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The new car batteries that could power the electric vehicle revolution

There’s a revolution brewing in batteries for electric cars. Japanese car maker Toyota said last year that it aims to release a car in 2027–28 that could travel 1,000 kilometres and recharge in just 10 minutes, using a battery type that swaps liquid components for solids. Chinese manufacturers have announced budget cars for 2024 featuring batteries based not on the lithium that powers today’s best electric vehicles (EVs), but on cheap sodium — one of the most abundant elements in Earth’s crust. And a US laboratory has surprised the world with a dream cell that runs in part on air1 and could pack enough energy to power aeroplanes.

These and other announcements rely on alternative designs to the conventional lithium-ion batteries that have dominated EVs for decades. Although lithium-ion is hard to beat, researchers think that a range of options will soon fill different niches of the market: some very cheap, others providing much more power. “We’re going to see the market diversify,” says Gerbrand Ceder, a materials scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

The pursuit of better car batteries is fierce, in large part because the market is skyrocketing. More than a dozen nations have declared that all new cars must be electric by 2035 or earlier. The International Energy Agency forecasts that the global stock of EVs on the road will rise from 16.5 million in 2021 to nearly 350 million by 2030 (see go.nature.com/42mpkqy), and that demand for energy from EV batteries will reach 14 terawatt hours (TWh) by 2050, which is 90 times more than in 20202.