Hi, I work at a startup focusing on lithium sulfur batteries. It’s a slightly different chemistry and I can’t say how far this particular tech is from the market, but I have some insight.

The standard practice in testing new battery tech is to make coin cells that look very similar to what you’d buy in a store. The article also mentions pouch cells which are a similar size but aren’t rigid, which causes them to behave differently because pressure doesn’t build up. Once you prove tech can work at this scale, then you start engineering a bigger battery. The idea is that eventually it could power anything, but obviously cars would be a main focus.

The cool thing about sulfur batteries is that sulfur is literally trash. The fossil fuel industry has been making mountainsof it for decades. They practically pay you to take it. That’s important because the most expensive part of lithium ion batteries is currently the cathode, which requires the use of cobalt and manganese, both of which are very expensive and require lots of ecological damage to mine. If we can figure out the tech, these batteries could be dramatically cheaper, and also store enough energy to give an electric vehicle enough range that EVs could outcompete combustion engine cars.