The new “Rich Mengenis” battery from General Motors promised EVS cheaper in 2028

General Motors revealed on Tuesday the chemistry of a new battery called the Rich Managanian Lythmium (LMR), which says it must reduce costs while providing a shy driving scope of the most advanced batteries in the market.

“With LMR, we can connect more than 400 miles in our trucks while significantly reducing the battery costs,” Cort Kelti, Vice President of Battery, Payment and Sustainability at General Motors, told Techcrunch.

LMR will also significantly reduce the amount of nickel and cobalt compared to the most advanced GM cells, which are critical minerals that are not easily available from local sources in the United States.

Today, Chevrolet Silvrado uses nickel-manc-cobalt (NMC) cells to lead 492 miles on a complete charge. This impressive range comes with a large price. Electric trucks start with more than 73,000 dollars for the general public (the lean release cost less). General Motors plans to release with Li-Lithium-phosphate cells (LFP), which would decrease the price By $ 6000But it also cuts the range to 350 miles.

The new technology will maintain LFP prices without sacrificing more than the range.

General Motors says new cells will be cheaper for several reasons. For one, manganese is cheaper than cobalt or nickel. The LMR chemistry will have zero to 2 % cobalt, 30 % – 40 % nickel, and 60 % – 70 % manganese. This is much lower than the leading NMC cells today, which reaches 10 % cobalt and 80 % nickel.

Previous attempts in the batteries rich in manganese tend to decompose quickly. General Motors is believed to have cracked the problem. The auto company tried a set of materials and manufacturing operations to reach the current formula.

LMR battery packages will have published cells instead of bags. Ultium batteries are used the last day. Keelti said that the shift to the vocalist cells, which has a solid shell, would help the company build a battery package of more than 50 % of the parts.

“They are huge and huge cost savings that we will get,” he said.

General Motors has major LMR plans, where chemistry is likely to spread throughout the EV lineup. “LMR can” can take over a large part in the middle of the market, pushing the LFP to the entry level and NMC price price to applications that need long -term and high -energy density.

New cells will be made with Ultium cells, GM joint project with LG Energy solution. Through Ultium, the two companies invested billions of dollars in Battery manufacture in the United States.

Both have been following LMR for years. General Motors has more than 50 patents on LMR, although LG also works on the technology itself. Kelti acknowledged that LG could make its own version of LMR cells that do not violate patents in General Motors, making chemistry available on a wider scale. “It will be interesting to see how all this plays,” said Keelti.

The GM’s LMR research has been going on a decade ago. Its efforts have been largely launched in the past two years, as engineers have produced large cells of coordination similar to those in EVS on the road today.

Koshal Narayanaswami, director of advanced cell engineering at the auto industry, said that General Motors has made about 300 large coordination cells so far, and the test system is equal to about 1.5 million miles of typical driving.

This leaves only a few years for the company to modify the current manufacturing factories to accommodate the new chemistry and then increase production. Specific, in particular, Stumbling The first Ultium cells.

Keelti is sure that General Motors could reach the goal of 2028.

He said: “He fulfills all the standards of our performance, and we have a partner who will make it, and we have a manufacturing site.” “The other thing is that the supply chain is much more local than high nickel or LFP, so we really motivate to do so. There are a lot of things that meet here make us really want to go quickly.”