New battery technology heralds breakthrough for electric vehicles
Israeli start-up to show three-minute charging car next year
ISRAELI firm StoreDot has unveiled a prototype mobile phone battery that can be fully charged from flat in around 30 seconds - and says it’s planning to upscale the idea to suit electric vehicles.
If it succeeds, it will instantly eliminate the single biggest constraint that’s held back electric cars and bikes so far – the hours of charging needed every time the battery runs flat.
Showing the battery technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, StoreDot boss Doron Myersdorf told the BBC: 'We intend to show in one year a model of a car that can charge in just three minutes. We are 100% sure we can deliver because the know-how of how you take one cell and combine thousands of them together has already been done by Tesla.'
At the moment, the firm has a 900mAh phone battery that can be charged in around 30 seconds and is the same size as a conventional phone battery, albeit only holding around a third as much energy. It also showed a 2000mAh battery – similar in capacity to most modern phone batteries – that could be charged in three minutes, but is around 5mm thicker than a normal lithium phone battery. It reckons that by 2017 it will have doubled the energy capacity of its batteries, though.
The batteries themselves are made using what the firm describes as ‘bio-organic peptide molecules’.
Myersdorf is a former director of computer memory card multinational ScanDisk, while StoreDot’s chief technology officer, Simon Litsyn, has been a professor at Tel Aviv University's School of Electrical Engineering for 23 years. StoreDot's chief scientist, Gil Rosenman, is also a professor at Tel Aviv University.
