MIT researchers devise new lithium-ion battery material to provide a more sustainable alternative to cobalt-containing batteries for electric cars.

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With electric vehicles on the rise in the time of climate change, scientists have been working towards developing more sustainable batteries to prevent excessive waste.

Recently, MIT researchers devised a new lithium-ion battery material that could provide a more sustainable alternative to cobalt-containing batteries for electric cars.

MIT reports that in a new study, the researchers demonstrated a newly developed material, produced at a significantly lower cost than batteries containing cobalt, exhibits comparable electrical conductivity to cobalt batteries.

But in the past few years, a climate change hero technology has made its way into electric vehicles, one that has improved—but not solved—their cold weather issues: heat pumps. Heat pumps transfer heat from outside the car to help keep passengers warm, and so avoid sucking too much power away from the battery. And yes, heat pumps can still bring warm air into the car even if it’s freezing outside, albeit with mixed success. As counterintuitive as it sounds, there is still a good amount of heat that can be drawn from air that’s, say, 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

Today, heat pumps come in many, but not all, new electric vehicles. Teslas have come with a proprietary heat pump tech since 2021. Jaguar’s I-Pace has one built in, as does BMW’s latest i-series cars, Hyundai’s Ioniq 5, Audi’s newest e-Tron, and Kia’s new electrified flagship, the EV9.

“Any electric vehicle that comes out right now and doesn’t have a heat pump is a dinosaur already,” says John Kelly, an automotive technology professor and instructor focusing on hybrid and electric vehicle technology at Weber State University.