Will battery quality issues ever go away?
Why we think battery quality will get worse before it gets better
A catastrophic EV battery fire in a Korean parking garage (source).
We often get asked if battery quality issues will ever “go away” by students, partners, and investors (but, we’ll note, we’ve never been asked this by a customer 🙂). It’s a good question! Here are our thoughts:
In the short term, unfortunately, we believe the problem will get worse before it gets better. Today, cell producers are under intense pressure to improve both cost and performance, especially given the increasing dominance of Chinese cell producers. However, cost and performance are in tension with quality: why not pass a few more marginally-failing cells, increase the line speed by 20%, add in a little more silicon to the anode, or reduce the electrode overhang spec to squeeze in a few extra millimeters of active material? This problem is exacerbated in consumer-facing devices such as vape pens, where cheap, low-quality batteries can be readily purchased online, as well as in battery startups introducing new high-performance but yet-to-be-scaled-and-battle-hardened battery innovations. Ultimately, of course, the end user of the battery-powered product will face the consequences of these decisions when a battery safety event causes undue harm.
In the long term, we absolutely believe that battery quality issues will “go away” — simply because OEMs, governments, and the general public will no longer tolerate battery safety events. We’re already seeing the beginnings of governmental pressure on battery quality in New York, Korea, and elsewhere in the wake of battery safety crises. Furthermore, OEMs with a reputation for sourcing unsafe batteries will be forced out of the marketplace if they won’t or can’t improve. In the end, we believe that only battery producers who can scale production while maintaining high quality will survive.
That said, battery quality won’t improve magically! Battery quality control is an extremely difficult problem, and the status quo of inspection technologies is woefully inadequate (especially for latent defect detection). Only with a suite of next-generation quality control technologies — including, of course, our CT-powered cell Quality Management Solution — can cell producers scale their production with high quality.
We see a clear parallel between the current state of the battery industry and the early days of semiconductor manufacturing (Voltaiq has highlighted this parallel as well). Initially, quality control techniques in semiconductor production were simpler and less automated. However, as the complexity of these products increased exponentially via Moore’s law and the scale of production followed suit, the industry developed much more sophisticated quality control processes. In turn, companies such as KLA began offering comprehensive solutions to improve yield and quality for semiconductor manufacturers. In particular, vision-based chip inspection (both optical and SEM) is especially powerful. Despite the relative maturity of the semiconductor industry, quality issues haven’t gone away, but quality control has advanced to meet the challenges. Similarly, we anticipate that as the battery industry matures, it will follow the trajectory of the semiconductor sector and adopt more advanced quality control measures—especially given the additional pressures on product quality due to safety requirements.
Glimpse’s mission is to enable battery quality at scale to ensure the quality of the batteries that you make or buy. Contact Glimpse to learn more about our Scan on Demand and On-Premise Scanning offerings.
