WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Elon Musk has a beef with Sam Altman and OpenAI, and now he wants to buy the company … or does he just want to slow them down enough to catch them?

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As if Elon Musk doesn’t have enough going on, a consortium of investors led by him announced plans Monday for what appears to be a hostile takeover of OpenAI. The investor group offered nearly $97.4 billion – which would make it one of the biggest M&A deals in history – to buy all of OpenAI’s assets and is “prepared to consider matching or exceeding higher bids,” it said in a press release sent to reporters.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman isn’t having it. He immediately replied on X, “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” and said that Musk was simply “trying to slow OpenAI down.”

The consortium includes Baron Capital Group, Valor Management, Atreides Management, Vy Fund III, Emmanuel Capital Management, and Eight Partners. While Emanuel Capital Management has a slimmer public profile, the others are firmly in Musk’s orbit.

Baron Capital Group, which manages multiple mutual funds, was founded by Ron Baron. The firm’s Baron Partners Fund, which he manages with his son Michael Baron, has large stakes in Tesla and SpaceX.

Atreides Management is associated with Boston-based hedge fund Atreides. As we previously reported, founder Gavin Baker spent 18 years at Fidelity where he made his first investment in SpaceX. Atreides has also invested in Tesla and Baker was a public supporter of Musk’s enormous Tesla pay package.

Valor Management was founded by Antonio Gracias, an early SpaceX investor and former Tesla board member. He was also an investor in Musk’s SolarCity before Tesla acquired it.

Vy Capital, founded by Alexander Tamas, also has a SpaceX stake and has invested in a number of other Musk companies like The Boring Company and Neuralink.

Eight Partners VC is better known as Joe Lonsdale’s firm 8VC, according to public filings. Lonsdale is a vocal fan of Musk and runs in similar circles. He recently appeared on CNBC calling himself “a huge fan” of Musk’s DOGE, an interview that Musk reposted on X.

It’s not yet clear how serious this group is. One plausible analysis floating around the internet is that this is as much trolling as offer. Some say this is Musk’s attempt to drive up the price that Altman’s team would have to pay to buy OpenAI’s underlying assets in order to restructure it from its original non-profit status.

Musk was part of the founding of OpenAI as a nonprofit AI research organization and Musk has been attempting to halt Altman’s restructuring plans.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

If someone can create a humanoid robot that is as good as humans in many tasks then companies will be able to automate all kinds of jobs.

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One of the world’s most advanced humanoid robots Atlas has been all play and no work for a while now as it backflips, dances, jogs, and does parkour for fun, But now it looks like the bot is going to go to work.

Now, six months after the legendary robotics lab unveiled an all-new electric Atlas, they’re showing off more of what it can do. A recent video shows Atlas picking auto parts from one set of shelves and moving them over to another, a job currently handled by factory workers.

Apart from being electric, the new Atlas has a unique way of moving. Its head, upper body, pelvis, and legs swivel independently. So, its head might rotate to face the opposite direction of its legs and torso, Exorcist-style, before the rest of its body twists around to catch up.

The new demo highlights another core change for Atlas. Whereas, in the past, Boston Dynamics meticulously programmed the robot’s most impressive manoeuvres, the latest video, by contrast, shows a fully autonomous Atlas at work.

“There are no prescribed or teleoperated movements; all motions are generated autonomously online,” according to a description accompanying the video.

See it in action.

Why release this video now? One, humanoid robots are having something of a moment. And two, ditto for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in robotics. Boston Dynamics led the pack for years, but it didn’t rush Atlas into production for commercial use. Neither has it added significant amounts of AI to the equation. Now, it appears to be interested in both as competition from other companies – in the US and China – heat up.

Last month, the lab, which is owned by Hyundai, announced a partnership with Toyota Research Institute (TRI) to add AI, TRI’s specialty, to Atlas. Alongside pure research, the partnership hopes to make Atlas into a general-purpose humanoid.

It’s an intriguing development. In terms of pure robotics, Atlas is world-class. TRI, meanwhile, is working to develop Large Behaviour Models, which are like large language models for robotic movement and manipulation. The idea is that with enough real-world data, AI models like this might develop into a kind robotic brain that doesn’t need to be explicitly programmed for every scenario it might encounter.

