Envia battery breakthrough gives General Motors lead for affordable electric cars

A California battery start-up says it's achieved a breakthrough that could make electric vehicles affordable alternatives to fossil-fueled cars, cutting the price of EV batteries in half. The firm's backers include the U.S. government and an arm of General Motors. Did GM just win the race for mass-produced electric vehicles?

The hubbub around electric vehicles over the past two decades has never translated into mass production for reasons of basic chemistry. While we're used to computers that grow outdated every 18 months, battery tech moves at a glacial pace; the lead-acid batteries in today's vehicles would be familiar to mechanics from the turn of the 20th century, and the lithium-ion batteries in modern electric vehicles date to the 1980s.

It's not for lack of trying. Corporations and governments around the world spend billions of dollars a year on battery research in hopes of finding a breakthrough that would wean cars off oil. None have succeeded to date, in part because nature set the bar high with gasoline, a gallon of which contains as much energy as 900 lbs. of the most advanced lithium-ion batteries in EVs today. As Tesla proved with its recent uproar over a $41,000 replacement cost, those batteries don't come cheap.