INSIDE THE BATTERY REVOLUTION

From smartphones to supercars, the story of CATL and QuantumScape reflects the global race to create safer, longer-lasting, and more powerful batteries

- KRISHNA GUPTA

We saw in our earlier article on batteries that the development of lithium-ion batteries has been instrumental in the spread of electric vehicles across the world.

This is because these batteries are light and have a higher energy density and voltage capacity compared to other types of batteries (nickel-cadmium or lead-acid batteries). Sony became the first company to incorporate lithium-ion batteries into their products. Lithium-ion batteries were also in the news recently when Whittingham, Goodenough, and Yoshino won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 for the invention of lithium-ion batteries. However, the future of batteries will perhaps lie in solid-state batteries, which have an advantage over lithium-ion batteries because of their improved safety and longer life. In this article, we will look at the story of two champion battery manufacturers: CATL, a lithium-ion battery manufacturer, and QuantumScape, a solid-state battery company.