Ford started production yesterday on its F-150 Lightning pickup truck, a do-or-die vehicle that takes the automaker’s — and the United States’ — best-selling vehicle and swaps its gas-guzzling engines for powerful electric motors juiced by more than 1,800 pounds of batteries.
The mattress-sized pack can deliver over 300 miles of range, but if Ford wants to win over weekend warriors who tow 28-foot motor boats, it’s going to need better batteries.
While today’s batteries can store more energy than ever — they’ve improved in energy density by 5% per year for the last several years — those steady, incremental increases probably won’t be enough to make EVs a no-brainer for many consumers. Today’s cells are better in every respect than those made five years ago, but they still leave much to be desired. What’s needed are some…
Charged with billions in capital, meet the 9 startups developing tomorrow’s batteries today – TechCrunch
