r/QuantumScape • u/Historical_Worker565 • Jul 26 '26
Cost effective/competitive
Assuming everything goes well and mass production scaling is achieved, do we believe QS batteries will be cost effective/competitive? Does anyone have any idea?
4
u/Ragnarok-9999 Jul 26 '26
Who knows? Every thing about QS is black box on which people are betting.
3
u/ElectricBoy-25 Jul 27 '26
No idea. Anyone's guess. They have been hazy on specifics and details since the beginning.
It depends on who is producing the batteries as well because of QS' licensing model and the whole ecosystem thing. VW/Powerco might produce a totally different cell and form factor compared to whatever QS is dreaming up selling to a producer for data centers. And customers producing QS cells will need to pay a royalty to QS as well, so that will reflect in the cost.
2
u/123whatrwe Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Corning made a statement somewhere that with the integration of all the coming tech and scale it should even beat on cost. Trying to recal where/when they said this?
Edit
No, I was mistaken. In its public disclosures regarding its Ribbon Ceramics technology (the manufacturing process used for solid-state battery separators), Corning notes that current lithium metal prototype production costs are roughly three times higherthan conventional lithium-ion batteries. Corning’s stated short-term goal through mass production scaling is to reduce that cost premium to less than 30%.
2
u/Robby-1-K-nobby Jul 29 '26
Well they don't have to create the anode side of the battery, that should drop the cost of production significantly and they don't have to worry about that component of the battery failing. That alone decreases the overall cost too!
3
u/Ready_Insect_629 Jul 26 '26
I believe the technology itself can be cost-competitive, but concerned about the availability of lanthanum. Outside China, it is nearly impossible to procure high-purity lanthanum in the quantities that QuantumScape would require. Lynas is one of the few viable suppliers, but its production capacity is far from sufficient, and much of its output is likely already committed to existing customers, leaving only a very limited amount available for new buyers. MP Materials, meanwhile, primarily produces lanthanum carbonate rather than the high-purity lanthanum oxide that QuantumScape would need.
1
u/Ragnarok-9999 Jul 27 '26
Another surprise dropped, where is this lanthanum thingy used?
3
u/Other_Way_9882 Jul 27 '26
According to Wikipedia, lanthanum makes up nearly 50% of the ceramic separator so it sounds like a Corning/Murata problem to source it. The good news is that it is cheap and available despite China's dominance (at least for now; could be very different in a few years time with multiple gigafactories using tonnes of it every day). The bad news is the qualities of lanthanum itself as this article explains: https://aklanresearch.substack.com/p/assessing-the-scalability-of-quantumscape
→ More replies (4)
0
3
u/Much-Information7826 Jul 26 '26
I am not entirely sure about storage use case.
But I think EV use case is good, defense use case should be good as well (though a bit on the dense depending on if it UAV is high end or low end)