Photograph: Wade Vandervort/AP Last April, Elon Musk promised that Tesla would soon be able to power its electric cars for more than 1 million miles over the course of its lifespan. At the time, the claim seemed a bit much. That’s more than double the mileage current Tesla owners can expect to get out of their car’s battery packs, which are already well beyond the operational range of most other EV batteries. It just didn’t seem real—except now it appears that it is. Earlier this month, a group of battery researchers at Dalhousie University, which has an exclusive agreement with Tesla, published a paper in The Journal of the Electrochemical Society describing a lithium-ion battery that “should be able to power an electric vehicle for over 1 million miles” while losing less than 10 percent of its energy capacity during its lifetime. Led by physicist Jeff Dahn, one of the world’s foremost lithium-ion researchers, the Dalhousie group showed that its battery significantly outperforms any similar lithium-ion battery previously reported. They noted their battery could be especially useful for self-driving robotaxis and long-haul electric trucks , two products Tesla is developing. What’s interesting, though, is that the authors don’t herald […]

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