Google DeepMind has also been pursuing a similar approach with a vision-language-action model called RT-X and united 33 research labs in an effort to assemble a vast new AI training dataset for robotics. And just last week, a TRI-funded MIT project showed off a new transformer algorithm like the one behind ChatGPT, only designed for robotics.

“Our dream is to have a universal robot brain that you could download and use for your robot without any training at all,” CMU associate professor David Held told TechCrunch. “While we are just in the early stages, we are going to keep pushing hard and hope scaling leads to a breakthrough in robotic policies, like it did with large language models.”

Boston Dynamics isn’t alone in its efforts. If anything, it’s late to the party. A host of companies, many born in the last few years, share the goal of general purpose humanoids. These include Agility Robotics, Tesla, Figure, and 1X, among others.

In an interview with IEEE Spectrum, Boston Dynamics’ Scott Kuindersma said this may be “one of the most exciting points” in the field’s history. At the same time, he acknowledged there’s a lot of hype out there – and a lot of work still to do. Challenges include collecting enough of the right kind of data and dialling in how best to train robotics algorithms.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be more Boston Dynamics videos out soon.

“I want people to be excited about watching for our results, and I want people to trust our results when they see them,” TRI’s Russ Tedrake said in the same interview.

AI-Atlas is just getting started.

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China is increasingly sanctioning the export of rare earth metals which are used in everything from computer chips to batteries, so now there’s a race to replace them.

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It’s no secret that the world needs to transition away from fossil fuels – and quickly. But, as China increasingly bans the export of Rare Earth metals in tit for tat measures against the US for their sanctions on Chinese companies, and as companies scramble to replace them with everything from coal ash waste to quantum materials, one of the big concerns surrounding humanity’s breakneck green energy transition is that the electric motors and electric batteries that will power that future need rare earth metals, and asides from the geopolitics involved getting those metals can be disastrous on both environmental and societal levels. For these reasons, as well their overall pricey-ness and scarcity, automakers like Tesla are actively searching for alternative materials to power their growing fleet of EVs.

Simply put, humans don’t have enough time to research alternative materials for our green energy future. But luckily, Artificial Intelligence (AI) ‘lives’ life in the fast lane.

A UK tech company called Materials Nexus recently announced, with the help of its AI platform, they’d developed a magnet that’s completely free of rare earth metals. While this isn’t the first such device – other companies have also created “Clean Earth” magnets – they did so after a about decade of trial-and-error. According to Materials Nexus’ press release, the company’s AI platform only took an amazing three months to design its rare earth metal-free creation, MagNex.

“The current industry standard permanent magnet took decades to discover and even longer to develop into the products we use today; MagNex took just 3 months to design, synthesize and test – x200 faster,” the press statement reads. “MagNex can be produced at 20 percent of the material cost and a 70 percent reduction in material carbon emissions (kg CO2/kg), compared to rare earth element magnets currently on the market.”

Materials Nexus worked with the Henry Royce Institute and the University of Sheffield to synthesize and test the magnet. The company said that a similar AI design approach could also revolutionize other facets of the green energy transition, including the design of semiconductors and superconductors. This seems more than possible, as only days before the reveal of MagNex, scientists from the UK and Japan successfully created an iron-based superconducting magnet using AI.

While the arrival of capable AI brings with it much deserved scepticism, as well as job security-induced anxiety, AI is particularly suited to be revolutionary in the field of materials science. According to the Materials Project, an open-source database meant to help support research into new materials, humans discovered 20,000 materials through experimentation – a number that was upped to 48,000 thanks to the dawn of computing.

In late 2023, researchers at the Google-owned Deepmind reported in the journal Nature that its Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME) used those 48,000 materials to then dream up an additional 2.2 million materials – 380,000 of which are considered stable and excellent candidates for synthesis.

Completely transitioning the entire world from fossil fuels to electricity as soon as humanly possible isn’t good enough – luckily, we have an AI ace up our sleeve.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

The US debt burden will bankrupt the country says Musk, could Bitcoin pay it all off?!

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“Excess government spending is driving America into bankruptcy,” Musk posted to X, the social media platform he bought and rebranded from Twitter, adding: “This debt growth is unsustainable.” And many people, including in the Pentagon where one way to break the US military is to bankrupt them first, agree.

Musk was replying to Bitcoin-backing Kentucky senator Rand Paul, who called the “status quo of $2 trillion annual deficits unsustainable.”

