Where are Electric Car Batteries Headed?

You know how even your favourite electronic devices eventually reach the point where their batteries don’t hold a charge anymore? Typically, we come across this problem with older laptop computers.

The laptop itself can work perfectly well but we can’t really take it anywhere because the battery pack is dead. Mobile computing doesn’t really work when it requires eight kilometres of extension cord, right?

Of course, you can buy a new battery pack for the laptop but this often costs more than the computer is worth, making such an investment of dubious value. Well, how much will it disappoint to find your electric car has the same problem?

In the early days of Electric Cars, this was a serious risk. You had two choices: go with battery technology that could hold a charge for a long time and end up with a very heavy car or use lighter, more modern battery packs that limit range and life.

Fortunately, scientists have been hard at work on the development of ever more potent battery technology for electric cars. In addition to seeking lighter batteries that last longer, produce more power and recharge more quickly, science also needs to help us find batteries that are safer. Nobody can afford to have batteries leak harmful substances or burst into flame.

The final ingredient in the recipe for Electric Cars success is ensuring the batteries have a minimal effect on the environment. Both the production of batteries and their disposal need to be managed carefully to ensure our green cars aren’t indirectly damaging Mother Earth.

The proliferation of electronic devices has caused a corresponding explosion in the search for ever more exotic materials. Countries like Bolivia are anxiously guarding vast reservoirs of elements like lithium that are difficult to extract without great harm to the local environment.

One of the benefits of the rise of fast mobile internet, Twitter and Facebook is that information travels faster, farther and more freely. Automakers today cannot afford to sell us green cars that we then discover are really having a toxic effect on the environment.

As a result, the companies and researchers involved in the development and production of current and future models of electric vehicles know they have to continue working hard on battery technology. They’re not just seeking faster cars with greater range; they’re hoping to find the Holy Grail – electric cars that truly have no damaging effect on Earth’s limited resources.

Perhaps one day, we’ll be able to just dump our household waste into our cars. They’ll munch through cardboard boxes, banana skins, old shoes and teabags, generating the power we need to get to the supermarket and stock up on those things again. After the shopping run, the only thing the car will spit out will be clean air and clean water.

In the meantime, let’s take a quick look at the work of one of the biggest names in electric cars. Tesla Motors is known by all car buffs for producing a zippy electric sports car based on a chassis from British company Lotus.

In order to accelerate from a standstill to 60mph in less than four seconds, the Tesla Roadster needs some pretty fancy batteries. Tesla, however, didn’t sacrifice its pursuit of environmental friendliness just to produce a covetable sports car.

The Roadster uses a battery pack made up of lithium cells. Despite all of the advances in battery technology, however, these battery packs do have a finite life, especially when car owners need a reasonable driving range on each charge.

Eventually, the Roadster’s battery pack will no longer be able to provide the same acceleration and range. What happens then? Well, legally speaking, these batteries could actually just be dumped in the ground.

The Roadster’s batteries don’t contain any toxic materials or heavy metals. Production of the battery packs meets UK standards on the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS). The batteries are made in Japan, where relatively tight environmental laws are complied with.

Though it is possible to repurpose batteries like this for other, less-demanding applications, they do eventually have to be discarded. The battery packs are broken down physically and their component batteries are basically smashed into little pieces.

Once they have been ‘pulped’, the different elements are separated. Elements like aluminium, cobalt, nickel and copper are collected for re-use. Other materials like plastics can also potentially be turned into other reusable forms.

These are early days in the business of reprocessing and disposing batteries, however. Tesla Motors continues to work with various partners in a bid to further reduce the environmental costs of producing all components in its cars and to find more efficient means of handling old batteries.

In short Electric Vehicles promise to be the cars of the future providing they can produce the batteries more effectively.