Time to start a topic on this company so it's easier to follow any news, rumors, etc. First link is a good recent overview: • 2014-Aug-20 article in Scientific American on "Secretive" Sakti3 company Some other links: • Video Interview with the founder/CEO, Ann Marie Sastry x • PDF transcript of that interview above • 2011 TEDx Univ of Michigan Talk by Ann Marie Sastry (youtube video) • 2014 Stanford Energy Seminar talk by Sastry (youtube video) • Some interesting employee comments about what it's like to work at Sakti3 (not positive! nobody recommends working there!) • 2014-Aug-22 article on Sakti3 from Cleantechnica • 2014-Aug-21 article on Sakti3 from Xconomy As for me, I'll just echo Elon's oft-cited quote, "Send us a cell." Otherwise, this is all talk. But who knows...
Employees seem to think their fellow employees are good and everyone is working hard. They are mainly complaining about working too hard themselves and not being paid enough by their politically-oriented senior management. There are only a handful of comments so it's hard to know how accurate that is. Toyota has stated recently that they are working on similar technology and are seeing good results but don't expect it to show up in their cars for another 5+ years. GM pulled the plug on Envia within a year of working with them but I think they've been investing and collaborating with Sakti3 for several years so I suppose that is a sign that they have tested some prototype cells and validated some of the hype.
The part of this story that I take note of is that even though they are an Ann Arbor company with close associations with Detroit auto engineering, they project what seems to me to be the logical marketing and development path, which is licensing the tech for consumer electronics batteries and other higher profit applications FIRST. With BEV applications demand is for cheap high performance. Consumer electronics pays a lot better and makes much more sense if you really have an innovation that will allow more charge in a smaller battery that's inherently safer. Apple would be happy to put this to work in 100 million iPhones a year at a much higher price per gram. Every week there are new claims by labs and start ups to have a revolutionary battery tech tweak. I expect to see it come up at a big product announcement from Apple or Samsung long before it has any relevance to automotive BEVs. Companies that talk about going straight to automotive (and analysts who suggest they are a challenge to Tesla) lack credibility.
That really comes back to the issue of the talk being about energy density and not power density and saying they think they can make them cheaply without revealing a current cost. Battery tech is often pick 3 of 4: cost, life, energy density, power density). Tesla's model focuses on cost and energy density, with reasonable power density (occasional 4C for cars and C/2 for static storage) and life, using battery management to help with the power density and life issues in order to help lower battery cost. As with metal-air, a very high energy-density, low power-density battery could be used as a range extender, hybridizing with a high power-density battery. But overall that means a high low charging rate so not good as a long-range BEV, unless it's reasonable cost per mile and you could fast swap.
NPR's Marketplace had a piece on this company. With an introduction mentioning Elon Musk and Tesla's "D" (for no good reason that I could tell) that doesn't show up in this transcript: A better battery is hard to invent | Marketplace.org
Good article. This "Battery Discussion" thread has contained links to interesting battery research over the past 8 years. Some research is still in testing while others have yielded little progress over the current lithium ion tech. I guess we are still waiting for the battery that will truly be a paradigm shift.
Dyson powers $20M investment into solid-state battery company Sakti3 http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/15/dyson-powers-20m-investment-into-solid-state-battery-company-sakti3/ $20M doesn't sound like enough to do much these days.
Also in Car and Driver. The C/D article didn't really have anything we didn't already know, though the Dyson deal that woof mentioned earlier was news to me.
Once bitten twice shy. You'd think the Envia experience would be enough for GM not to get sucked in twice. Sadly people do not always learn from their mistakes.
anyone knows what energy density (Wh/kg) will they get? They say 1100 Wh/l, but I don't know what goes into the battery. Couldn't find it anywhere.
The Panasonic cells (Tesla) are about 600 Wh per Liter volume so 1,100 is almost half the volumetric size for the same energy. The cells used by the Nissan LEAF and 2015 Chevy Volt are only about 300 Wh per Liter. Lots of energy in a small space. As far as I can tell, Sakti3 has not made any claims about "specific energy" or energy density by weight. Nor have they made any apparent claims for specific power or power density by weight.
Taking the Tesla or Nissan batteries energy density by volume and comparing tells you very little about the specific energy... this thing doesn't have an liquid electrolyte. If anything it should be heavier. This seems relevant if you want to put it in a car, you might care about weight as much as volume. Do you know what goes into their battery? as in, what metals? That would help get some boundaries on the problem.
I didn't mean to imply anything about Sakti3's specific energy by referring to the volumetric energy density of the LEAF and Volt cells. I just meant to give further perspective since the Panasonic cells used by Tesla are already at the high end of energy density among the cells used in plugin cars today. I don't think there is any reliable public knowledge about the Sakti3 cathode or anode chemistry or even the chemistry of their solid electrolyte layer. They claim they will have non-automotive ready for commercial production with 1-2 years from now with Dyson presumably being a prospective buyer. Automotive cells would supposedly follow within 2-3 years after that. GM has been burned once before with Envia when the sample cells they provided for GM lab testing failed to meet expectations. The fact that GM is still investing and working with Sakti3 today seems like a good sign.
Yea well I was telling that to myself mostly. I had some wishful thinking regarding Sakti3. After seeing an interview with the CEO, it got me impressed. But leaving out an important detail like kWh/kg seems questionable.
Sakti3 prospective customers do not care about specific energy - this is why Sakti3 atm talking about volumetric density only. No one really cares if smartphone battery weight is 42g or 61g. But every smartphone manufacturer cares how thin particular model is. Thus focus on Wh/L. When Sakti3 would be in position to market their batteries for an application where specific energy is important - then they start talking about Wh/kg. But let them commercialise it for most lucrative market first, high-end smartphones.
Zzzz.., exactly. I have talked to leadership of this company(I'm a student at that school in Ann Arbor) and they are looking to crack the market through sponsorships, which so far i from Dyson, and likely other manufacturers, ala, smartphone manufacturers for sure. We'll see how there plan works out, but they are very serious about the math behind there theoretical, and hopefully actual energy density!
Seems they were able to talk Dyson into buying them. Dyson buying Li-ion solid-state battery company Sakti3 for $90M (GreenCarCongress.com) More at link above...
Dyson buying them out seems to indicate that this technology wasn't really suited for automotive purposes. When you have very small batteries, it's a big deal to be able to generate a lot of power out of them. But when you have very high capacity batteries, generating power is usually not the big concern, it's weight. So this seems to indicate that Sakti3's technology was really more suited for small electrics than automotive.
I wouldn't be so sure about that: Government documents reveal Dyson is making an electric car and Dyson Challenges Tesla With $1.4 Billion Battery Tech Investment The $1.4 billion number is more than 3X as much as Tesla and Panasonic (combined !) invested in the Gigafactory so far.