Paul made headlines in 2015 when he began accepting bitcoin campaign donations to support his Republican White House bid – with Donald Trump and many other 2024 candidates following suit – and in 2021 said in an interview he believed crypto could replace the US dollar due to a lack of confidence in the currency and increased government surveillance.

U.S. national debt has skyrocketed in recent years, crossing the $34 trillion mark at the beginning of 2024, largely due to Covid and lockdown stimulus measures that sent inflation spiralling out of control and forced the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates at a historical clip.

Earlier this year, Trump floated the idea he could use bitcoin to “pay off our $35 trillion – hand them a little crypto check, right? We’ll hand them a little bitcoin and wipe out our $35 trillion,” he said.

In July, Trump promised to create a “strategic national bitcoin reserve” and predicted bitcoin could eclipse gold’s $16 trillion market capitalization during an appearance at the Bitcoin 2024 conference.

Musk’s campaign against excessive US spending has resulted in calls for the creation of the Doge Department Of Government Efficiency, which Musk has said he believes could strip $2 trillion from US spending.

The Doge department is a nod to the shiba inu doge meme that’s also linked to the dogecoin cryptocurrency, named by Elon Musk as his “favourite” cryptocurrency and accepted as payment by his Tesla car company.

Doge’s association with the dogecoin bitcoin rival has caused the dogecoin price to more than double over the last month, with billionaire Mark Cuban joking Musk could put dogecoin in the US Treasury.

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As renewable energy is rolled out globally it still needs massive amounts of Grid Scale Storage, and this is Tesla’s largest battery storage by far globally.

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Tesla has secured an absurdly large contract to provide over 15 GWh of Megapack to California’s Intersect Power. The Megapack has become the go-to, poster child product for large-scale energy storage around the globe.

It’s by far Tesla’s fastest-growing product and enabled the company to deploy a record of 9.4 GWh of energy storage last quarter – more than twice the last record.

Now, Tesla has secured its biggest Megapack contract to date and it is absurdly large. Today, Intersect Power announced that it secured a contract for Tesla to provide them 15.3 GWh of Megapacks through the next 5 years.

Intersect Power wrote in a press release: “Tesla and Intersect Power today announced a contract for 15.3 GWh of Megapacks, Tesla’s battery energy storage system, for Intersect Power’s solar + storage project portfolio through 2030. This agreement, when combined with previous commitments, make Intersect Power one of the largest buyers and operators of Megapacks globally with nearly 10 GWh of large-scale energy storage expected to be deployed by the end of 2027.”

As mentioned above, most of that capacity is expected to be deployed within the next 2 years, which means a significant part of Tesla’s capacity, which is currently ramping to 40 GWh per year, is going to go to Intersect.

Intersect currently only “2.2 GW of operating solar PV and 2.4 GWh of grid scale storage in operation or construction.” So this is a big step up for them, but the 10 GWh of projects planned for the next 2 years are reportedly already in the pipeline.

Mike Snyder, Senior Director of Tesla Energy, commented on the new partnership with Intersect: “Intersect continues to be an exceptional partner, and their development expertise combined with the plug-and-play nature of Tesla’s vertically integrated technology enables the speed and scale needed to enhance grid resilience and support greater renewables integration.”

Sheldon Kimber, CEO of Intersect Power, added: “No one in the market can match Tesla’s depth of experience in storage technology. This partnership is the foundation of one of the largest and fastest growing storage portfolios in the country here at Intersect Power. This storage franchise is the perfect complement to our multi-billion dollar expansion of renewable generation that is expected to more than triple the size of our company over the next three years.”

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Elon Musk wants humans to be able to cognitively merge with AI, but in the meantime this is neural chip helps solve paralysis and much more …

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Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of the neurotechnology company Neuralink, which has been jamming neural computer chips into the brains of monkeys for a while now, and wants to merge humans with AI, has said the first human received an implant from the brain-chip startup and is recovering well. The surgery is not a surprise: the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had given the company clearance in September to carry out the first trial of its implant on humans.

“Initial results show promising neuron spike detection,” Musk said in a post on X on Monday, a day after the chip was implanted.

Spikes are activity by neurons, which the National Institute of Health describes as cells that use electrical and chemical signals to send information around the brain and to the body. Musk did not provide further details.

