News

To produce EVs, you need batteries. To build batteries, you need lithium. That’s why Tesla has signed a long-term contract with a pair of mining companies to supply lithium hydroxide from a site in northern Mexico. Bacanora Minerals Ltd and Rare Earth Minerals PLC are partners in a joint venture […]

A new report from Lux Research makes the argument that LG Chem could supplant Panasonic as the leader of the growing electric vehicle (EV) battery market, and details the potential path to that happening. That report — “Watch the Throne: How LG Chem and Others Can Take Panasonic’s EV Battery […]

  SK Innovation, a unit of SK Group, is a small fish in a sea of Asian battery suppliers like Panasonic, Samsung and LG, but its automotive customer base is growing, and it is rapidly ramping up production. Since the Korean firm opened its battery plant in Seosan in 2012, […]

Rare earth elements, prized for their magnetic properties, are used in a wide range of modern technology, including advanced electric motors. Unfortunately, they are expensive, and some are available only from problematic parts of the world. To make it easier to recover and recycle rare earth minerals, the DOE’s Critical […]

The Volkswagen Group has nominated 44 of its suppliers to collaborate on a new strategic level under the Future Automotive Supply Tracks (FAST) initiative. One of the first batch of preferred suppliers is LG Electronics, which provides high-voltage batteries for the Group’s various plug-in vehicles. Volkswagen launched the FAST program […]

Utilizing battery cells from LG Chem as well as Samsung SDI, Audi has announced that it is planning to produce a fully electric SUV with 311 miles (500 kilometers) of range. If that wasn’t enough to get you sitting up much straighter in your chair, Audi says that it will […]

Skeleton Technologies’ new ultracapacitor-based 24 V Engine Start Module (SkelStart ESM) is designed to ensure trouble-free engine starting in any conditions. Batteries are a major headache in the trucking industry, particularly in cold climates. Long-haul drivers often leave engines idling for long periods to keep batteries charged. Starting failures occur […]

3M and LG Chem have formed a patent license agreement to allow the Korean battery-maker to use 3M’s formulation of nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC) cathode materials in lithium-ion batteries. NMC, valued for its balance of power, energy, thermal stability and low cost, has been the subject of some rivalry […]

Arkema, a global chemical company, and SCE France, a subsidiary of Canadian electricity producer Hydro-Québec, plan to create a joint laboratory that will focus on developing a new generation of materials for the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries, in particular new electrolytes (solvents, lithium salts) and conduction agents (carbon nanotubes, conductive […]

Critics of electric vehicles like to argue that they’re really not greener than gas-powered cars: those tailpipe emissions just move to the source of electricity (which, in the US, is often coal or natural gas), and that electric vehicle battery will eventually require disposal. The first argument doesn’t take into […]

Electric car enthusiasts are pretty quick to drop the term “vaporware” these days… because there’s a lot of vaporware in this market. Heck, there’s a lot of vaporware in the car market in general. So, when Faraday Future* unveiled plans this week to build high-performance electric cars, it decided to jump straight […]