Impact of Future Battery Technologies on the Passenger Vehicle Market

Abstract

The introduction of battery electric vehicles has initiated a transformation in the automotive industry, highlighting the need to improve the range, durability and fast-charging capability of vehicle batteries while reducing manufacturing costs and emissions. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of current trends and developments in future battery technologies. It shows that, especially in the small and compact vehicle segment, we can expect to see the entry of vehicles that use lithium iron phosphate batteries and, in the long term, possibly also sodium ion batteries, which, in addition to lower production costs, also rely less on critical raw materials such as cobalt and lithium. The integration of these cell chemistries opens up new opportunities in pack and module design due to their increased inherent safety and thus change the cost of future vehicles. In order to represent the corresponding market development, future battery technologies were integrated for the first time within the DLR's internal scenario analysis software VECTOR21. This integration enabled a bottom-up determination of future market potentials for passenger cars equipped with novel cell chemistries on the German vehicle market. In the short term, a high market potential for cost-effective cell chemistries can be seen. However, as soon as the range requirement can no longer be covered by vehicles with internal combustion engines due to stricter CO2 regulations, the market potential for vehicles with cell chemistries of high energy density and range will also increase.