On a hot summer day in mid-September, a man sitting in a park in the northern Chinese city of Wuhan is staring out at the clouds above.
“I’m the world’s most powerful electric vehicle battery,” says Li Yuqing, the director of WU-Hing Energy Technologies, the company behind the Li-ion battery used in the Tesla Model S and Model X electric vehicles.
He is not kidding.
The battery can produce up to 450 kilowatts (1,200 horsepower) of electricity per kilogram of weight.
Tesla and other electric vehicles are also expected to have huge batteries.
And they have already delivered some of the biggest battery promises in history, including those that will allow them to drive a city or a city block.
But there are many hurdles to get to this point, including building batteries that can last hundreds of miles, making sure they can be safely deployed for years without overheating, and testing for and approving their use before they reach mass production.
These challenges are among the reasons why automakers are starting to rethink how they approach battery production.
Tesla, for instance, announced in January that it had entered into an agreement with a Japanese battery maker, Panasonic, to produce batteries in a large-scale facility in the city of Kobe.
In July, Nissan announced it was moving its lithium-ion manufacturing plant to a plant in the Chinese city Shanghai.
And in the United States, General Motors is building a plant at the University of Michigan that could potentially be ready to make battery cells in just a few years.
What makes this announcement so unusual is that it comes as Tesla has also announced plans to manufacture battery cells at its factory in Nevada, and with a new lithium-air battery being designed.
But how does the company expect to get the technology into mass production and where will it go from here?
The answer to these questions depends on whether the company can find a way to manufacture and sell its new batteries in large quantities, and also on how the companies’ existing batteries fare.
There are also several other challenges that need to be addressed before these batteries can be used to power cars or trucks or buses.
But they have the potential to reshape the way we think about battery technology and the future of energy.
Tesla’s lithium-polymer battery will likely be the most powerful in history because of its size.
Li-air batteries are made of thin sheets of lithium metal.
Tesla has a history of manufacturing and selling batteries in such thin sheets.
But its new battery has a much higher capacity than that of existing batteries, which could enable it to produce large amounts of power over time.
In this new design, Tesla will use lithium-sulfur trioxide (LiS2), which is about twice as abundant as nickel-iron-oxide (NiSO4), the most abundant metal in a battery.
Tesla also plans to make lithium-cadmium battery cells using its new technology.
“If you have an all-metal cell, that means you have a high-capacity battery,” said Dr. Li Zhang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“But if you have metal, you have lower-capacity cells, which means you can use them for a longer time.”
If Tesla can produce the battery cells, then it can start mass producing its batteries at a scale that will enable it, for example, to get them into mass markets within a few decades.
Tesla is also hoping to start making batteries at the same time as it builds its electric cars.
“The first step is to put the first cells in the vehicles,” Mr. Li said.
Tesla plans to sell a number of vehicles powered by this new battery technology, which is designed to have high energy density and a large battery capacity.
This is the technology that has been most promising for lithium-based batteries, since it will be able to store a lot of energy and still produce power.
“There is a lot to work out,” said Peter A. Srinivasan, Tesla’s vice president of product development.
Tesla first developed the LiS2 batteries as a way of improving the lithium-oxidation process for lithium in a process called electrolysis.
Lithium is chemically identical to graphite, which contains a metal, called aluminum, which helps keep the electrons in a material from escaping.
Tesla initially began making its lithium battery from graphite in 2007, but it was unable to use it because it was too heavy.
“We were looking for a lighter alternative,” Mr, Li said, “and we did find one, but we didn’t use it very much.”
The first lithium-oxygen battery was made in 2011, and it was able to provide more energy than a nickel-metal-oxide battery.
In 2015, Tesla announced that it would be developing a new battery material that uses aluminum as the electrolyte.
But this material is still in the early stages of development, and Tesla said it would start selling its new LiS battery to car manufacturers soon.