In follow-up tweets sent in between arguing about video games and bantering with far-right influencers, the businessman said the first Neuralink product was called Telepathy which, funnily enough might very well be because that’s the kind of system he’s trying to eventually create, even though telepathic communication is already possible and is oldish news …

”It enables control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking,” he wrote. “Initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs. Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is the goal.”

Musk has a long history of bold promises but a spottier record of fulfilling them. In 2016, he wrongly predicted that within two years it would be possible for a Tesla to drive autonomously from New York to Los Angeles. That year he said his SpaceX rocket company would fly to Mars in 2018 – it still has not.

In 2017, Musk suggested Neuralink’s first product would be on the market “in about four years”. However, Tuesday’s news was a “significant milestone” towards that goal, said Anne Vanhoestenberghe, a professor of active implantable medical devices at King’s College London.

“For the brain-computer interface community, we must place this news in the context that while there are many companies working on exciting products, there are only a few other companies who have implanted their devices in humans, so Neuralink has joined a rather small group,” she added.

“I expect Neuralink will want to give the participant time to recover before they start training their system with the participant. We know Elon Musk is very adept at generating publicity for his company, so we may expect announcements as soon as they begin testing, although true success in my mind should be evaluated in the long-term, by how stable the interface is over time, and how much it benefits the participant.”

The startup’s study, Prime, is a trial for its wireless brain-computer interface to evaluate the safety of the implant and surgical robot. Researchers will assess the functionality of the interface, which enables people with quadriplegia to control devices with their thoughts, according to the company’s website. Neuralink and Musk did not immediately respond to a request for further details.

Musk replied to a crypto influencer though on X who quoted him as saying the company would “help in restoration of eyesight” to add that Blindsight was another product Neuralink was working on.

Neuralink first announced the implant trial in September last year, and said that, as I reported a while ago, that during the study an autonomous robot developed by the company would surgically place the implants’ “ultra-fine” threads that helped transmit signals in participants’ brains.

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The world is at the beginning of a massive energy transition, and Musk wants his companies to play a central role.

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Say this for Elon Musk: When it comes to setting goals, he doesn’t short change himself. Tesla unveiled their so-called “Master Plan 3” recently, with Musk, the electric vehicle maker’s high-profile CEO, playing the starring role at the company’s first-ever annual investor day.

For his part, Musk did nothing to disappoint those expecting bold pronouncements because the goal of the new master plan is nothing less than worldwide energy sustainability.

“There is a clear path to a fully sustainable Earth – with abundance,” Musk proclaimed in his opening remarks. “I’m just often shocked and surprised by how few people realize this.”

Achieving Musk’s goal won’t come cheap: Tesla estimates the investment to accomplish it will total $10 Trillion, which is ironically way below Bloomberg NEF’s estimate of $92 Trillion – 70% of which consists of a global shift to electric vehicles.

It’s not the first time Musk has swung for the fences. The event at the company’s Gigafactory Texas plant near Austin marked Musk’s unveiling of Master Plan 3 for the company, the latest iteration of a vision that extends his first Master Plan in 2006.

That plan, which included creating a low-volume, expensive electric vehicle whose sales would pave the way for affordable, high-volume cars down the road, hasn’t exactly worked out as Musk foresaw. However, it eventually did lead to the production of the Model 3, a high volume seller even at relatively steep price of about $40,000.

Musk’s Master Plan 2 – some call it Part Deux – in 2016 targeted the creation of solar panel roofs and integrated battery storage, development of self-driving capability 10 times safer than manual driving and expansion of its production line across all key customer segments.

Much of the plan hasn’t reached fruition, and the company two weeks ago recalled 362,000 vehicles because of fears that its experimental driver-assistance software, called Full Self-Driving Beta, may cause accidents.

His vision for Tesla is to deliver 20 million cars annually by 2030, and since inception Tesla has produced 4 million vehicles and currently has capacity to manufacture 1.9 million cars per year as it ramps production capacity.

Nonetheless, Tesla’s forging ahead with an audacious plan that, if achieved, would completely transform the way world procures and uses energy – much the way Musk’s Space X venture aims to revolutionize space travel – and the plan has five overarching elements.

Namely re-powering the world’s existing power grid with renewable energy, switching to electric vehicles, switching to heat pumps for home, business, and industry climate control, electrifying high temperature heat delivery and development of green hydrogen for industrial processes, and finally fuelling ships and airplanes with sustainable energy.

