Fisker divested of solid-state batteries – “800 km range on a 1-minute charge” turned out to be an empty promise

Fisker said it is phasing out solid-state batteries. Previously, she spoke of them as a “breakthrough” that was supposed to provide her electric vehicles with a “range of 800 km on a 1-minute charge.”

Those who were skeptical about the company’s promises were right. A few years after the high-profile announcements, Henrik Fisker admitted that hopes for a “breakthrough” had actually faded more than a year ago. In an interview with The Verge, Fisker’s CEO said:

“We’ve spent a lot of time, several years, researching solid-state batteries. And this is the kind of technology where you feel like you are 90%, almost there, until you realize that the last 10% is much more difficult to get through than the first 90%. But you really don’t know this until you get to 90%. So, when we came to the end – or, let’s say, when we got closer to fully understanding this technology, we realized that it is much more complicated than we predicted and expected at the beginning, since we were very inspired by the first successes.

But in the end we came to the conclusion, I think it was probably the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020 – I don’t remember exactly that solid state batteries are still very, very far away. Personally, I think that before them at least seven years, if not more, in terms of at least some kind of mass. Because you need to… once you make a breakthrough in this technology, it will probably take you three years to go into high volume production, and then another three years to do durability tests. So even if someone had invented them today, it would have taken at least another six years.

So, we have completely abandoned solid-state batteries, because we simply do not see the possibility of their materialization. Will we do something in the future? If we do that, it will be something completely new, and of course we have a battery development team that is exploring current technology. But the solid-state battery we’ve been working on has no future now and in the short term. And I can’t imagine that we will continue to develop this specific direction. “

Interestingly, when the breakout was announced, the company was confident that it would soon commercialize. However, shortly after the announcement, Fisker was sued by the young company QuantumScape, which is developing solid-state batteries with the support of Volkswagen. Then Fisker was accused of stealing trade secrets. The case was later settled by paying $ 750,000.

Last year, Fisker went public in a reverse merger and rose to nearly $ 8 billion in market value after partnering with Magna and Foxconn to bring the electric vehicle under development to mass production.