Tesla poised to reveal 'million-mile' battery as soon as this year, report says

From CNET: Tesla may have something big up its sleeve to show off as early as this year: an affordable, long-lasting battery to allow its electric cars to reach cost parity with gasoline-powered cars.

Reuters on Thursday published a report citing sources close to the company's battery program, and it largely falls in line with past evidence we've heard about this so-called "million-mile" battery -- that's a million miles of total use, not range on a single charge. The publication's sources said the battery comes from a joint-development project with Chinese company Contemporary Amperex Technology and various battery experts. We've heard both of these nuggets of information in the past. In fact, Dalhousie University in Canada published a research paper detailing this type of battery last September. The university happens to have an exclusive agreement with Tesla.

CATL's contribution comes in the form of battery chemistry that does without expensive cobalt, or minimal amounts of the resource. Nixing the most expensive part of a battery, while adding new materials and additives to give it the ability to store more energy for longer periods of time, could be a massive breakthrough for lithium-ion units. It's not the holy grail of solid-state batteries -- a radically different and thus far overly expensive tech -- but nevertheless, it could be big.

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