breveSodium-ion EV battery breakthrough delivers 11-min charging and 450 km range
https://electrek.co/2026/03/25/sodium-ion-ev-battery-delivers-11-min-charging-450-km-range/
BYD / Denza z9 gt claim 10-70% in 5 mins, 97% in 9 mins. With a range of ~1000km this seems to crush these results? I don't know enough about this space to know if I am missing something here, but would love to know because something about this feels more exciting than i think i am grasping. anyone know?
I see no charge rate numbers so there is no way to compare. however, these sodium batteries are cheaper, do not require lithium, and are operable at lower temperatures of -20C/-4F. Sounds like a bit of a win and opens the door for battery options in cars.
The sodium-ion batteries are said to work satisfactorily down to -40 Celsius = -40 Fahrenheit.
-20 Celsius just happens to be a temperature for which a retention ratio was specified in the parent article, and not the limit of the operation range.
This article is about a sodium-ion battery which is a different chemistry to the one BYD claimed those results on (that was LFP).
Sodium-ion is exciting because it has the potential to have less degradation over time, much less sensitivity to cold and less reliance on rare earth metals. Could also end up significantly cheaper. However it has struggled to reach the same energy densities and so hasn’t been practical thus far.
This seems like a big step towards it being a practical technology choice for certain models, if it bears out.
"Sodium-ion is exciting because..."
Well it is exciting, but not for the reasons you think. More like a Michael Bay movie exciting...there is nothing practical about this design. Most of the cost will be safety systems designed to prevent the battery from being exciting and even then a crash will likely set them off. Pure Na-ion probably isn't viable and certainly isn't viable in a car. Maybe mixing in some Na into the Li-ion to stretch the small amount of Lithium but even then you are significantly increasing the volatility of the battery.
This isn't a practical step, its an act of desperation from people who don't want to admit that large scale electrification is a dumb idea. We electrified everything that made sense to electrify a half century ago.
> Most of the cost will be safety systems designed to prevent the battery from being exciting and even then a crash will likely set them off.
People say the same thing about Li-ion batteries yet they have proven to be significantly less likely to catch fire compared to ICE vehicles [1].
> people who don't want to admit that large scale electrification is a dumb idea. We electrified everything that made sense to electrify a half century ago.
I'm very curious to hear why you think this. If nothing else, the 'situation' with the Strait of Hormuz would seem to have shown the importance of energy independence achieved through large scale electrification. Individually, I couldn't go back to an ICE car or even garden tools, they're worse in every way.
1. https://www.mynrma.com.au/open-road/advice-and-how-to/unders...
Na is 30x the volatility of Li. Physics doesn't care about your politics. Just like you (at the moment) are acting like you don't care if people die in fires.
If you want to replace FF there is exactly one solution, that's nuclear. Nothing else even scales to the point of making any difference at all. And you need to not just make electricity from the NPPs, but ammonia and some sort of synthetic hydrocarbon too. Anything else is a pipe dream from people who have never looked at the numbers nor learned the physics.
Stop acting like you care about this issue. You have never cared enough to learn about it, so until you do, stop spreading misinformation about how physics works.
PS I have driven an electric car for a decade, they are wonderful. Too bad there isn't enough Li for everyone to have one. Replacing Na with the Li just doesn't work for transport if you at all care about the people riding in the cars.
> With a range of ~1000km this seems to crush these results
The 1000km range likely has more to do with the efficiency of the drivetrain and the aerodynamics of the car more than the battery tech. kWh is an absolute value that is fungible and the Denza has a 122.5 kWh battery pack, which means its getting 5mi/kWh. For perspective my Rivian R1S gets ~350 miles on a 135 kWh pack which is about 2.5mi/kWh (so about half that)
The only part of the battery tech that could affect range is the weight. Sodium batteries are typically much heavier than Li-on. I believe the Denza uses LFP, which means it's likely somewhere else on the car that they're gaining improvement in the range - not from the battery tech. That being said, the battery tech definitely affects the charge/discharge rates.
I don't know what chemistry exactly these cells are using, but in sodium-ion batteries, prussian blue analogs as they are called are common anode materials. Overcharging these cells can lead to a release of hydrogen cyanide gas, notoriously known as Zyklon B.
It has damped my enthusiasm for perusing it as a potential future home energy storage solution.
Just wait until you find out about hydrogen sulfide from overcharged car batteries.
Also, I think HCN can be scrubbed by adding a special absorptive cap onto the battery.
hydrogen sulfide is not anywhere in the same category. When you consider failure you have to consider what is the most catastrophic possibility and if that is “this battery silently kills people” then you dont make it.
Or you could just have the batteries in a separate enclosure away from your house. I think I would be inclined to do this anyway, certainly for Lithium batteries given the possibility of fire.
Its metallic sodium. Its about 30 times more volatile than Lithium. We don't use metallic sodium for almost anything industrial because of this volatility. I assumed there would be some mixed Li-Na-ion batteries. A pure Na-ion battery is an explosive waiting to go off. Putting these in a car...seems rather like a poor choice unless you are a personal injury lawyer.
