Here’s How Battery Advancements Are Shaping EV Affordability

No matter how many luxury trimmings you buy, the battery is still the most expensive part of an EV. It is about half the cost of any given car (even one with solid-gold door handles and leather seats made from endangered species). Obviously, very few people in the EV industry want so much money to go into the battery.

Even those who aren’t altruistically trying to make budget cars prefer to turn their uptrimmed sales prices into profit rather than put the money into the cars’ undercarriages. Because of this, both automakers and battery manufacturers have been trying to pull down the cost of batteries. Their efforts are paying off; battery costs are dropping. Here are a few ways that have actually worked.

In order to give you the most up-to-date and accurate information possible, the data used to compile this article was sourced from various authoritative sources.

The Simplest Is Sometimes The Best: Making Battery Cells Bigger

• Enlarging cells reduces the labor required both to manufacture the parts of an EV battery pack and to assemble it.
• Although making bigger battery cells seems like a simple change, it requires developers to iron out a lot of physics and chemistry problems.

An EV battery is not a single unit with two wiring terminals poking out of it. Instead, it is composed of a lot of battery cells that are packed into one big, heavy package. The cells themselves look a lot like the alkaline batteries that infamously are never included with children’s toys. Really, it’s more correct to call it a “battery pack” than a simple “battery.” With this in mind, EV manufacturers have already been working on one of the most superficially straightforward ways to cut battery cost: make the battery cells bigger.

Enlarging Battery Cells Simplifies Manufacturing

With bigger battery cells, the cost to produce a battery goes down. A lot of the cost of an EV battery is the labor (whether done by machines or humans) that is required to make the cells that go into it. The labor cost per cell stays roughly the same as the cells get bigger. Since EVs require fewer battery cells if the cells are bigger, this means that fewer labor hours go into each battery pack.

Bigger cells also make battery construction a lot simpler. Each battery pack requires fewer holding brackets and electrical terminals. This means that the pack’s housing is faster to produce. Additionally, less time is required to install and connect all the cells contained within. The resulting price drop is especially obvious for EVs with very large battery packs.

With Batteries, Even The Simplest Task Is A Complex Ordeal

One may wonder “Why didn’t they just make bigger cells from the beginning?” Enlarging battery cells isn’t as simple as increasing the dimensions of every single part in the schematic. (Nothing about electricity is ever simple unless it is an accident.)

Regardless of type
, batteries use chemical reactions to store and direct the flow of electrons. The physics behind electricity is a deeply complex subject. Scientists can devote their entire lives to studying it and still not know everything there is to learn.

In short, making bigger cells is a straightforward concept. But making bigger cells a reality required an entire monograph’s worth of mathematics.

The Price Of Lithium Is Going Down

• The massive rise of demand for lithium-ion batteries has led to an increase in lithium mining.
• The growth of lithium mining has lowered the price.
• Despite the current price trends, lithium is a finite resource. The price drops cannot go on forever.

It’s hard for things like “metal valuations” to get the top spot in the news. But even though “bauxite price fluctuations” can’t compete with the latest celebrity gossip, recent lithium prices have been very good news for everyone purchasing battery-powered devices. (Amusingly, most discussions of lithium prices come from investment news sites, which frame the price drop as an unfortunate event. In that topsy-turvy world, a price spike is a “recovery”).

It cannot be emphasized enough that the battery is the most expensive part of any EV. Indeed, many EVs go to the salvage yard because it was cheaper to replace the car than the battery. So even though most car buyers don’t read the latest news about metal prices, they will definitely appreciate the results.

The Surprisingly Rosy Future For The Price Of EV Batteries

Demand for lithium has increased, which has expanded the lithium mining industry. This means that the supply of available lithium has gone up, and has brought the price down a bit. Additionally, many professional investment forecasters have predicted that EV adoption is tapering off, which will reduce lithium demand. This means that lithium could drop even further in price. It is already cheaper to throw out old batteries than to recycle them for the metals contained within. (Otherwise, the worldwide battery recycling rate would be a lot higher than 5 percent)

The Cheap Lithium Party May Not Last Forever

Before getting too excited about the cost of lithium dropping to one penny per ton, it should be noted that no amount of creative accounting or business conferences can change the nature of finite resources. While investors have been glibly predicting price drops, geologists have been warning that there is only so much lithium and cobalt underground and waiting to be mined. The constant threat of a lithium shortage is a severe, if unacknowledged, threat to solid-state EV batteries. As lithium grows more scarce, the price will inevitably rise– or, in investing parlance, “recover.”

