Many automakers have announced they will electrify entire vehicle portfolios in the years to come. With more electrified cars on the road, battery production will become increasingly more important. Adding to the positive outlook for lithium-ion cell makers is Volkswagen's potential partnership with CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology Company... World’s 3rd largest battery firm may ally with VW for electric cars in China
Many automakers have announced they will electrify entire vehicle portfolios in the years to come. With more electrified cars on the road, battery production will become increasingly more important. Adding to the positive outlook for lithium-ion cell makers is Volkswagen's potential partnership with CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology Company... 
Over the past decade, advances in battery technology have progressed steadily, but not quite as quickly as impatient electric-car advocates might like. With electric cars and plug-in hybrids fast becoming part of every carmaker's lineup, durable, less expensive, and higher-capacity batteries are more important than ever. Yet despite growing... 
Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz, is expected to announce that it will invest up to $1 billion to build electric SUVs and batteries in and around its Alabama assembly plant. The plans, first reported reported Thursday in The Wall Street Journal (paywalled), represent a major expansion of electric-car manufacturing in the U.S. So far... ![Mercedes-Benz EQ electric car concept [photo: Axel Harries]](http://images.hgmsites.net/tmb/mercedes-benz-eq-electric-car-concept-photo-axel-harries_100597897_t.gif)
The first vehicle in history considered to be an automobile was the Benz Motorwagen of 1885. It was also the first vehicle from an automaker that has been around for the duration of the industry: we know it today as Mercedes-Benz. In other words, the company has been building cars for 132 years. DON'T MISS: Mercedes to launch 10 electric cars by... 
Renault hasn't tackled the home-energy storage market to the degree its alliance partner Nissan has, but it has found another use for "second-life" batteries. The French brand has worked with UK-based Connected Energy to install two electric-car DC fast-charging stations powered by second-life batteries. Once the energy capacity of lithium-ion... 
General Motors has informed "a few hundred" owners of 2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV electric cars that their cars could suffer from a problem with the lithium-ion battery pack that could cause it to fail without warning. The cars were among the very earliest Bolt EVs produced for public sale, so are likely concentrated in California and perhaps Oregon... 
Relatively few people focus on it, but the huge Japanese electronics company Panasonic is a minority shareholder in electric-car maker Tesla. The deal dates all the way back to November 2010, the same year that Tesla completed its initial public offering after Toyota took a stake in the company and sold Tesla its Fremont assembly plant in... 
Alkaline batteries have been a staple energy source for decades, but their potential has been capped by their chemical properties. Notably, alkaline batteries cannot be recharged, which means their application is often limited to single usess in small devices such as flashlights and remote controls. An alkaline battery finding its way to an... 
The report that Toyota is planning an electric car with a solid-state battery for 2022 has led some fans and advocates to suggest huge new leaps in electric cars are imminent. The 2011 Nissan Leaf had an EPA-rated range of 75 miles combined; the comparable figure for a 2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV is 238 miles. That's remarkable progress, and clearly...