I doubt that it is metallic sodium, for the same reason why the rechargeable lithium batteries do not use metallic lithium electrodes like the non-rechargeable batteries.
During charge-recharge cycles, a metallic electrode is likely to be degraded quickly.
So it is more likely that the reduced sodium atoms are intercalated in some porous electrode, e.g. of carbon, while at the other electrode the sodium ions are intercalated in some substance similar to Prussian blue.
The volatility of sodium does not matter, because it is not in contact with air or another gas, but only with electrolyte.
This is incredibly misleading. It's not like there's a bunch of metallic sodium sitting in the battery waiting to react. It's a lot closer to a solid solution. Do you have a personal injury lawyer on speed dial for your table salt?
Your response is even more misleading than the misconception you're trying to correct. The complexes formed in (charged) lithium batteries are unstable and reactive in ways quite similar to the base metal. The salt molecule, in contrast, is pretty unreactive. Salt shakers don't catch fire if dropped.
Which complexes are reactive?
The substances similar with Prussian blue are very stable. During charge and discharge, the ionic charge of iron ions varies between +2 and +3 and the structure of the electrode has spaces that are empty when the charge of the iron ions is +3 and they are filled with sodium ions when the charge of the iron ions is +2.
Both states of the electrode are very stable, being neutral salts. The composition of the electrolyte does not vary depending on the state of charge of the battery and it is also stable.
The only part of the battery that can be unstable is the other electrode, which stores neutral atoms of sodium intercalated in some porous material. If you take a fully charged battery, you cut it and you extract the electrode with sodium atoms, that electrode would react with water, but at a lower speed than pure sodium, so it is not clear how dangerous such an electrode would be in comparison with the similar lithium electrodes.
Fine, now show a video of what happens if you pierce the Na-ion cell with something metallic. Because explosion doesn't even begin to cover what happens next in that situation. And you are suggesting that everyone should be 2 ft from such a cell, traveling at 60 mph, in all weather conditions. These things should be restricted to grid stabilization batteries and nothing else and you know it. Don't mislead people on such things.
Piercing a Na-ion cell is not good, but the effect is pretty much the same like piercing a Li-ion cell.
In both cells the electrode that stores alkaline metal atoms has high reactivity, but in both cases the reactivity is much smaller than for a compact piece of metal, so the reaction with substances like water would proceed much more slowly than in the movies when someone throws an alkaline metal in water.
If you pierce the cell, but the electrode does not come in contact with something like water or like your hand, nothing much happens, the air would oxidize the metal, but that cannot lead to explosions or other violent reactions.
Do you have any link for the claim that overcharging can produce cyanide?
I have never heard such a thing and all the articles that I have seen about overcharging concluded that such batteries are much safer during overcharging than other kinds of batteries, the worst case effect being battery swelling.
In normal conditions, even during overcharging there are no obvious chemical reactions that could produce hydrogen cyanide.
For instance, at
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.4c02915
it is said that cyanide release can happen only at temperatures above 300 Celsius degrees. Such temperatures cannot be reached in normal conditions.
> Such temperatures cannot be reached in normal conditions
Thank you for the reasonable chuckle I got from this understatement of the day.
Just remember, the US Na-Ion battery startup died last year with _products_ _in_ _warehouses_ just because it couldn't get a UL certification. All it needed was a bridge loan.
And the government did nothing.
Starting to think that the American century of humiliation meme was prophetic.
One could argue that in that case, doing nothing was very much a choice.
>And the government did nothing.
Why didn't a private investment company, even venture capital, extend them a bridge loan? It seems like the type of technology that could have decent returns in licensing fees.
I ask this question because it seems odd to someone in the software world so flooded with startups that the government would be expected to intercede on behalf of a startup.
Decent returns aren't enough for a risky investment, they need to be spectacular returns.
The benefit to the country as a whole is potentially large, but most of it wouldn't show up as profit for the company itself. I'm sure it would do quite well if it was successful, but the benefits to car manufacturers and to having this sort of technology on-shore would not translate into monetary returns on private investment. That's the sort of thing government intervention is good for.
In this case, Natron was focused on energy-storage for data centers, a sector which is ordinarily a prime recipient of government intervention.
While this article is about cars, there is another Chinese company that offers 50 MWh sodium-ion batteries for stationary energy storage.
While for cars sodium-ion batteries will never reach the energy per kilogram of the best lithium-ion batteries, for stationary use it makes absolutely no sense to use lithium batteries, because sodium batteries will become much cheaper when their production will be more mature, so they should always be preferred to lithium batteries.
Even for cars, sodium-ion batteries have a second advantage besides price, they retain their capacity and their charging speed down to much lower temperatures than lithium-ion batteries, so they will be preferred in cold climates.
note that the quoted 170Wh/kg is about the same as currently available LiFePO4 cells and half that of the best available NMC cells
"CATL’s “Naxtra” sodium-ion batteries achieve an energy density of up to 175 Wh/kg, the company said, putting it on par with lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries."
Useful, but not a "breakthrough" in energy density. More like another good low-end option.