The Future of Solid-State Batteries: Are We Really Close?
Nowadays when I see a headline like this one, talking about an eight-hundred-mile range electric vehicle powered by a revolutionary solid-state battery, I experience a sense of very slight skepticism. The first article on this web that mentioned solid-state batteries for electric vehicles was way back in 2018, when a naïve, fresh-faced young presenter made this earth-shattering prophecy: “Lithium-ion batteries or hydrogen fuel cells to power our vehicles? Until recently, that was the extent of the debate in the EV enthusiast community. But just when you think the battle for supremacy is between two major technologies, along come a bunch of other market disruptors, like graphene, sodium-ion, supercapacitors, ultracapacitors, and solid-state batteries. And it’s the last of these, solid-state batteries, that look like becoming a commercially viable product, maybe even as early as 2020.”
Now, to be fair, we did have a global pandemic in 2020, didn’t we? So we can perhaps give the solid-state developers a year or maybe eighteen months’ grace. But given the fact that since then we’ve been fed an almost weekly stream of pronouncements from battery makers and auto manufacturers all over the world that THEIR particular solid-state technology will be in real-world production vehicles in ‘just a few months’ time,’ we could, I think, be forgiven for being just a little bit disappointed and disillusioned as we reach the back end of 2025 with none of those promises so far having been proven to be remotely accurate.
There is furious activity going on in the sector, though. We’ve got firms in China and South Korea all at it, and after years of bad-mouthing electric batteries and barking up the bonkers tree of hydrogen fuel cells, even the Japanese behemoth Toyota now claims it’s about to ride into the solid-state battery fray like a knight in shining armor. European giants are also having a go. Volkswagen, for example, has been spreading its bets by working hard with US firm QuantumScape AND Chinese firm Gotion to get solid-state batteries into their next-generation vehicles. So, surely one of them must be close…right?
I imagine you know the spiel quite well by now, don’t you? Solid-state batteries are the “next big thing” that will transform electric vehicles with much higher range, faster charging times, less fire risk, and lighter weight. They achieve that apparently all-conquering array of parameters because, unlike a normal lithium-ion battery that uses a highly flammable liquid or gel electrolyte between an anode and a cathode, a solid-state battery replaces the liquid with a solid electrolyte that takes up far less space and is not made of a flammable material.
But the annoying concept known as ‘the valley of death’ has proven to be a far wider leap than most developers had hoped for. The materials are new and complex, manufacturing yield is low, costs are high, and scaling from lab to gigawatt-hour production has proven very difficult. So, the plan today is to have a quick scoot through the major players, including Chery, with their eight-hundred-mile range claim, to see who is closest to the winning line and when we might really, really be able to buy an electric vehicle with an ALL solid-state battery.
Now, Let’s start with good old VW and their partners in China and the USA. As recently as October 2025, Chinese firm Gotion announced that its all-solid-state “Jinshi Battery” has entered pilot-scale production, and the company has begun designing a 2-gigawatt-hour mass-production line. Gotion claims a cell energy density of three hundred and fifty watt-hours per kilogram, which is significantly higher than Tesla’s so-called ‘forty-six-eighty’ cylindrical lithium-ion cell, which we’ll use as our baseline for the rest of this video. Gotion reckons a full battery pack is good for about a thousand miles of range, with stable performance between minus twenty and plus eighty-five degrees Celsius and a projected lifespan of a million kilometers. The company’s roadmap suggests small-scale vehicle integration around 2027, and mass production by around 2030.
VW is also working with QuantumScape over in the States, perhaps the best-known of all the solid-state developers. Their technology centers on what they refer to as a “lithium-metal / anode-free” solid-state cell. This tech uses a lithium-metal anode that is actually formed in situ during charging. That effectively means there is no pre-existing anode. The solid electrolyte is in fact a ceramic separator which plays a dual role: it provides a highly conductive pathway for lithium ions, and it physically impedes the growth of the dreaded lithium dendrites that we’ve looked at plenty of times in previous videos on this channel. The idea is that you get higher energy density – QuantumScape claims just over three hundred watt-hours per kilogram at cell level – improved safety, faster charging – like fifteen minutes to go from ten to eighty percent – and potentially longer cycle life.
But QuantumScape has gotten itself a bit of a reputation for over-promising and under-delivering, hasn’t it? So where are they at right now? Well, in Q3 of 2025, the company announced the shipment of B1 samples of their so-called QSE-5 cell, and they are apparently now installing a ‘highly automated cell production pilot line’ at their headquarters in California using a new manufacturing process known as Cobra, that is claimed to be twenty-five times more efficient than its predecessor.
You may have seen the very recent press coverage of an actual QuantumScape solid-state battery in one of VW’s Ducati electric motorcycles. That’s encouraging stuff, demonstrating real-world scalability for the technology and the strength of the partnership with the German giant. QuantumScape’s timeline for commercialization has now been accelerated, with analysts projecting a commercially viable product by 2027. Keep that year in mind, by the way, because it might come up again!