AI Battery Management Can Help Them Last Longer And Reduce The Demand For New Batteries

AI has been grossly overused by people who don’t understand it. Its skills at writing and artistry are somewhere between subpar and mediocre. AI is also inept at parsing people’s language, which makes AI customer service chatbots an infuriating ordeal. However, AI is extremely good at pattern-matching.

In both battery manufacturing and use, there are relatively few areas where human judgment is better than an unthinking computer. (The same is not true for battery design, which is its own fiendishly complex topic.) This is similar to how automatic transmissions, after several decades of improvements, are better than stickshift-loving people at getting the most out of the engine.

AI Can Match Battery Management To Driving Patterns

As the electronics in EVs have grown more complicated, “driver profiles” have become a growing trend. They allow the car to remember where each user has the seat and mirrors positioned, where they set the volume on the stereo,and what time any given user tends to use the car.

AI expands the possibilities of driver profiles. It allows the car to also learn how each person drives, and adjust the battery accordingly. For the person who requires full passing power while frantically bobbing and weaving through traffic, the car can learn to immediately send a full surge of power to the motor whenever the driver taps the accelerator. For another user who tends to do long drives, the car can reduce the acceleration of the car so that the battery is less taxed while cruising on highways and watching for speed traps.

With that in mind, AI can vary its battery management for each person who uses the car. For the person who makes long road trips, it might charge the batteries to a slightly higher than optimal level. This would allow the driver to make fewer charging stops. For the person who makes frequent demands of the car’s instant torque (whether to avoid collisions with inept drivers, or for late-night fun in a vacant parking lot), AI can fine-tune the battery’s heating and cooling system to accommodate it. The person in the driver’s seat wouldn’t even need to tweak any settings.

AI Can Improve Battery Management Systems

AI can also make it easier to automate a lot of battery maintenance. Like any computer, AI excels at tedious math. This makes it easier to redistribute power among the battery cells (in other words, making sure each cell has the same amount of electricity in it). It can also regulate all aspects of the battery using more input than conventional battery management.

For example, AI can consider things like ambient temperatures, usage history, charging habits (Does the user fast-charge or not? How often do they charge? How low do they let the battery get before plugging in the car?), and other things that previously would have required a person keeping a record-book.

Batteries Are The Final Frontier Of EV Design

Indeed, batteries are the only part of EVs that are still being developed instead of refined. No technology has ever been truly perfected (with the possible exception of the headphone jack). However, every aspect of EVs is a solved problem except for the battery itself. Car body designs translated directly over from ICE vehicles, with no need to repeat a century of load-distribution and aerodynamics studies.

Electric motors did not need to be reinvented before putting them into cars. Indeed, EV powertrains have proven more rugged than internal combustion engines. It turns out that engines, with all of their bearing journals that have thousandth-inch tolerances, have more parts that can go out of line than an electric motor. However, batteries were not ready to suit drivers’ demands. EVs have required batteries that can deliver several hours’ worth of energy in extremely adversarial conditions.

The Shortcomings Of Current-Generation EV Batteries

TopSpeed’s own readers have confirmed that batteries are the main reason most people haven’t switched from internal combustion to electricity, even if they don’t realize it. All the biggest complaints, such as short driving ranges and long charging times, go back to the battery. Even cautiously curious people tend to love the instant torque when test-driving an EV. The battery is the reason most people decide that “going electric” is too risky.

Lower Prices Could Persuade A Lot Of People To “Make The Switch”

Aside from range anxiety, price has been one of the main reasons people continue to drive cars with engines under the hood. Even budget-level EVs tend to cost more than ICE. Whether it’s the high cost of a new (or at least new-ish) car or the price of a battery replacement for an EV in otherwise excellent condition, money has kept an internal condition in most people’s parking spots.

As batteries continue to get cheaper, they will bring down the cost of EVs with them. This may allow EVs to finally become commonplace instead of four-wheeled novelties.