Lithium is a critical ingredient for today’s electric-vehicle batteries. Although a host of chemistries show promise—such as sodium-ion, fluoride-ion, or iron-ion—lithium-ion is proven, and the demand for it has been increasing rapidly as electric cars take off. And yet lithium has become unexpectedly plentiful and a lot cheaper... EV battery suppliers face glut of lithium, tight supply of other materials
Lithium is a critical ingredient for today’s electric-vehicle batteries. Although a host of chemistries show promise—such as sodium-ion, fluoride-ion, or iron-ion—lithium-ion is proven, and the demand for it has been increasing rapidly as electric cars take off. And yet lithium has become unexpectedly plentiful and a lot cheaper... 
As part of its latest revelation of a new, mainstream electric SUV for 2021, startup automaker Fisker (the eponymous founder's second under his own name), implicitly made a somewhat startling admission: The solid-state batteries the company has been working on may not be ready any time soon. Founded by Henrik Fisker, the former BMW designer who... 
Toyota has been a laggard in the race to transition to electric cars. The company was an early leader in fuel-efficient hybrids, but has since focused on developing fuel-cell vehicles, and executives have expressed skepticism about electric cars and lithium-ion batteries. Now in an effort to accelerate its move to electric cars, the company may be... 
Nissan unveiled Tuesday a new version of the 2019 Leaf electric car, called the Leaf Plus or Leaf e+, that can go well over 200 miles on a charge. Although such a model has been a long time coming, the 2019 Nissan Leaf Plus stands as strong evidence that in the eight years since the first deliveries of the Leaf, Nissan has listened carefully to... 
VW announced that it is now designing the last combustion engines it will sell. Ford trademarks two possible names that could go on its upcoming electric SUV. Toyota explains why it still uses nickel-metal hydride batteries. And a Chinese battery company says it will pass the magic $100-per-kilowatt-hour threshold as soon as 2020. All this and... 
Toyota continues to stay the course with nickel-metal hydride battery cells for many of its hybrid vehicles, even though most other hybrid vehicles from other brands have moved on to using lithium-ion cells exclusively. According to Prius chief engineer Shoichi Kaneko, in an interview this past week at the LA Auto Show, most of Toyota’s... 
A Woburn, Massachusetts, company may be attracting big name attention for its solid-state technology that it says can withstand higher temperatures and offer higher capacity. For battery makers, producing a stable solid to withstand the rigors of charging and discharging has proved elusive. Ionic Materials said in February that it had secured $65... 
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... 
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...