Despite the projected cost Musk and Tesla officials said the global transition they envision ultimately will cost 40% less than persistent reliance on fossil fuels – notably a cost that doesn’t include the additional cost of building resilient climate-proof infrastructure and re-homing up to a billion people whose countries have flooded as sea levels rise if we don’t find ways to tame climate change …

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500 miles is the sweet spot for trucking because truckers have to stop every 8 hours, and this is a major achievement.

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Elon Musk has confirmed that Tesla Semi has completed its first 500-mile trip with a full load – quite a feat for a battery-electric truck. Tesla Semi is an all-electric class 8 commercial truck that Tesla first unveiled in 2017, and it was supposed to be in production in 2019. However, it was delayed several times.

At the time, it was quite revolutionary to have a purely battery-powered truck with a full 80,000-lb. class 8 capacity capable of traveling between 300 and 500 miles, depending on the model.

Since then, several other companies have managed to beat Tesla to market with class 8 electric semi-trucks, such as Volvo, Freightliner, and Nikola, but they have only managed to come close to the lower end of the range.

Now Tesla is finally bringing its electric truck to market with deliveries expected to start this week, and it’s a 500-mile version of the electric truck. Last night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed that a Tesla Semi has now completed a 500-mile trip with a full load.

It seems a bit last minute to complete the first 500-mile drive, considering Tesla is expected to deliver production versions of the truck to customers this week, but Tesla has presumably previously completed many shorter trips that confirmed the full range could reach 500 miles on a single charge.

Five hundred miles with a full load between charges is the sweet spot for a commercial long-haul semi-truck, because after about eight hours of driving, a break for the driver is mandatory.

With that capacity and a much lower cost of operation per mile than diesel trucks, Tesla Semi is expected to have a major impact on the trucking industry, and if the price point is good, which could be confirmed at the event this week, it could truly be a game changer.

The 500-mile range on a full charge is going to be good to convince people that battery-electric trucks can take over the whole Class-8 market. However, I think the best use cases at first are going to be for companies, like Tesla, that often need to move a lot of cargo between two locations that they control, like a factory and delivery centers.

That way, it can have charging stations at each location that charges the trucks while they are loaded, and then you get an all-electric and emission-free trip between the locations while massively reducing your fuel costs.

What company will not want that? When it’s going to be time to update their fleets, companies will fight to get those trucks as production ramps up.

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Elon Musk has announced on Twitter that all Teslas will soon be using his space based satellite communications system to connect to the internet.

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Elon Musk has just announced that the upcoming second-generation Starlink internet satellites include cellular antennas for connections with phones from T-Mobile in the US and potentially other operators as well. And then, following on from that announcement he responded to tweets asking whether the connections will work with Tesla vehicles that currently connect to AT&T’s LTE network. And, according to Musk, the answer is an empathic “Yes!”

While he didn’t go into detail about how it will all work or how much data owners could expect to access from the connections when they’re somewhere out of reach by terrestrial cell phone towers, the move isn’t surprising because it means even more income for the world’s richest man. It also means that one day Starlink could become a major global carrier as the company signs more and more deals around the world.

The Future of Communications, by Futurist Matthew Griffin

Musk said during the event that the satellite-to-cellular coverage from Starlink will be capable of providing a 2–4Mbps link, which is shared by everyone in the satellite’s coverage area. That likely won’t be enough for some Premium Connectivity features, like livestreaming video from your car’s cameras. Still, a connection that works at all, “anywhere you have a view of the sky,” is better than no connection, potentially.

In a comment to CNN, LightShed Partners analyst Walter Piecyk pointed out that enabling access could work similarly to an MVNO like Google Fi, which uses multiple carriers as its backbone, or that Musk could change the carrier deal away from AT&T in the future.

Over the years, Tesla has scaled back the connectivity packages that come standard with its electric vehicles. As explained here, cars purchased before the end of June 2018 include Premium Connectivity at no extra charge, while cars purchased before July 20th, 2022, all include at least the Standard Connectivity package with in-car maps and navigation. Those connections are available for the lifetime of the vehicle, “excluding retrofits or upgrades required for any features or services externally supplied to the vehicle.”

Adding the Premium Connectivity subscription to a Tesla that doesn’t have it currently costs $9.99 per month or $99 annually.

