This will be a high level overview of the value proposition that Quantumscape offers to the EV market. This is a quick primer. For more information, check out the Blog and Investor Relations page at Quantumscape.com
Solid State Battery
Solid State Batteries (SSB) are supposed to offer the next “step-change” for battery development. They should, in theory, offer higher range, faster charging, and better safety than current lithium ion technology.
There are many variants of SSB offerings on the market, but one of the biggest differentiators is the anode that each variant can support. In fact, it’s the advancements in the anode that will be the biggest contributor to gains in energy and power density.
I will cover competition more in depth at a later date, but most of the development in the space (from competitors such as Factorial, Solid Power, SES.AI, etc) are primarily focused on either silicon anodes or lithium metal anodes.
Lithium metal is supposedly the “Holy Grail” for lithium ion batteries. Quantumscape is one of the companies pursuing lithium metal anode technology. Their approach is quite novel in that they can actually manufacture their battery cells without the anode in it: more on that later.
QS Value Proposition
Energy Density
With the move to an in-situ lithium metal chemistry, QS offers the potential to shift the energy density frontier beyond current technology. Figure 1 shows QS’s projections on their target energy density numbers (sourced from the their website).
One important thing to note is that they believe that their technology can act as a lithium ion battery “platform”, where it should be compatible with different cathode chemistries (LFP and NMC shown in Figure 1). They suspect that their LFP system should compete with today’s highest energy density NMC offerings, with the benefits of LFP pricing.
Fast Charge & Performance
EV battery cells currently have a give-and-take relationship with energy vs power. Pure energy cells can offer very high range, but with the downside of a 40 minute minimum fast charge time. Pure power cells can offer very fast charging times, but at the detriment of driving range. So EV manufacturers typically have to sacrifice one or the other in order to meet their desired specs.
QS proposes that their cell can offer both fast charge + long range. Put more plainly, cells made by Quantumscape will theoretically offer longer range and faster charge time capabilities than anything currently on the market: See Figure 2 (pulled from their 2024 Investor Presentation).
In terms of performance, the QS Energy Cell will offer 1,000+ horsepower in a 100 kwh pack. This is notable because, should they ever release a power cell, that performance metric should climb even higher.
Cost
At this point, you may be thinking to yourself “This all sounds great so far. I bet this will be incredibly expensive.”
This may not necessarily be the case. Of course, the first generation of any new disruptive technology won’t be cheap, but they do make a case for cost savings for cell production.
Current lithium ion cells are produced with 3 primary components: Cathode (LFP, NMC, etc) + Separator (typically a polymer) + Anode (legacy tech uses graphite).
As we mentioned earlier, the anode is where the disruption lies. Current cells (the Tesla 2170, for example) have graphite in their anode. Some companies are exploring silicon anodes (Solid Power, Enovix, Amprius) and others are going for lithium metal anodes (SES, Factorial, and Quantumscape).
What makes Quantumscape special is that they can manufacture their cells without an anode at all. See Figure 3 below (taken from their May 2024 Investor Presentation). This is enabled by Quantumscape’s novel ceramic separator. This is important, because it’s the separator that enables the potential for performance gains, but it is also the pain point for getting to mass manufacturing as it is very difficult to produce at-scale with low defects and high reliability.
Being able to manufacture their cells without the anode means that they can remove quite a few steps from the manufacturing process (which reduces cost) as well as showing cost savings on the anode materials, themselves. All told, they have projected 15-20% cost savings for cell production (Source).
Here’s another graph pulled from the QS blog:
Again, these cost savings probably won’t be realized anytime soon. Likely not until they reach economies of scale.
Safety
So far QS seems to offer a safety profile inline or better than current technology. Here’s a quote from their 2023, Q2 shareholder letter:
Another key technical development milestone is safety testing. In Q2, we ran a suite of safety tests on our A0 prototype cells, including nail penetration, overcharge, external short circuit, and thermal stability testing up to 300 °C, and we’re pleased to report that the A0 prototype cells successfully passed these safety tests according to the specification set by a leading automotive customer, with hazard levels of 3 or lower as defined by EUCAR and SAE J2464 standards
One area that shows real promise is that their cells don’t seem to be as susceptible to thermal runaway as legacy technology. They actually just released a new video showing their progress on safety (QS Battery Safety Report)
Cycle Life
Their early prototype cells have been validated by one of their main partners, Volkswagen. They’ve shown that QS cells have the potential to offer 1000+ cycles (equivalent to 300,000 miles or more) with only 5% degredation. See Figure 5 (pulled from their May 2024 investor presentation). Note that this test likely wasn’t performed to full depth of discharge. PowerCo cites “full cycle equivalent” life in the image below. However, this is in line with QS test data presented in the past.
Summary
So just to summarize, Quantumscape cells have the potential to offer longer range, better performance, faster charging, better safety, last for the life of the vehicle, all while at cheaper cost. Better and Cheaper: This is the value proposition.
Consumers are a long way from seeing QS cells in their daily driver, however. It will all come down to execution. We’ll go into detail later, so subscribe to stay tuned.