Electric cars are no longer held back by crappy, expensive batteries

Re:Electric cars are no longer held back by crappy, expensiv... by Animats on Monday May 23, 2016 @12:04AM (#11751792)

Sodium batteries have been around since the 1960s.[1] They're a high-temperature battery, 90°C and upwards. Ford built some experimental vans with sodium-sulfur batteries in 1991. Two of them caught fire. That technology was abandoned for mobile applications.

There's still interest in this for stationary energy storage on power-grid scale. But not for mobile. Sodium catches fire if exposed to air.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery

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Re:Electric cars are no longer held back by crappy, expensiv... by lhl on Monday May 23, 2016 @06:36AM (#11752948)

Sodium-ion batteries aren't necessarily the dead end you might think.

Faradion has been working on portable batteries w/ decent energy density (~150 Wh/kg), excellent charge-discharge performance (93% capacity after 1000 cycles) and competitive costs: http://www.faradion.co.uk/about/news/2015/05/489/

Recent formulations for sodium rechargeable batteries are room-temperature and non-flammable: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4525335/

Here's a a short article progress being made getting Na-ion batteries into an 18650 form-factor (their current prototype has an energy density of about 90 Wh/kg): https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/a-battery-revolution-in-motion

While energy density is lower than Li-ion, there's probably a good argument for longevity, safety, and material costs.

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