Inside America's Race for a Better Electric Car Battery

Big problems in the supply chain for electric-car batteries came to light last March, when Elon Musk partnered directly with a New Caledonian nickel mine amid rumors that China was planning export limits, Forbes reported at the time. China retains a "near-monopoly position" on the world’s production and refinement capacity of rare earth metals; Russia provides much of the world’s nickel; and Congo has most of the cobalt, which in many cases isn't ethically mined. To get in the global race, much less keep up, American companies need to innovate. At the New York Times, Jack Ewing and Eric Lipton take a look at US automakers' quest to develop a "new generation" of batteries that are cheaper, more powerful, and quicker to charge.

These performance features "will be the yardstick by which cars and trucks are judged and bought," they write. Auto giants are betting billions on small start-ups, to the point that executives at Factorial Energy told the Times they "stopped returning calls from automakers offering bags of money." In many cases, the focus is on the chemical makeup of the batteries: Cobalt-light and cobalt-free prototypes, along with ones with more nickel, are in the works. But much hope rests on a shift to "solid-state" batteries that promise to be lighter, easier to charge, and safer than current batteries that rely on a liquid solution to allow the flow of electricity between components. Those batteries may not be widely available until the end of the decade though. (Read the full story to learn which US automakers are pursing which innovation.)