Battery Issues Impact Both Electric Vehicles & Mobile Devices

We are faced with a need for new technology to address the ongoing limitations in battery life that we are seeing every day. If you are the owner of an all electric vehicle, the majority of them on the road today have a very limited range of driving before you must stop and charge them back up. Few cars exceed a range of 100 miles and if you exclude the Tesla, the average across all models drops a lot. You can only go so far before you have to stop and recharge. The same issue is impacting our mobile devices today where getting an all day charge on your smart phone seems to be very elusive at best. It seems that technology and desire has exceeded the capabilities of today's battery technology.

Future Battery Technology

The existing batteries which are being used does not meet the needs and without new discoveries, we will continue to be limited in battery life. Current solutions to extend all electric vehicles for decent ranges are extremely expensive as demonstrated by Tesla. For mobile devices, the current solution is battery extenders which attach to you device and add life to the battery. Neither of these are acceptable solution. There is continuing work being done by a wide variety of groups on the next big breakthrough. And it is a race because the winner will make a lot of money.

The future is being held in new discoveries, such as one using Graphene layers to improve batteries. This one is supposed to improve battery capacity and speed up charging times. Existing Lithium batteries are being researched for ways of improving that technology. Other research for smart phones holds promise to increase capacity 10 times greater than what we have today.

There are numerous researching activities going on at universities which will hopefully result in significant improvements in battery life for electric vehicles. While one might think that it will benefit only all electric vehicles for what has been discovered and brought to market, that would not be correct. That new technology would be passed on to mobile devices as well, benefiting us all. But how long it will be before all the various research which is being done will come to market is an unknown. And that is part of the problem as there is no known time frame when we can expect to see the hoped for significant battery life improvements.

With the coming technology shift to provide far better battery life, we are concerned about how long can we go before having to charge things up again. Given our appetites, it would appear that we will never have enough of a charge to meet our needs. Be it for the all electric vehicle or the ever popular mobile devices. We all want to keep using them and never have to worry about charging them up. That is not available for today, but is the hope for tomorrow.