Battery researchers at Canada’s Dalhousie University have released a paper detailing a new lithium-ion battery that “should be able to power an electric vehicle for over 1 million miles.”
The team, which has partnered with electric car company Tesla since 2016, outlined its findings in The Journal of the Electrochemical Society earlier this month.
Led by physicist Jeff Dahn, the group claims the battery not only lasts significantly longer than any other on the market but that it will only lose a small percentage of its energy capacity over its lifetime.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk alleged that a million-mile battery was on its way in April but was met with skepticism.
Tesla’s current vehicle batteries only survive on an average of 300,000 to 500,000 miles. Batteries for most electric vehicles also lose up to half of their energy capacity after only 1,000 cycles.
The new battery from the team at Dalhousie, however, will allegedly only lose 10 percent of its energy capacity after 4,000 cycles.
The group notes that such robust batteries would be perfectly suited for self-driving electric-trucks and robo-taxis, two vehicles actively being developed by Tesla that would rack up more miles than the average driver.
The researcher team even provided exhaustive details on their creation for others hoping to develop long-range batteries as well.
“Full details of these cells including electrode compositions, electrode loadings, electrolyte compositions, additives used, etc. have been provided,” Dahn wrote. “This has been done so that others can recreate these cells and use them as benchmarks for their own R+D efforts.”
Even more astonishing, it appears that Dahn’s team may even have a better battery than the one described in their paper. Tesla recently received a patent for a battery invented by Dahn and others that is nearly identical to the million-mile battery.
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