A solid-state battery development lab for QuantumScape.
QuantumScape
The electric vehicle space has seen a handful of impressive stock market debuts in recent years, but battery start-up QuantumScape's first few weeks of trading were remarkable even by EV stock standards.
QuantumScape, which was founded in 2010, went public via a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Its stock soared 49% in its first day of trading in November 2020 and had surged to a high of $131.67 by Dec. 22 — a gain of over 400% in less than a month.
That run gave QuantumScape an eye-popping $54 billion valuation, fueled by investors’ excitement over the company’s solid-state battery technology, so called because it does away with the flammable liquid or gel electrolyte found in today’s lithium-ion batteries. What’s more, it didn’t hurt that auto giant រថយន្ត Volkswagen was a major investor, or that Bill Gates had also taken a stake.
But the hype that surrounded the company in late 2020 appears to have all but dried up, with the once red-hot stock shedding about 92% of its value from that record high.
QuantumScape is standing by the lofty claims it made in 2020 and says its batteries are still on track to go into production in a few years. But the company faces a long, cash-intensive road of testing ahead. Competition is only intensifying, and Wall Street is still waiting.
Investors may have moved on, but the auto industry is still watching: In addition to Volkswagen, QuantumScape said it now has three other automaker partners who have signed on to test the company’s batteries. So far, those carmakers are unnamed.
A little piece of flexible ceramic
In December 2020, QuantumScape CEO Jagdeep Singh promised a reliable solid-state battery, at scale, by roughly the middle of the decade. Here are some of the claims he made during a livestreamed presentation of early test results:
- QuantumScape’s batteries could recharge from zero to 80% of capacity in just 15 minutes, about half the time required by most lithium-ion EV batteries.
- An EV using the company’s batteries would have up to 80% more range than one powered by current lithium-ion batteries, with similar weight.
- QuantumScape’s battery cells were “capable of lasting hundreds of thousands of miles” in a wide range of temperatures, including as cold as minus 22 Fahrenheit.
“If QuantumScape can get this technology into mass production, it holds the potential to transform the industry,” said Stan Whittingham, co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery and winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in chemistry, in a QuantumScape press release.
It seemed almost too good to be true. Researchers had been tinkering with solid-state batteries for decades, without success.
Inventors faced a key challenge. Such batteries were prone to failure because of dendrites — needle-like structures that form inside, often in a matter of weeks, that can short circuit them and end their life.
QuantumScape’s key innovation is a separator made of a proprietary flexible ceramic material that resists dendrites and can’t catch fire. If it works as intended, solid-state batteries should be able to survive for as long as a typical lithium-ion battery while maintaining all the hoped for benefits.
QuantumScape is still at least a few years away from being able to mass produce its batteries. But in lab testing, its technology appears to work.
In that 2020 livestream test that sent the company’s stock soaring, QuantumScape said a tiny prototype of its battery held up for over 800 cycles of charging and draining — roughly the number that an EV’s battery would endure over its lifetime.
But that test battery was a scaled-down version, and sizing up to a battery that’s ready for use in electric vehicles has been a slow process.
QuantumScape was able to repeat that 800-cycle test twice last year with slightly scaled-up batteries. A larger one made it through 500 cycles in a round of testing earlier this year. But the company is still a few more development rounds away from achieving a full-size prototype.
‘Sample’ road map
Those rounds of development, production and testing will require significant amounts of cash.
By then, it may have competition.
តូយ៉ូតា has said it’s working to develop its own solid-state batteries in-house, and at least one other start-up — Colorado-based ថាមពលរឹង, ដែលគាំទ្រដោយ រថយន្ត BMW និង ក្រុមហ៊ុន Ford Motor — is on track to begin manufacturing its own solid-state versions នៅជុំវិញពេលតែមួយ។
Raising the amount of cash needed for a factory would be challenging to do in the current economic environment, but Singh thinks raising that money won’t be difficult once investors have had the chance to drive test vehicles powered by QuantumScape batteries.
“The good news about the U.S. capital markets is that if you can demonstrate that you have something real and that the market opportunity is really large, then there’s a lot of capital available,” Singh said.
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/11/why-quantumscape-investors-are-still-waiting-for-new-ev-batteries.html