The Electric

Introducing the 36-Million-Mile 'Century Battery' for EVs

Jeff Dahn's new brainchild is the "century battery." Photo: Courtesy Dalhousie University
By
Steve LeVine

Welcome back to The Electric! 

You’ve probably heard of the million-mile battery, the effort by automobile companies such as Tesla and General Motors to put electric vehicles with extremely long life on the road. In this week's edition, the inventor of the million-mile battery ups his game with a surprising new concept. 

Correction: In the flash analysis on Tuesday, I incorrectly wrote that no silicon anode companies have formed partnerships with automakers. At least two of them have—Sila Nanotechnologies, backed by Mercedes-Benz and BMW, and Solid Power, which has partnerships with Ford and BMW. Thanks to Sila CEO Gene Berdichevsky for emailing me about this.

Three years ago, Jeff Dahn, one of the world’s most respected battery scientists, attracted unusual attention—and some bewilderment—with a claim that he and other researchers had developed a battery that would power an electric vehicle for a million miles. Some of those scratching their heads wondered—even if Dahn’s battery worked as he said—how big the market was for a vehicle that could last a million miles. Wouldn’t the vehicle itself disintegrate by then? The idea caught the imagination of some in the industry, though: In 2019, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he would introduce an EV with a million-mile battery the subsequent year. Musk missed his self-set deadline, but General Motors claims its electric Cadillac Lyriq, to come out later this year, will contain a million-mile battery.

Now Dahn, a physics professor at Canada’s Dalhousie University and a battery adviser to Tesla, has a new claim: a 36-million-mile battery. If his numbers are right, the battery would last about 100 years, and hence he has dubbed it the “century battery.” No one is known to have made anything close to a century EV battery before, and in disclosing his lab results at an industry conference last week in Orlando, Fla., Dahn invited the obvious question: If barely anyone needs a million-mile battery, what’s the demand for a battery that lasts 36 times as long?