A New Battery Breakthrough That Could Save Electric Vehicles During a Recession

Gas prices are plummeting, but GM’s new EV Hummer will debut a game-changing battery

Illustration: Evan Weselmann

Another unsuspecting victim of Covid-19 should be electric vehicles: Oil prices have cratered, making gasoline-fueled cars dirt-cheap to run. But a little-noticed breakthrough in automotive batteries has shaken up China’s EV market, and now is about to arrive in the United States, where GM and VW already have their hands on it.

The advance is the result of a global race to substantially reduce expensive cobalt in lithium-ion batteries. Until now, cobalt has been 20% to 33% of the cathode, the heart of lithium-ion batteries. The advance reduces that to 10%, a drop that researchers were calling highly unlikely just six months ago, cutting the price of an electric vehicle and adding up to 25 miles of range. Cobalt — sometimes called “blood cobalt”— also comes largely from a controversial supplier, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where workers toil in often horrible conditions. “This leap is big because it gets harder and harder to remove the last bit; 33% to 20% is less challenging than 20% to 10%,” said Venkat Viswanathan, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “It becomes exponentially harder to get the cobalt out.”

The new, advanced battery, called NMC 811, solves an electrochemistry puzzle that has vexed researchers for more than five years. Already it captured 12% of Chinese EV sales in January, up from less than 1% in 2018, according to Adamas, a Canada-based research firm. LG Chemical, the South Korean battery-maker, made the NMC 811 battery that GM will commercialize next year in its new electric Hummer, the ultra-heavy pickup truck popularized during the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. The revived Hummer will have up to 400 miles of battery life on a charge, GM says, sufficient to erase almost anyone’s “range anxiety,” the malady afflicting anyone conjuring a spouse or child stranded on a snowy night in a dead car. After GM, VW says it will introduce the new battery in its own electric vehicles over the next year, and experts say most of the other major carmakers won’t be far behind.