start having problems including refusing to power on.

Here Are Some Of The Existing and coming improvements.

Better Power Management

One of the things that we quickly learned from cars thanks to Toyota who did a big study some years ago, was that if you can avoid fully charging and fully discharging the car the batteries will last a lot longer. As a result, all electric vehicles keep at least 20% of the battery in reserve, 10% top and 10% bottom, so the batteries last longer. Tesla did allow you to use that capacity if you needed extra range but that did come with the cost of faster battery wear.

As a result, the batteries have held up to wear surprisingly well. Here is a video on a Tesla that had 400K miles on it (the battery on the car had been replaced at 217 miles due to non-age-related battery problem) and clearly this battery needs to be replaced but I think most folks would be fine with a battery life in the 100K to 200K range. This is both due to the car’s battery management and Panasonic’s excellent work on battery formulations. Tesla warranties the battery for 70% capacity at 100K to 150K depending on car (the newer cars tend to have the better warranties). I should point out that users that drive their cars more moderately are not showing much if any degradation at all.

Tesla has had a unique problem with car washes suggesting they have a unique battery containment sealing issue that may just be a small part of their overall quality problem, where defects in the cars are being charged to owners not covered under warranty. Frankly, while I love electric cars, I wouldn’t buy a Tesla given the quality risks and behavior of their CEO. Their new Cybertruck is having lots of issues as well, and even their new electric Semi truck is experiencing battery issues.

Battery Technology

We are due for some better battery technology, and we have both solid-state batteries coming and new battery formulations that look promising. I’d hoped we would have gone farther with Ultra-Capacitors which promised near instant charging and no degradation over time, but this technology lacks sufficient energy density making it useful for cold weather starting and for energy boosts in high performance cars but little else at the moment.

Toyota has been pushing their new Solid-State battery design which they expect to deliver to market in 2027 which promises 10-minute charging times and up to 932 (that’s pretty specific) miles of range. This would be a game changer, typically, a forecast out over 2 years is unreliable, and this one was made back in 2023. In addition, Toyota has been a huge Hydrogen advocate, and they had a point, but the cost to build out a Hydrogen fuel infrastructure would be similar to the cost we are undergoing to build out the electric infrastructure which is already in progress. It seems unlikely, given the existing electrical charging investment, that governments would be willing to pivot to Hydrogen now. And with Shell shutting down existing fueling stations, the trend is in the wrong direction right now.

Other Battery Formulations

There have been a number of alternative battery formulations that have shown promise over the years, the first I followed was Lithium-Air but while this technology had decent energy density the longevity was horrid with around a 2 month service life and IBM, the company that I was following working on this technology abandoned it.

Sodium-Ion batteries have a number of advantages including low cost, better thermals, far less chance of a fire,  lower cost, and a far smaller environmental footprint make this technology interesting. However, this technology lags Lithium Ion in energy density and service life both of which will need to improve before this battery formulation will be adopted.

There are other formulations under development focuses on markets like aeronautics but they have yet to reach deployment stage even though they do look very promising right now. In the end I expect we’ll have this battery problem sorted before 2030 but, right now, and until at least 2027, we are stuck with some form of Lithium-Ion batteries in vehicles.

Wrapping Up:

Electric Cars like the Hyundai Ioniq N, now Car and Driver’s Electric Car of the year, are getting far better in terms of bridging the experience between driving an electric and ICE car. But the batteries remain their weakest link both because these cars tend to use a redundant 12-volt battery which needs replacing every couple of years and because Lithium Ion is expensive, nasty to mine environmentally, is prone to thermal overload, wears out, and doesn’t have the needed energy density (it’s just better than the alternatives at the moment).

But once we can replace these batteries, with solid-state batteries looking the most promising right now but with an estimated production date of 2027 there is still plenty of time for another technology to emerge that could be even better like advanced Ultra Capacitors.

It should be possible to swap out our Lithium-Ion battery packs for one of these advanced systems but whether we get that option will depend on the incentives offered to automotive OEMs to provide that option, right now they’d rather you just bought a new car making upgrades unlikely.

Rob Enderle is a technology analyst covering automotive technology and battery developments at Torque News. You can learn more about Rob on Wikipedia, and follow his articles on Forbes, on X, and LinkedIn.