Featured SIAC EVs getting solid state batteries

Meh, it is another solid-state-battery gimmick.

Solid-state batteries are very difficult to manufacture, and they don't cycle well. Performance improvements are also becoming more incremental with the standard batteries advancing.

I will wait until the major players like Toyota, QuantumScape, and Samsung start making solid-state batteries, but even then, I don't expect major entry into the market until 2035.

 

funny you should mention Toyota and waiting for them.
It wasn't too long ago Toyota already hyped up their over promising - resulting in under delivering on solid state
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Correct. As I said, they are hard to manufacture, as they require a lot more precision, and don't cycle well, as the solid-state electrolyte, which also serves as the separator between the anode and cathode, cracks and/or loses contact with them during cycling.

Don't expect the smaller players to beat the bigger players. Sure, you can make a solid-state battery and put it in a car, but that doesn't mean that it will cycle well and/or be cost-effective. It's not to mention that the heavy pressurization plates that are needed to ensure contact with the solid-state electrolyte by sandwiching the pouch cells reduce the claimed energy density significantly.

So, yes, the technology is still far from being mainstream if ever. I'll give it another five or ten years and then see what happens. Meanwhile, the standard cells will keep getting better and cheaper.

 

Calm my friends, research and development explored many 'dead ends.'

"In response to a question about his missteps, Edison once said, “I have not failed 10,000 times—I've successfully found 9,999 ways that will not work.”Nov 20, 2013​

I admire researcher and their work because that is often how we find 'dead ends' with the possible exception of "cold fusion."

Bob Wilson

 

The following quotation is from Thomas Edison in The Electrician (London) Feb. 17, 1883, p. 329, "The storage battery is, in my opinion, a catchpenny, a sensation, a mechanism for swindling the public by stock companies.

Unfortunately, there is still a lot of truth to this to this date. Don't get sucked into battery hypes and claimed breakthroughs.

https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/227454-john-petersen/2479201-1883-interview-with-thomas-edison-on-energy-storage

 

Shouldn't be a surprise at all that Edison would say something negative about electrical storage. Hard to forget how he tried to crush alternating current in favor of DC. According to him - DC too, would be another catchpenny.
But modernly? Due to AC's "Corona discharge", if Edison had taken more time to do research - rather than putting out bad p/r over AC, he could have discovered that DC in the future would have been better then long distance high voltage AC. So now we are kind of stuck.
Oh the irony.
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You are not informed on this at all. That is OK. However, you should learn:

The IEEE news you posted is not very informed either. A gel catholyte, which they called “semisolid,” is already used in standard batteries. That does not make a standard battery a semisolid-state battery. It has nothing to do with that. What makes a battery solid-state is the type of the separator. In a solid-state battery or a semisolid-state battery, the separator is literally a solid material without any pores, such a ceramic, a glassy material, or a polymer. There are no pores in it as in the porous-membrane separator in a standard battery. The lithium-ions are transferred quantum-mechanically through the solid-state separator through an ion-transfer mechanism via the lattice of atoms. It is also called the solid-state electrolyte, or if you like, the solid-state anolyte in a semisolid-state battery with the catholyte portion of the electrolyte being a liquid or a gel. So, note that in a semisolid-state battery, the cathlotye (cathode portion of the electrolyte) is a liquid or a gel, but the anode portion (anolyte) is entirely solid. If there is no solid-state anolyte, then it is a standard battery, even if the catholyte is a gel.

If someone tells you that they have a semisolid-state battery or a solid-state battery but they have a porous separator, that is definitely a hoax/hype/gimmick. I don't know if that is the case with China's WeLion or not.

As I said, the problem with these (semisolid-state or solid-state) batteries is that they are hard and costly to manufacture because of the precision required with the solid-state separator (also called the solid-state electrolyte) and poor cycle life because the solid-state separator quickly deteriorates during cycling, and the heavy pressure hardware that is needed, which reduces the claimed energy density. So, yes, it is typically a gimmick these days.

And, yes, China, while being a leader on standard batteries, has been lagging behind in solid-state batteries, and Japan (Toyota), Korea (Samsung), Taiwan (ProLogium), and US (QuantumScape, Solid Power, SES AI, and others) have been leading.

 

So far, only on paper as in the first link or in a demo car as in the third link you provided.

Again, sure, you can make a solid-state battery and put it in a car, but that doesn't mean that it is cost-effective and able to cycle well. Don't believe on the claimed energy density either until you see commercial production models.

There is little info on the WeLion batteries. They seem to use a polymer solid-state electrolyte (SSE), a carbon/silicon anode, and a polymerized or gel NMC catholyte. They probably need pressurization hardware, which will reduce the claimed energy density of 360 Wh/kg. And the actual cycle life remains to be seen. No one will be happy with a battery that lasts for only 100,000 miles and costs 50% more than a standard battery, even if it is a little more energy-dense.

Another problem with polymer solid-state electrolytes is flammability. It was fireworks when a public-transit bus with a Bolloré/Blue Solutions polymer-solid-state-electrolyte battery caught fire in Paris. Polymer solid-state electrolytes are the easiest to work with but typically the most problematic.

Here is “Solid-state-battery roadmap 2035+” published in April 2022. It has a lot of good information. WeLion didn't rate well back then.

https://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/isi/dokumente/cct/2022/SSB_Roadmap.pdf

 

Sorry TB, you can't convince someone who's never wrong.

 

We will see how this will work out. 360 Wh/kg is quite impressive if that is the case. However, according to the specs published, the charging rates and cycling lives are not that impressive, and we don't know if this flammable-polymer-separator solid-state battery is safe. It may also be significantly more expensive.

 

Yes, of course it costs more, but the real question is how it will fare in real life in terms of performance and safety. There are so many parameters for a battery, and even if only one performance or safety parameter fails, it is a failure.

Would I drive a car equipped with a WeLion polymer-separator solid-state battery? Absolutely not until it goes through several years of commercial service. See the Bolloré/Blue Solutions video above. Now, that solid-state battery has a lithium-metal anode in addition to the polymer separator, which makes it a lot more dangerous due to lithium-metal-dendrite formation, but still.

 

Sorry Edison was proved to be very wrong about batteries and AC. Yes, don't get sucked into the hype. semi solid using a solid electrolyte and liquid or gel electrolyte should be much easier to manufacture than all solid state. The Edison quote about failure showed his method of brute force. Now we have computers and models coming up with likely candidates. Solid state will be more expensive than common lithium iron phosphate until manufacturing is dialed in.

The person that posted that seeking alpha bit has been consistently wrong about Teslas and BEVs. I remember reading his posts about how batteries would get so much more expensive as volume increased.