The recent shutdown of AT&T’s 3G network showed how that can come into play, as older vehicles built prior to mid-2015 without an LTE capable modem may have required a $200 upgrade to stay connected.

Meanwhile, new or used electric cars purchased today from Tesla “will have Standard Connectivity for the remainder of the eight years from the first day your vehicle was delivered as new by Tesla, or the first day it is put into service, whichever comes first.”

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What if your cars battery lasted longer than you could live?

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With things like fast charging and long lasting million mile batteries that can pack more power into a smaller lighter format, electric roads, and even beefier fast charging cable systems, electric vehicles (EV) are improving all the time. That said though one of the biggest concerns about EVs is that the batteries will need replacing after a few years, at great expense. After all, your smartphone battery is likely to have seen better days within as little as three years. But now a Tesla researcher is getting ready to kick this idea into touch once and for all, after demonstrating batteries that could potentially outlive most human beings.

Tesla enthusiasts are likely to have heard of Jeff Dahn already. He’s a professor at Dalhousie University and has been a research partner with Tesla since 2016. His focus has been to increase the energy density and lifetime of Lithium-Ion batteries, as well as reducing their cost. Dahn appears to have hit the motherload along with colleagues on his research team. In a paper published in the Journal of the Electrochemical Society, the group claims to have created a battery design that could last a staggering 100 years under the right conditions.

The Future of Mobility 2030, by Keynote Speaker Matthew Griffin

Dahn’s paper contrasts cells based on Li[Ni0.5Mn0.3Co0.2]O2 chemistry (“NMC 532”) to LiFePO4. The latter is the “Lithium Iron Phosphate” (LFP) chemistry that Tesla is currently using in Chinese-built standard Model 3 cars imported into Europe. The LFP chemistry has lower energy density than more widespread Lithium-Ion alternatives, but is cheaper, more durable, and allegedly safer, too. LFP can last up to 12,000 charge-discharge cycles, so beating it in this regard is no mean feat. Dahn’s NMC 532 cells showed no capacity loss after nearly 2,000 cycles. The paper extrapolates this out to imply a 100 year lifespan even though they obviously haven’t been testing the battery that long.

Dahn also presented a keynote in March at the international battery seminar in Orlando, Florida, where he talked about a “4-million-mile battery”. This included some of the findings in the paper, prior to its release this month. Dahn had previously promised the million mile battery, and has been testing cells based on his adjusted chemistry since October 2017. Apparently, they have been going strong and after 4.5 years of continuous cycling at room temperature, they have only seen 5% degradation. This would mean they could power an EV for 4 million miles before needing to be replaced.

Part of the reasons for the longevity is the switch from polycrystalline to single-crystal cathodes, which don’t break down so rapidly during the charge-discharge cycle. The NMC 532 chemistry Dahn is using contrasts with the NMC 811 chemistry currently employed by LG Chem, which has eight parts nickel in its cathodes for each part of manganese and cobalt. Last year the Tesla Model Y switched from NMC 811 to LG Chem’s NCMA chemistry cells, aka “high nickel”. These are expensive compared to either LFP or NMC 811 but offer the highest density for longest range. NCMA chemistry uses nickel, cobalt, manganese, and aluminum for its cathodes, but the majority is nickel (89%).

The NMC 532 chemistry Dahn has been testing promises another leap forward in battery technology. However, cars don’t need to last 100 years, and they don’t need to go 4 million miles either. Considering that the average vehicle age in the USA is 12 years doing 14,000 miles per year, the mean lifetime distance driven by an American car is 168,000 miles, and in Europe it’s a lot less. So, in reality, batteries with 4 million mile durability will enable applications such as Vehicle to Grid (V2G), which will increase the rate of charge-discharge cycling. But they are more likely to be most useful for static energy storage in houses and for grid buffering capacity from an intermittent renewable energy supply like wind or solar power.

Hydrogen enthusiasts often argue that batteries are just a stopgap until Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles and hydrogen storage systems hit the mainstream. But with all the development taking place in battery technology, hydrogen is likely to be too little, too late when it does arrive in volume for transportation. Technologies like those Dahn is working on, alongside Lithium Sulfur batteries developments such as from Theion and ultra-rapid charging technology such as StoreDot’s, will mean that in just a few years’ time batteries have solved all the problems posed against them, which would then possibly mean that the need for hydrogen based vehicles becomes a moot point.

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