Currently Electric Car Batteries are not helping the introduction of electric driving very well. The batteries are still very expensive and give the electric car a limited range of around 100 to 150 kilometres. This is usually the case for new technologies, which take time to fully develop and need an up-scaled production to be more competitive on pricing. So you could say that the battery price plus the performance of the battery is a bottleneck for the adoption of the Electric Car.

According toDr. Steven Chu from the U.S. Energy Secretary, the DoE estimates that battery technology improvements will be made over the next decade

Here’s what Dr. Chu said in a recent talk:

Decades ago, we let leadership in battery manufacturing shift to Asia. Today, we’re catching up, but our goal is to become the market leader. Research supported by the Energy Department is pushing the limits of energy density and cost for lithium-ion batteries, while also exploring even more advanced battery concepts such as lithium-air, lithium-sulfur, and a whole class of metal-air batteries. We are still in the early days of this work, but we are seeing some promising results.

Overall, the Department of Energy is partnering with industry to reduce the manufacturing cost of advanced batteries. While a typical battery for a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle with a 40-mile electric range cost $12,000 in 2008, we’re on track to demonstrate technology by 2015 that would reduce the cost to $3,600. And last year, we set a goal of demonstrating technology by 2020 that would further reduce the cost to $1,500 – an accomplishment that could help spur the mass-market adoption of electric vehicles.

The 2008 to 2015 number represents a 70% drop in price from that baseline, while the 2020 number is a further 58.4% reduction from the 2015 number and an impressive 87.5% drop from 2008.

Via DOE, ABG