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Elon Musk’s automotive company has signed a contract to supply specialized equipment for the production of its own batteries and its own battery packs for the 4 plants where Tesla’s electric cars are assembled, in Fremont, Nevada, Berlin and Shanghai . There are increasing signs that Tesla batteries will be hybrid, something that no one has ever done before. These are lithium metal / lithium ion batteries that increase electric vehicle mileage by 25%.
Usually when we talk about an electric car with higher mileage (range extender), we mean a car with a battery, which has a small gasoline engine that is used as a generator to charge the batteries, if necessary. A similar car is the BMW i3 Rex, which has batteries for 203 km and a range extender for another 430 km.
Tesla offers something similar, but mileage is increased only by electricity, reports Electrek.
The team of Canadian scientist Jeff Dan from Dalhousie University has been working with Elon Musk since 2016 and is funded by Tesla. This team has already become a special research department, which has developed and patented a series of innovations in the field of rechargeable batteries.
Jeff Dan and his team have just described in Joule magazine their new technology for producing a whole new type of rechargeable battery. They consist of long-lasting lithium ion elements and energy-dense lithium metal elements.
“The higher energy density of the battery will lower the price of electric cars and increase their mileage. Replacing the graphite anode in traditional lithium-ion batteries with a lithium metal anode significantly increases the energy density. But the Lithium metal electrodes quickly lose their properties and become damaged In order to create batteries with high energy density and long technological life, we offer the new lithium-ion / lithium hybrid batteries, which are manufactured by applying a lithium-metal alloy about graphite, “says the scientific article.
Until now, this approach has led to the destruction of lithium-ion elements, but scientists have achieved the necessary stability thanks to the electrolyte of the double salts. Also, because batteries don’t always perform at peak performance, hybrid batteries can operate in lithium-ion mode without significantly compromising their longevity.
In practice, this means that if the lithium-ion battery provides 300 km, the hybrid battery increases it to 400 km.
Musk has always wanted to establish his own battery production for a price of $ 100 for 1 KWh in mass production of electric cars. This means that this parameter will drop by more than 50%, because according to expert estimates, this price is now $ 158 per kilowatt hour of battery. If Elon Musk succeeds in this endeavor, he will become virtually untouchable by any competition, whose best batteries cost 2-2.5 more per kilowatt hour.
