Recent marketwide weakness notwithstanding, electric vehicles (EVs) remain a solid growth opportunity for investors. Worldwide sales of EVs grew 20% last year, in fact, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.
The next EV frontier investors need to know about? The lithium-based batteries that power them. They can be improved, mostly by becoming more durable with a greater driving range.
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Enter QuantumScape (NASDAQ: QS). Since 2010, it’s been working on so-called solid-state lithium batteries that will do both. And, after the usual post-IPO rise and fall, its stock started to soar in the latter half of last year after the company announced a crucial battery production process had been perfected.
Although it’s still only shipping prototypes to its developmental partner PowerCo — a subsidiary of Volkswagen — it was a sign that the company would probably be able to begin large-scale commercial production sometime in 2027. It almost seemed as if it would be the first to enter the solid-state lithium EV battery business, in fact. Straits Research expects this sector to grow at an annualized pace of 36.4% between now and 2033.
Much has changed since then, however. Namely, a shocking number of rivals have unveiled their own solid-state lithium EV battery development efforts, suggesting time frames for commercialization that are at least as short as QuantumScape’s.
Take China’s BYD (OTC: BYDDY) as an example. Without nearly as much fanfare as QuantumScape’s mid-2025 announcement that it was able to begin utilizing its newly developed production process, around that same time, BYD began testing its own solid-state battery packs capable of being driven 900 miles on a single charge. Given BYD’s much bigger size and scale, it’s in a much better position to expand its output once the technology is perfected.
Toyota Motor decisively entered the race in the meantime, too, committing in October of last year to bring its own solid-state batteries to the market by 2027, and install them in its own EVs no later than 2028. Then just last month, China’s Geely (parent to Volvo) said its first fully integrated solid-state lithium battery will be completed this year, with testing in its own electric vehicles to begin shortly thereafter.
And these are just a few of the electric vehicle manufacturers working on this next-generation battery tech.
