Fisker ditches solid-state batteries after announcing ‘breakthrough’ with ‘500 miles of range and 1 minute charge’

Fisker claims to have given up on solid-state batteries after announcing a “breakthrough” supposed to allow “500 miles of range and 1 minute of charging” in its electric cars.

After relaunching his electric vehicle startup, Henrik Fisker began making many very ambitious statements about the capabilities of the new company’s future electric cars.

We highlighted some of these in a report titled: “A Look at Fisker’s Incredible Claims About Its Next All-Electric Car With” Over 400 Miles of Range “and” 9 Minutes of Charging. “

But one of the biggest claims was about the batteries Fisker planned to use.

As a first step, the company announced that its first car would be powered by new graphene-based hybrid supercapacitor technology.

This idea did not stick around for long and instead Fisker announced a “breakthrough” of the solid-state battery pack for electric cars with “500 miles of range and 1 minute of charging”.

As with most drumming breakthrough claims, we were skeptical of Fisker’s announcement.

Now, a few years later, Henrik Fisker announced that they actually gave up on the alleged breakthrough over a year ago.

The CEO said in an interview with The edge:

So we spent a lot of time, several years, researching solid-state batteries. And it’s kind of a tech where when you feel like 90% there, you’re almost there, until you realize that the last 10 percent is a lot harder than the first 90. reach 90 percent. So as we came to the end of this – or let’s say it, just about to fully understand this technology, we realized that it was a lot more difficult than we had anticipated and anticipated at the start. because we were very excited about the first things we were doing.

But we finally came to the conclusion, I think it was probably late 2019, early 20, I forget exactly, that solid state batteries are still very, very far away, they are not around the corner. . Personally, I think there are at least seven years left, if not more, for any kind of high volume format. Because you have to… once you have a breakthrough in this technology, it will probably take you three years to get high volume manufacturing in place, and then it will take you another three years to do durability testing. So even if someone made it up today, it would be at least probably six years old.

So we have completely ditched solid-state batteries at this point because we just don’t see them materializing. Would we do something in the future? If we do, that would be something completely new, and obviously we have a battery team looking at the current technology that is here. But the solid-state battery we worked on just doesn’t have a future at this point in the near future. And I don’t see at all that we are continuing this particular development.

In short, Fisker believes the technology is far from ready for commercialization.

This is despite indicating exactly the opposite in the announcement of the “breakthrough”.

Fabio Albano, who was Vice President of Battery Systems at Fisker at the time, commented:

“This breakthrough marks the beginning of a new era in solid state materials and manufacturing technologies. We tackle any hurdles solid-state batteries have encountered on the way to market, such as cold weather performance; the use of inexpensive and scalable manufacturing methods; and the ability to form bulk solid state electrodes with significant thickness and high active material loads. We’re excited to build on this and move the needle on energy storage. “

Interestingly, the story isn’t as straightforward as Fisker being too quick to claim a breakthrough.

Shortly after their breakthrough announcement, Fisker was sued by QuantumScape, a Volkswagen-backed solid-state battery startup, for alleged theft of trade secrets.

Fisker later settled the lawsuit for $ 750,000.

Later in 2019, Albano filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Fisker, claiming he was fired by the company.

Fisker went public in a reverse merger last year and saw its valuation climb to nearly $ 8 billion following announcements they were trying to work with Magna and Foxconn to put their design into production. of electric vehicles.

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