Professor Fichtner, as one of the “battery pundits”, you naturally drive an electric car. How satisfied are you with it?
We have an electric car at the institute, which I use to drive to lectures in Munich, for example. It works well. The charging speed is a bit too slow for me, but I mostly charge here at the institute, where it doesn’t matter. However, colleagues sometimes use it to travel longer distances, such as to a conference in Trieste.
Short range, long charging time, high price—until now there have been many reasons not to buy an electric car. Can you give the skeptics hope that battery technology is making progress?
The next generation of batteries, which are already being installed in vehicles in Asia in particular, can be charged with 6C. This means that the battery is charged from 10 to 80 percent in eight and a half minutes. A 350-kilowatt column is enough for this.
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You’re talking about lithium-ion-based batteries that have a liquid electrolyte. Hasn’t this technology reached its limits?
Things are still happening. But our engineering approach is a hindrance, particularly in Germany. In Europe, we rely on lots of small battery cells that we then put together in a module. Then we connect several modules in a small space and the compact battery pack is ready. It consists of an incredible number of small parts, there’s a lot of packaging, cables, and housings, and the amount of actual storage material inside is comparatively low. This is also the reason why Europe has to rely almost exclusively on batteries with the high-performance NMC material, i.e. batteries based on nickel, manganese, and cobalt. That’s not the case in China.
Why is that?
In China, the interior of the batteries in a battery pack is much more spaciously designed. Larger cells with more space for the storage material allow the use of cheaper material, such as lithium iron phosphate, which is found in the positive pole of the battery, the cathode. Lithium iron phosphate has a low density and is quite voluminous. But these battery packs have the space for this. The first vehicle models with iron phosphate batteries are now being launched on the market in China. They have a range of 1,000 kilometers and can be charged in ten minutes.
Impressive! But are these cars really more environmentally friendly? A study by the Association of German Engineers (VDI) comes to the conclusion that an electric car—depending on the type of electricity used for production and operation—is only environmentally superior to a combustion engine after 60,000 to 90,000 kilometers.
This is just a recent study with some questionable basic assumptions. Institutions such as the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) or the Fraunhofer ISI in Karlsruhe have been carrying out such life cycle analyses for a very long time and come up with different results. Their analyses show that the CO2 breakeven point is already reached after 20,000 to 40,000 kilometers, depending on the battery and electricity mix. Tesla uses almost 100 percent renewable energy at its factory in Texas—so after just 8,000 to 9,000 kilometers, the carbon footprint is already better than that of a combustion engine.
That leaves the issue of safety. Spectacular cases of battery fires occur time and again.
There is now data on this as well: In the United States, the figures have been compiled by insurers and America’s road safety organization. For every billion kilometers driven, there were 96 fires in combustion engines and three to four in electric vehicles. This means that combustion engine vehicles burn 25 times more frequently than electric cars. Swedish figures show a similar ratio. So a supposedly higher fire risk really can’t be an argument against electric mobility.
When will battery technology be competitive with combustion engines?
It is already on a par technologically, now it’s all about the costs. However, if you compare the engine and battery, which dominate the price, you are also comparable here. Here’s one example: One kilowatt hour of battery capacity currently costs around 90 US dollars to produce. For a battery with 70 kilowatt hours, I am therefore looking at production costs of 6,300 US dollars. My old Alfa Romeo Spider, a fun car for the summer, needed a new engine a few years ago—it cost me 8,000 euros. Batteries are therefore no longer more expensive than gasoline or diesel drives. In China, two thirds of all electric cars are already cheaper than their combustion engine counterparts. Models are already available there for the equivalent of 10,000 euros. Technologies such as the sodium-ion battery will become even cheaper in the future. The first such cars are already on the road in China—city runabouts with a range of 300 kilometers.
»Technologically, battery technology is already on a par with the combustion engine. Now it’s primarily about costs«
Maximilian Fichtner Director at the Helmholtz Institute Ulm for Electrochemical Energy Storage
Why are EVs so much more expensive in Europe?
China clearly has an advantage here. What has now happened at Northvolt…
…the Swedish battery manufacturer has become insolvent due to quality issues…
…that happened in China as well. At the beginning of almost every series production run, 20 to 30 percent of the cells have faults. However, while the timetables here have barely taken this into account and Northvolt has run into difficulties due to overly optimistic promises, people in China have shown patience, stayed on the ball, and simply carried on. It took five years to adjust all the little screws in production—and in the end the result was practically perfect. Today, the Chinese are the world market leader.
Is patience lacking in Germany for this?
Yes. Battery cell production is a highly complex topic. If we lose patience too quickly and unsettle investors by repeatedly discussing the possibility of staying with the combustion engine, then we will not succeed. We have bought ourselves some time in Europe by imposing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. But if the time is not used, I think the situation will become really bleak.
There is also a lot of money at stake. Billions and billions have been invested in the expansion of electric mobility in the USA—at least under Joe Biden’s presidency. Do we need more subsidies in Europe in order not to miss the boat?