So, what about the two largest battery manufacturers in the world then? CATL and BYD. Well, CATL has entered trial production of some relatively small all‐solid‐state battery cells, which they claim to have energy densities of about five hundred watt-hours per kilogram, but only as early lab-scale prototypes, so for the purposes of our comparison chart, we probably need to take that with a large pinch of salt. The company has actually been beavering away on this since 2016, and it apparently now has about a thousand dedicated colleagues working on the challenge. And guess when they say they will have a production-ready batch of all solid-state batteries. Yep. 2027.
In fact, in typical CATL candor, the company says it is currently only at technology readiness level 4 and they themselves caution that despite the five hundred watt-hour per kilogram headline number, charging speed, cycle life, cost, yield, and manufacturing scale still remain substantial challenges for them. Their CEO, Robin Zeng, recently publicly stated that he thought ASSBs are “still years away” from full commercialization.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, BYD is in almost exactly the same position. They’ve had a small-scale prototype line for a year or so now, achieving four hundred watt-hours per kilogram, and they too are projecting 2027 as the year when they will launch a demonstration vehicle powered by their all-solid-state battery technology, with full commercial production slated for 2030. The key barrier for both companies seems to be not so much the technology itself but the challenge of making it cost-competitive with their own existing lithium-ion and sodium-ion chemistries. I certainly wouldn’t count them out though. When it comes to delivering on promises, few companies have performed more impressively than these two in recent years.
So that brings us to Chery, not the last manufacturer we’ll look at today but arguably the one with the boldest claim so far. In November 2024, the company announced it had already got a gigawatt-hour-level all-solid-state battery production line under development in Wuhu, in the Anhui province of China. Then in January 2025, the first batch of engineering samples of ASSBs rolled off their production lines with a real-world, cell-level energy density of about three hundred watt-hours per kilogram. And now they’ve just unveiled this latest prototype with an astonishing six hundred watt-hours per kilogram of gravimetric energy density, which, according to the fevered reporting in the Chinese press, makes it good for more than eight hundred miles or thirteen hundred kilometers of real-world range. But while the first-generation, 300Wh/kg version can be considered a genuinely commercial product, the six hundred watt-hour version cannot. At least not yet anyway. Chery Automobile is suggesting a date for large-scale rollout of this one though. And you’ll never guess when that date is. Yeah. It’s 2027. Who would have predicted that, eh? What a remarkable coincidence.
Now, I wouldn’t want to upset the sensibilities of the myriad other companies all over the world who would also consider themselves to be in with a decent shout at the ‘all solid-state battery’ crown, so while I can’t mention every single one, I think it is worth highlighting a few of the main other contenders. Chinese automaker Nio has recently been very vocal about its ET7 sedan which achieved more than six hundred and fifty miles on a single charge using cell chemistry from another Chinese firm, WeLion. So, first of all, the battery pack was a hundred and fifty kilowatt-hours, which is about one and a half times the capacity of even the largest EV batteries on the market today, so range is bound to be longer. And secondly, the WeLion cells are not ALL-solid state. They are semi-solid state.
So, what do I mean by that? Well, there’s a little bit of gel in a semi-solid-state battery, which is there to take up the microscopic undulations in two solid materials and overcome the reduction in ionic transfer at the interface of electrode and electrolyte which has been one of the major challenges of the all-solid-state developers. But adding a gel back into the mix adds costs and complexity in production.
It means you need dual-phase manufacturing – one phase for the dry-electrode steps and another phase for the wet filling. You also need more precise sealing systems to prevent leaks, and additional QC steps to ensure the gel is distributed just right. Plus, you need special handling equipment for high-viscosity gels. In other words, many of the things that proper solid-state battery developers are trying to avoid.
Several other car makers, mostly Chinese, have now jumped on the semi-solid-state bandwagon, but it’s a hybrid technology at best. It may well have its place for now, but when the all-solid-state batteries do eventually arrive, they will most likely spell the end for this stop-gap configuration.
There’s loads of other small-scale battery developers in China, of course, but Farasis is perhaps the best known of the tier-two batch. They’ve got backing from Mercedes-Benz among others, and they also have a pilot production line up and running, producing their Gen-4 pouch cells with a claimed energy density of three hundred and twenty-three watt-hours per kilogram. Then there’s Prologium just across the water in Taiwan. According to the folks at Inside EVs magazine, that company is apparently planning a gigafactory in Dunkirk in France for 2027, which seems a bit random, but anyway, their so-called super fluidized all-inorganic solid-state tech is seen by many as one of the more advanced contenders in terms of cell chemistry because it kind of steals the idea of a semi-solid state battery but does actually output a genuinely solid-state product.
The company achieves that by TEMPORARILY FLUIDIZING a ceramic-based solid electrolyte during processing so that it can flow into all those micro-crevices we talked about earlier, to form an intimate solid-solid contact. Then they cool it all down into a solid before the end of the production line. Clever stuff, eh? The latest prototype has a gravimetric energy density of three hundred and sixty watt-hours per kilogram, and the company reckons it’s on the way to four hundred and seventy watt-hours per kilogram with their next generation version.
