Fisker Secures Investment From Caterpillar For Solid State Battery Development

Admire Fisker's guts but going up against Tesla and the big boys seems foolhardy!

So Fisker is not going to go belly up this time?

"Last year, Fisker claimed a solid-state battery ‘breakthrough’ for electric cars with ‘500 miles range and 1-minute charging".

If this turns out to be true, the ICE will become a novelty.

The solid state battery tech is pretty cool.

WE still do not have enough Electric Generation Capacity to charge more than about 5% of the car market as EVs. In some metro areas - we do not even have that capacity. In can take YEARS to get all the approvals needed to build a new one. At the same time - there are Hundreds of Gas stations to every charging station for EVs - when there are Thousands of Charging stations in a Metro area - then it might be possible for the Solid State Battery - with minutes for full charging to get an inroad.

BUT even that depends on the COST. Right now - Evs are heavily subsidized - and are being sold as LOSS leaders to get their prices into the $30,000 range - when these cars actually cost that much to produce and should be listed closer to $48,000 (For a Base Model 3) to make a normal car profit. THe Governments are not going to continue this support forever - and if the price of these breakthroughs is high - then most Americans simply will not be able to afford them - even if their cost of operation is lower than other choices. Today - if the Chevy BolT - actually listed for $48,000 at the base - no one would buy it - even though it SHOULD actually be that price.

Where did you get the 5% number?

According to "The US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory calculated that the grid’s excess capacity will support over 150 million pure electric vehicles.

150 million means that nearly 75% of the vehicles on our roads today could be electric and the grid would have the capacity to support them all."

There are a few caveats to that, on car charging locations but a very long way from 5%

Currently EVs are heavily subsidized but the majority of the cost is in R&D. Once the R & D is paid off the EVs should be cheaper to produce, a whole lot less parts and engineering for those parts.

Solid State Battery?! I’ve heard of solid state hard drive... is this something for real or one of those elon musk thing??

Quite real, and Musk is not very keen on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_battery