Lithium-Ion Battery Pioneer Akira Yoshino Says Self-Driving Taxis Will Need Tougher Batteries
One of the pioneers in the development of lithium-ion battery development — Akira Yoshino, the inventor of a prototype lithium-ion battery back in 1985 — was recently publicly quoted as saying that if autonomous vehicles are going to be deployed so as to allow for nearly constant short-range use (taxis, etc.), then batteries will have to become a lot tougher.
In other words, it’s not just a matter of improving energy density to allow for greater range — there will also need to be an increase in durability.
“A car shared by 10 people means it will be running 10 times more,” commented Yoshino, an honorary fellow at Asahi Kasei Corporation, in an interview with Bloomberg. “Durability will become very important.”
“Cars are a completely new application, and we’ll have to wait until we find out what kind of batteries will really be needed,” Yoshino continued. “The future of batteries depends on what will happen to the future of the automobile society.”
The Bloomberg coverage provides more: “At Asahi Kasei’s laboratory in the early 1980s, Yoshino began researching polyacetylene, a conducting polymer discovered by the Japanese chemist and Nobel Prize winner Hideki Shirakawa. Although the material could be used in solar panels and semiconductors, Yoshino focused on batteries as a wave of small electronic devices requiring powerful, rechargeable energy sources began hitting the market.
“He succeeded in building a lithium-ion battery using polyacetylene as the anode, later switching to carbon. But Sony Corp beat Asahi Kasei in the race to commercialize it for mobile phones in 1991. The following year, Asahi Kasei formed a venture with Toshiba Corp to make and sell their own batteries.”
Did he envision an age of battery-powered electric cars enabled by these batteries? Apparently not. “I thought it would be a boon to tap into the 8 millimeter-video camera market,” Yoshino noted. “Mobile phones, laptops, and computers just kept multiplying, but no one was thinking about cars.”
And yet now, here we are, with plug-in electric vehicle sales surging — and perhaps more importantly, self-driving taxis threatening to upend car ownership rates in major cities throughout the world.
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