When considering cars, trucks, planes, trains and shipping, the transportation sector is the largest source of gas serra in the United States and beyond. If we have any chance of tackling climate change, we will have to stop burning fossil fuels in our cars. There is only one problem: Most electric vehicles depend on lithium-ion batteries made from heavy metals such as cobalt.
SVOLT is ready to produce cobalt-free batteries for electric vehicles
Not only is the material in short supply, but it is mined in a way that implies the child labor and the destruction of the environment. For these reasons, companies like IBM, Panasonic and Tesla have tried to make electric batteries without heavy metals.
The ORA Cherry Cat electric car equipped with a cobalt-free battery from SVOLT. | Photo Credits: NOW EV.
So far, many of these efforts are in their infancy and have yet to come out of the labs, but a Chinese company called SVOLT claims she is ready for start mass production of a cobalt-free battery. At the Chengdu Motor Show, the company showed an 82.5 KWh power supply inside a vehicle from the Chinese automaker Great Wall Motors. At normal temperatures, SVOLT claims its battery can deliver about 600 kilometers of autonomy on a single charge. It would also allow a car to accelerate from zero to 60 miles per hour in less than five seconds.
SVOLT said the battery is “expected” to reach the cars that go on sale in the Chinese market, but did not specify a timing, nor did he say how many cobalt-free power supplies he can produce at the moment. It is also worth pointing out that other companies are producing cobalt-free batteries on a large scale. As Electrek points out, most of the units Model 3 sold by Tesla in China are equipped with a cobalt-free lithium-iron-phosphate battery made by Contemporary Amperex Technology.