Tesla’s Four Million Mile Battery

The reemergence of the electric car in the twenty-first century can nevertheless be traced back to the era of the oil crisis. In 1972 Stanley Whittingham, a researcher at the oil company Exxon, was investigating a new battery design based on lithium. The lightest metal on the periodic table of elements, lithium can store fifteen times as much elect

Here’s what that means in practical terms. According to a 2017 study by two mechanical engineers at Carnegie Mellon University, an electric cargo truck capable of going 600 miles on a single charge would need so many batteries that it would have to carry 25 percent less cargo.13 And a truck with a 900-mile range is out of the question: It would nee

Batteries are getting better, but it’s hard to see how they’ll ever close this gap. If we’re lucky, they may become up to three times as energy dense as they are now, in which case they would still be 12 times less energy dense than gas or jet fuel.

Pound for pound, the best lithium-ion battery available today packs 35 times less energy than gasoline. In other words, to get the same amount of energy as a gallon of gas, you’ll need batteries that weigh 35 times more than the gas.

Electric cars provide perhaps the best example of new, and enormous, material dependencies. A typical lithium car battery weighing about 450 kilograms contains about 11 kilograms of lithium, nearly 14 kilograms of cobalt, 27 kilograms of nickel, more than 40 kilograms of copper, and 50 kilograms of graphite—as well as about 181 kilograms of steel,