JAC Motors, a Volkswagen-backed Chinese automaker, unveiled the first mass-produced EV with a sodium-ion battery through its new Yiwei brand. Although sodium-ion battery tech has a lower density than lithium-ion, its lower costs, simpler and more abundant supplies and superior cold-weather performance could help accelerate mass EV adoption.
They’re actually old tech. They just could never match lithium.
They’ll shine as standing storage more so than mobile applications. Home storage will benefit greatly from their improvements
If they can get industrial scale it could also allow energy grids to capture excess power instead of wasting it. Could yield massive efficiency increases being able to reclaim some of that loss.
That’s very interesting. If they can be used at home or in cars that don’t require batteries with a very large capacity, then that would be really good to counter the scarcity of lithium (and hopefully, help the environment too)