Solid Power, a spin-out company of the University of Colorado, has partnered with Ford to continue development of its all-solid-state batteries (ASSBs) for EVs. The partnership will focus on further developing ASSBs towards automotive requirements. The partners will use Solid Power’s fully automated, roll-to-roll production facility, which the company says will be fully operational in Q2 2019.

Ford’s investment follows a previous investment round in September 2018, in which Solid Power secured $20 million in funding from Hyundai, Samsung, and other tech firms. A year before that, Solid Power partnered with BMW to tailor its batteries towards high-performance EVs.

Solid power says ASSBs enjoy a range of benefits over current battery technologies, including 50% greater energy density, improved safety thanks to the lack of unstable liquid electrolytes, and lower cost due to minimization of safety features and simplified temperature management.

Solid Power CEO Doug Campbell said, “ASSBs have the potential to provide greater energy, which translates to greater run-time per charge or in the case of an EV, greater range from a fully charged battery. By combining state-of-the-art cathodes with metallic lithium anodes, ASSBs can achieve up to a 50% increase in cell level energy vs current lithium-ion cells while even greater energy improvements are possible with more advanced cathodes, which is an additional area of development for Solid Power.”

Source: Solid Power