Automakers seem to be in agreement that the ‘skateboard’ location for heavy battery packs—low and wide beneath the passenger floor—is the ideal layout for electric vehicles. Decades from now that might not be the cars. Researchers in Sweden have examined the possibility of using the vehicle shell as a battery casing... Could carbon-fiber electric-vehicle bodies double as ‘mass-less’ batteries?
Automakers seem to be in agreement that the ‘skateboard’ location for heavy battery packs—low and wide beneath the passenger floor—is the ideal layout for electric vehicles. Decades from now that might not be the cars. Researchers in Sweden have examined the possibility of using the vehicle shell as a battery casing... 
Until now, solid-state lithium-ion cells have been the likely path forward for battery technology, potentially finding their way into some production vehicles by 2025. But one other battery possibility is increasingly looking viable for the near future: zinc-air. The firm NantEnergy has made some new and exceptional claims about its latest zinc... 
Solid-state batteries sometimes sound a bit like the missing link that would punt electric vehicles soundly into mainstream acceptance. The list of potential virtues for solid-state tech, which would replace the polymer/gel electrolyte commonly used in lithium-ion cells with a solid one, is impressive: a longer driving range; smaller packaging;... 
European electric-carmaker Renault plans to build the continent's largest stationary battery storage network next year using old electric-car batteries. Renault announced on Tuesday that it will install used (and some new) electric car batteries in three locations: two Renault factories in France, and the site of a former coal-fired power plant in... 
Reduce, reuse, recycle. It's the same philosophy for electric-car batteries as for plastic grocery bags—almost. Knowing what happens to lithium-ion batteries from phones, cameras, and other electronic devices, many electric-car critics express a reasonable concern about what might happen to the similar batteries on a much larger scale that... 
Researchers at the University of Maryland, in conjunction with Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a new battery cathode material that they say could triple the energy density of lithium-ion batteries. The new material is an engineered variety of iron trifluoride, a well-known material that has had problems with rechargeability and low... 
Utilities are racing to expand battery storage on the electrical grid. The latest example is Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which submitted a request Friday to the California Public Utilities Commission to build and install four large banks of lithium-ion battery storage, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The projects would include Tesla's... 
Falling prices for lithium-ion batteries will enable half the world's electricity to come from renewable solar and wind by 2050. That still won't be enough to meet global climate targets, however. Those are the conclusions of a new report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), released today. Building on BNEF's Electrc Vehicle Outlook report last... 
Facing competition from American scientists, Japanese automakers are teaming up to develop solid-state lithium-ion batteries for electric cars, according to a Nikkei report. Some engineers see solid state batteries as the holy grail for cars because they are safer and have higher energy density than today's lithium-ion batteries. That can give... 
It's every electric car owner's nightmare: the car indicates that remaining range has suddenly plummeted to zero, the battery pack stops providing current, and the car won't run. For some 2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV drivers, that scenario has happened in real life. The problem has resulted in a program under which Chevy will replace the entire battery... 
With more than 300,000 Nissan Leaf electric cars on the road, some more than six years old, battery degradation is becoming more and more of an issue. The different rates of capacity loss are a topic of much discussion among Leaf owners, but it now seems likely that Nissan's choice of passive air cooling rather than active liquid cooling has... 
The Nissan Leaf, at least for the moment, remains the highest-volume electric car produced in history, with more than 300,000 sold. One of the measures that kept its cost down was the use of passive air cooling for its battery pack, rather than the pricier liquid cooling used by other makers to keep battery temperatures within limits. Nissan has... 
The town of Namie, in eastern Japan, was devastated by the earthquake and tsunami of 2011, and has struggled to recover from the devastation of that day. Almost seven years later, the first new plant in town is set to open, one contributing to clean energy and zero-emission vehicles to boot. Carmaker Nissan and an arm of the giant trading company... 
BMW sold more than 100,000 cars with plugs last year, adding together its battery-electric and plug-in hybrid models. That's roughly on a par with Tesla, and ahead of both General Motors and Nissan, two other pioneers in modern electric cars. The company has put far more plug-in cars on the road to date than its German counterparts, both Daimler... 
The main impediment to mass electric-car adoption is price, and the driving force behind that is the cost of lithium-ion battery cells. The performance of those cells improves at about 7 percent a year, give or take: Either the same cell costs 7 percent less after a year, or a carmaker gets 7 percent more energy capacity for the same price. Those... 
For a company that has only two battery-electric models in production, both several years old, VW Group spends a great deal of time talking about electric cars. The company has plans to launch 30 new electric vehicles by 2025, and has released four Volkswagen ID concepts, the first of which will enter production in November 2019. At its annual... 
The battery packs of most modern electric cars are far different than those in your mobile phone or other portable devices. In most cases, they include hundreds or thousands of cells, arranged into modules, and usually surrounded by channels containing liquid coolant to keep the battery in its desired temperature range. Now a new video shows... 
Sometimes it's the task of the Tesla communications department to explain, or provide context, or simply clean up the confusion after CEO Elon Musk says or tweets something about the electric-car maker. In the latest case, it was Musk's statement about Tesla Model 3 production equipment that required the good people of the company's long-suffering... 
Just a handful of companies today make the bulk of battery cells used in plug-in electric cars worldwide. Now the largest single maker of electric-vehicle cells in China has expanded its focus, from the home market to global markets and specifically the U.S. The name, CATL, may not be familiar to North American electric-car advocates, but the... ![Chevrolet Bolt EV being charged outside Go Forth electric-car showroom, Portland [photo: Forth]](https://images.hgmsites.net/tmb/chevrolet-bolt-ev-being-charged-outside-go-forth-electric-car-showroom-portland-photo-forth_100606247_t.gif)
As with any innovation, coverage of plug-in electric cars by mainstream media has been, shall we say, variable. Seven years after the first Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt were delivered to their buyers in December 2010, misconceptions and misinformation abound. Technology is often not a strong suit for business reporters, of course, and plug-in...