“Despite the academic success of battery research, the commercial battery world has suffered from a reputation of fraud.”

Last week, battery scientists and clean energy researchers Nicholas Yiu, Crystal Jain, and Melissa Zhang chronicled the recent history of fraud in battery commercialization, “ranging from misrepresentation to investors to various forms of sugarcoating promises of their new technologies,” the co-authors wrote on Medium. After a decade of low simmering investments, Wall Street and Silicon Valley are suddenly pouring billions of dollars into the invention of a superbattery for a mass-market electric vehicle industry. But if the often-sordid, 140-year history of automotive batteries is any guide, some of the unicorns that have emerged will turn out to be exaggerations and failures, with the very real chance of an outright fraud, or two.

This Time, We Really Do Seem to Be Moving to a New Age of Superbatteries and Electric Vehicles