Electric car company Fisker has filed a patent for a revolutionary new solid-state battery that would allow its cars to be charged in as little as a minute and even travel as far as 500 miles on a single charge.
The company might not have the scale and reach as Tesla but Henrik Fisker’s automotive company is looking to become a major competitor in the growing market of electric cars.
One of the biggest hurdles facing electric vehicles has been the current battery technology that we use.
Lithium-ion batteries are easy to manufacturer and can be found in everything from the Tesla Model S to your iPhone.
The problem is that they’re an old technology and despite regular advancements they struggle to provide the range and charging times needed for electric cars to finally compete with combustion engines.
Whereas a normal petrol or diesel car takes just a few minutes to fill up, even Tesla’s Supercharger takes at least 30 minutes to give you over 200 miles of range.
Solid-state batteries have the potential to overcome these problems and Fisker believes it has cracked them.
According to Green Car Congress - and also then later confirmed on Twitter by Fisker himself - the company will show its first working prototype of this new battery technology in January at CES 2018, Las Vegas.
Alongside the new battery the company will also show a near-production ready version of its brand-new all-electric saloon car the Fisker EMotion.
This will be Fisker’s first big play in the all-electric industry and the company is already making bold claims of a 400-mile range and the ability to get 125 miles of range from just 9 minutes of charging.
For the moment the EMotion will use the same lithium-ion technology found in other electric vehicles but Fisker is hoping to have its solid-state technology appearing in production cars as soon as 2023.
This would certainly be in keeping with a recent report made by the Dutch bank ING which has predicted that electric cars will be able to better the range of combustion vehicles as soon as 2020.