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LG’s Next Battery Could Revolutionise The EV World
Their lithium-sulphur battery may soon make Teslas unbeatable.
The EV race is getting incredibly hot right now. While Tesla is still storming ahead in terms of sales numbers, its competitors are rapidly catching up in terms of range, charge times, and even price. The competition is neck and neck, and everyone is in a desperate scramble to develop the next cutting-edge EV technology that could give them the killer advantage. Because the battery is the bottleneck for an EV’s range, charge times, and cost, it has become the focal point of this frantic development. Tesla is working hard to develop and scale its 4680 cells, the VW Group is heavily backing solid-state batteries from QuantumScape, and CATL, one of the largest battery manufacturers in the world, has its astonishing Qilin pack. However, one of the most important and little-discussed players in the EV game, LG Chem, has decided to take a left-hand turn and develop a strange new kind of battery that could outgun its rivals while still being cheaper and better for the environment. But can they pull this off?
LG Chem, the industrial branch of LG, has been a lynchpin of the EV movement. Their packs are the ones used in the vastly popular Tesla Model 3 LR. Even the astonishingly fast Porsche Taycan uses LG Chem cells. In short, though you may not have heard of them, LG Chem is a goliath in the EV world.
So it came as a surprise to many when they announced they wouldn’t be developing solid-state batteries. Solid-state batteries use a solid electrolyte traditionally made of ceramics rather than the gel-like ones currently used, giving them an astonishingly high energy density, allowing for smaller and lighter battery packs, faster charge speeds, and even reduced prices. As such, pretty much every battery manufacturer sees solid-state batteries as the holy grail of EV technology. LG Chem’s reasoning for not going down this route is that the ceramics that solid-state batteries rely on are incredibly brittle and hard to manufacture, making scaled production a near impossibility within the next decade or so.
But LG Chem thinks they can get solid-state-like specs with an entirely different battery technology, and this one will be cheaper, safer, and better for the environment…