As part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the US government has made 650 billion US dollars available to support companies in the green sector—including battery companies. The companies in China have also received support over the years. Here in Germany, on the other hand, this is castigated as state dirigisme and a planned economy. Moreover, unlike in Germany, Chinese battery and car manufacturers reinvest almost all of their profits. This has given them a head start and enabled them to build up huge development departments. Samsung and LG in South Korea have also made it to the top in this way. You have to be prepared to take entrepreneurial risks.
That’s easy to say. In Germany, companies have learned the hard way about battery projects—including Evonik in the Litec joint venture, which the company left in 2014. There are limits to shareholders’ patience with loss-makers.
And it is precisely because of this attitude that we will eventually have to buy everything that requires a longer development time from abroad.
You are focusing on the development of solid-state batteries. What advantage does the technology offer over batteries with a liquid electrolyte?
The potential storage capacity is significantly higher—by 30 to 40 percent. You would therefore have around 350 to 400 watt hours per kilogram of storage material. With the same range, the battery would be correspondingly lighter.
Where does research start to drive this process forward?
A lot of work is currently being done on anode-free or “zero-excess” cells. The anode, i.e. the negative pole, is currently still made of graphite. However, it has now been discovered that the cell also works if the graphite is omitted. If lithium passes through a solid electrolyte, it is deposited directly on the collector foil instead of in the graphite and forms a metal layer. This saves a lot of volume and mass. The laboratory cells, which have now been manufactured in Canada and China, store around 700 watt hours per kilogram. This would more than double the current capacity. A vehicle would be able to travel 1,900 kilometers, or the battery pack could be only half as heavy, but still have the previous range.
But it will probably also be significantly more expensive. Are we talking about cutting-edge technology for high-end vehicles and sports cars?
There’s a wide variety of concepts. Solid-state batteries usually contain a ceramic based on lanthanum-zirconium or phosphorus-sulfur. However, you are going to have problems with a rigid ceramic that is only a few micrometers thick and has a storage material in front of it that expands when charging and shrinks when discharging. The membrane only allows lithium to pass through when it is in direct contact with the material. For this reason, a little liquid is often added to fill gaps or the electrolyte is applied as a gel.
There are also lithium polymer batteries in which lithium passes through a polymer and is deposited on the negative pole during charging. Such batteries have accumulated 50 million fleet kilometers in the French car sharing system Bluecars.
So why don’t they play a major role?
For most everyday applications, we already have very good solutions that are affordable and comparatively sustainable. Iron phosphate, for example, is a common mineral. If you sprinkle iron salt into municipal wastewater, you will get iron phosphate as a white powder.
Which part of the world do you think is currently leading the way in the development of next-generation batteries?
It’s hard to assess developments in China. But at the moment, the USA seems to be ahead. There are simply a lot of companies working on it there, and there is a different startup culture. Banks there don’t ask how money can be saved, but how much money can be spent in a certain amount of time in order to reach the goal faster.
While the majority of newly registered vehicles in China have an electric drive, we are still far away from this in Europe. In Germany, not even 14 percent of new cars are currently all-electric. Is it even possible to meet the target set by the European Union that newly registered vehicles should no longer emit CO2 from 2035?
The abolition of purchase incentives in some countries has certainly caused a lot of damage. An additional factor in Germany is that we led the way with combustion engines for decades and are therefore attached to them. In other parts of the world that don’t have this history, electric mobility is seen as a great thing because it makes cities clean and quiet. New industries are emerging to support the whole, and countries are less dependent on oil and gas supplies from some potentate.
Nevertheless, some regions will probably remain dependent on combustion engines for longer due to a lack of infrastructure or thanks to alternative fuels—Africa, for example, or parts of South America.
But perhaps things will turn out quite differently. I was recently invited to an international energy and mobility congress in India, which had 70,000 participants. Electric mobility is growing rapidly there, albeit from a low level, and the state and industry are formulating a path to leadership. It’s also booming in Africa in many places. Electric tricycles, where you simply replace the battery, are becoming increasingly popular there. Ethiopia already banned the import of new gasoline and diesel cars in 2024 and is now fully committed to EVs because the country has a lot of hydropower and they want to get away from expensive oil imports.
When will the last combustion engine roll off the production line?
If you extrapolate the development in China, only five percent of new registrations there will be pure combustion vehicles by 2028. This will probably take longer in Europe. I believe that we will have plug-in hybrids for a while yet. Combustion engines may be slowly coming to an end that way. But as batteries evolve towards shorter charging times, greater safety, longer range, and better charging infrastructure, everyone will ask themselves at some point whether they still need their gasoline or diesel-powered cars anymore.
And what will become of your Alfa Spider?
It will be 25 years old this year and is resting in the garage until the summer. However, if you’ve been driving electrically for a while, it’s quite a change to get into this rattler, which you first have to ramp up to 3,000 rpm until it starts to show power. We will not be able to inspire future generations with something like this.