MILAN – When people say: “It’s all a question of chemistry”, the first electric car with sodium ion batteries arrives from China, to simplify: with salt. Hua Xianzi is produced by Sehol, the joint venture that brings together the Jac Motors group and Volkswagen. While another well-known Chinese company takes care of the supply of accumulators, HiNa Battery Technologies, which has been working and testing salt batteries for years, also supplying them to giants such as BYD and CATL.
Until now, electric mobility has relied on lithium, now, knowing you can count on salt for food use, to supply BEV vehicles, is having another ally in economic terms because as an element it has lower costs, it opens up a new road to the production of electrified vehicles and is easy to find.
Hua Xianzi, l’auto con la battery al sale
The first compact city car prototype of the Chinese Sehol E10X has five seats, is equipped with a cylindrical sodium ion battery with a capacity of 25 kWh and a density of 140 Wh/kg. The first BEV with salt accumulator guarantees a range of 250 km and manages to fill up on tap with a power of 100 kW in just 15 minutes. Not only that, this battery, being able to count on a lower energy density, cuts costs compared to the lithium-ion equivalent. Therefore, according to the manufacturer HiNa Battery Technology, the price of the car, although it has not yet been disclosed, could be reduced by 10%.
In this regard, the CEO of Jac Motors, Karl-Heinz Göbel declares: “The future of electric vehicles looks promising with the introduction of more accessible and sustainable battery technology. With the development of new battery technology, the prices of electric vehicles will become more competitive, offering more car buyers the excess to new energy vehicles.
Sodium ion batteries: the possible solution to the electricity market crisis
The automotive sector has been waiting for sodium-ion batteries for some time. The market can now take a breath of fresh air, with the introduction of this new technology applied to electric transport, given the increase in lithium prices, which at the end of last year went over 70,000 dollars per ton, doubling the cost compared to the beginning of 2022.
We can also say that the advent of the new accumulator offers a solution that goes hand in hand with the safety of a hardly flammable element, the costs of a raw material that is easy to recover and process.
So the question naturally arises: “Why haven’t sodium-ion batteries been put on the market for some time?”. The answer is linked to the limit of this technology due to the low energy density of this type of battery, which is well suited to static storage applications, but without the performance useful for automotive applications. This is where the researchers and engineers who have been working for some years to ensure that the vehicles of the future can mount sodium ion batteries enter the field, thus offering the market another source of energy for clean and safe vehicles.