Tesla’s batteries might soon last a million miles

Electric Vehicles (EV) are becoming increasingly popular owing to its enormous benefits over our conventional petrol or diesel vehicles. EV demand less maintenance and provide cheaper running cost.

Moreover, the harmful carbon dioxide emissions that are caused by our conventional fuel-driven vehicles are reduced significantly with the use of electric vehicles. EV is much more responsive in comparison to our traditional fuel-driven cars and provides features like immediate torque and better performance.

EV has been in the market for a while now, and their popularity has been increasing. Tesla launched its first EV in 2008, Tesla Roadster, which ran approximately 200 miles on a single charge of the battery. Tesla Roadster marked the beginning of the era of EV.

Immediately after, a Japanese automobile company, Mitsubishi launched an EV named i-MiEV. Soon after Tesla introduced EV in the market, many other companies released their EV such as General Motors (GM) released Chevrolet Volt, and Nissan released the Leaf.

Tesla was founded in 2003 with the aim of proving that EV is a much better and quicker alternative to gasoline cars. After introducing the world with its cutting-edge battery technology via Tesla Roadster, Tesla then launched the world’s first-ever all-electric premium sedan Model S followed by which Tesla launched the safest and quickest sports utility car Model X in 2015.

Ever since then, Tesla has announced its plans to get low-cost all-electric cars Model 3 as well as all-electric trucks Tesla Semi into the market to make it available to more and more people. Tesla aims at combining electric cars, batteries, and renewable energy generation and storage to have a powerful yet clean, safe, and affordable transport.

Electric cars without the batteries are just cool-looking stationary vehicles. Having EV that would have long-lasting batteries is still a challenge that’s being faced by many of the automobile companies that are trying to build the most efficient EV.

Currently, Tesla cars use power cells which provide a lifespan of approximately 300,000 to 500,000 miles. However, as per the announcement made by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla in April 2019, Tesla is working on developing EV with a battery life of over 1 million miles. He also went on to say that, this battery would outlive the lifespan of the car itself.

After months of the announcement made by Elon Musk, a group of researchers from Dalhousie University, Canada who also have an exclusive tie-up with Tesla published a paper in The Journal of the Electrochemical Society mentioning about the new lithium-ion battery that could charge any EV for over 1 million miles, i.e., over 4000 charges.

The paper also mentioned that the lithium-ion battery would lose only 10% of its energy in its whole lifetime. The research team at Dalhousie University is led by Jeff Dahn, a physicist and one of the world’s foremost lithium-ion researchers who is also popularly known as Tesla’s “battery guru.”

Jeff Dahn went on saying that, development of such battery would be highly beneficial in Tesla’s two new projects, “robotaxis” a self-driving robot car that would be operated as a taxi service and Tesla’s “long-haul electric trucks” as they would be around on roads more often than any private EV.

If Tesla succeeds in getting EV with lithium-ion batteries that would last for over 1 million miles, it will prove to be a big game-changer in the world of EV from the time when Tesla’s Model S launched just seven years back ran only 150,000 miles on a single battery.