Tokyo – Nissan is working with NASA on a new type of battery for electric vehicles that promises to charge faster and be lighter but safer, the Japanese automaker said on Friday.
According to Nissan, the solid-state battery will replace the lithium-ion battery now in use for the product launch in 2028 and the launch of a pilot plant in 2024.
The battery would be stable enough to use in pacemakers, Nissan said. When finished, it will be about half the size of the current battery and will be fully charged in 15 minutes instead of a few hours.
Collaboration with the U.S. space program, as well as with the University of California at San Diego, involves testing various materials, corporate vice president Kazuhiro Doi told reporters.
“Both NASA and Nissan need the same type of battery,” he said.
Nissan and NASA are using the so-called “original material computing platform,” a computerized database, to test various combinations to see what works best among hundreds of thousands of materials, Doi said.
The aim is to avoid the use of expensive materials such as rare metals needed for lithium ion batteries.
Nissan also has historical experience with the Leaf electric car, which first hit the market in 2010 and has sold more than half a million units worldwide, although battery technology is different, said Doi and other company officials.
The Leaf battery has not had any major road accidents and some parts of the technology are still commonplace, such as rolling the battery cell, they said.
Other carmakers, including Japanese rival Toyota Motor Corp., as well as Germany’s Volkswagen and US carmaker Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co., are working on solid state batteries.
Recently, General Motors and the Japanese automaker Honda Motor Co. they said they were working together on next-generation electric vehicles.
But Nissan Executive Vice President Kunio Nakaguro said Nissan is extremely competitive and that the battery it is developing promises to be “a game changer.”
Interest in electric vehicles is growing due to concerns about the use of fossil fuels that contribute to them. climate change and pollution. Players in the electric vehicle industry, such as Tesla and Waymo, are also growing and competition is increasing.
Nissan Motor Co., based in Yokohama, has been eager to put the the scandal of his former superstar executive Carlos Ghosn. He was arrested in 2018 on various charges of financial misconduct in Japan, but missed bail in late 2019 and now lives in Lebanon, a nation of his ancestry that has no extradition treaty with Japan. He says he is innocent.
Ghosn, who ran Nissan for two decades, led the company in driving electric vehicles, which also manufacture March’s subcompact models and Infiniti luxury models.
- In:
- battery
- nissan
- Electric vehicle
- Electric cars
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