‘Shared self-driving cars must have batteries with longer life’

One of the makers of the lithium-ion battery, Japanese chemist Akira Yoshino, believes that battery manufacturers should make their products more resistant to almost continuous use in the form of many short trips. The latter is the case with shared self-driving cars.

Yoshino believes that manufacturers should not only make their batteries stronger to increase the range of electric cars on a single charge, but also improve battery life. He is referring to shared self-driving cars and carsharing services, in which he believes a car shared by ten people is also driven ten times as often. According to him, how long the batteries last will be a very important factor, he said in an interview with The Indian Express.

The Japanese chemist believes that manufacturers should make batteries with materials that are more resistant to the constant expansion and contraction caused by the temperature differences caused by the chemical processes in batteries. This process is easier, according to Yoshino, if at the same time there is less need to increase the range of a battery charge.

He cites as an example the use of lithium titanate batteries, where nanocrystals of this material are used on the surface of the anode, instead of carbon in lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-titanate batteries have the great advantage that, partly due to the more robust material, they can be charged much faster and more often than lithium-ion batteries.

According to Yoshino, cars are a completely new application for batteries and he thinks it will be a while before we figure out what kind of batteries are necessary. He thinks that the car industry will determine the developments in battery technology: ‘The future of batteries depends on what will happen in the future with regard to car use in society’.