The billionaire inventor Sir James Dyson is hoping to race to the front of the fiercely competitive electric car market when his vehicle hits the road by 2020.
Like their rivals at Toyota and Tesla, engineers at the Dyson base in Wiltshire have been working on battery technology that promises to revolutionise speed and endurance. Developments to traditional lithium-ion batteries have been exhausted. For cars, the options are either safe but low energy or high in energy but a fire risk.
Companies making electric vehicles have entered a race to harness “solid state” technology — where the liquid is replaced with a solid — to create smaller, non-flammable batteries that last longer and charge faster. China’s booming electric vehicle market uses predominately lithium-ion phosphate batteries, which are very safe but have a low energy density so cars cannot drive far from one charge.
Despite these big announcements very little detail has been revealed by the competing manufacturers. However, the possibilities for solid state technology expand far beyond cars.
One of the main developers in Britain, Ilika plc (LON:IKA), has been working with Toyota since 2008 and has patented a number of materials that are crucial to the production of an alternative to lithium-ion.
Most of their work is on miniature batteries to be used in the “internet of things”. As smart technology becomes more common the number of sensors in the world is multiplying and is estimated to reach more than 46 billion by 2021. They are in everything from fitness trackers to washing machines and at present use relatively weighty copper cabling to connect to a power source. In a typical car this cabling weighs 60kg.
Companies such as Ilika are developing systems to enable tiny wireless, independently powered sensors, using solid state technology.
Graeme Purdy, its chief executive, said: “They are recharged using an energy harvester — about 1cm sq and similar to the little solar cells on big calculators. One of those can harvest light energy that can recharge the miniature battery.”
