A colossal claimed breakthrough in electric car batteries: VW-backed QuantumScape says it has solved the decades-long problems preventing the use of volatile, pure lithium metal. 1/3 link.medium.com/2EcgqRmFt9
With the breakthrough, QuantumScape announces a $4 billion IPO, the first U.S. battery company to go public in a decade. 2/3
If the claim pans out, the batteries will be in VW electrics by 2025, one-upping Tesla by going 50% further on a single charge. 3/3
For battery nerds, I asked Jagdeep Singh, Quantumscape's CEO, whether he was using pure metallic lithium. He responded that he was and described an "'anode-less'” design, which means that as manufactured, there is no lithium (or any other abode material) at all on the anode." 4/6
"This means that all the lithium that forms the anode in-situ comes from the cathode during cycling, which in turn means this is 'electrochemically distilled' lithium, the purest lithium you can have since nothing but pure lithium can get through the solid-state separator." 5/6
"This is also the most energy-dense configuration since there is zero excess anode material, just the lithium that’s cycling."
