British Electric Vehicle battery startup Ionetic. Subscribe to Electric Vehicle News Bitesize Podcast for FREE to hear more!
British start-up Ionetic has appointed former Aston Martin chief executive Andy Palmer as its new chairman in a bid to accelerate the company’s growth.
Founded in January 2022, Ionetic designs and develops electric vehicle battery packs, with a focus on making them available to large manufacturers as well as niche automakers producing less than 10,000 vehicles per year. The company is currently trying to attract customers and plans to build a “gigascale” manufacturing facility in the UK.
Palmer ran Aston Martin from 2014 to 2020, leading the company’s first SUV, the DBX and the Valkyrie, a mid-engine supercar. Prior to that, he spent most of his career at Nissan, rising to chief planning officer and playing a key role in the development and launch of the Leaf and e-NV200 electric vehicles.
Palmer has also served as chief executive and chairman of British-Indian electric bus company Switch and chairman of Slovakian manufacturer InoBat.
Ionetic said Palmer will use his industry experience to support the company’s growth as it works towards a “multi-GWh battery pack manufacturing capability”.
Palmer said: ““I have witnessed first-hand the need for more cost-effective battery pack solutions that can still meet the performance criteria of automotive OEMs, especially in lower volume. Ionetic is doing just this, and I have great belief that its offering will significantly reduce the challenge and headaches of electrification for OEMs.”
Ionetic co-founder James Eaton added: “Ionetic was founded to support vehicle manufacturers in making the shift to electrification, bringing innovation to the industry to make that transition easier and faster. Andy has demonstrated that same commitment to intelligent innovation throughout his career.”
Ionetic claims to be developing battery modules with an energy density of around 226 Wh/kg, compared to around 160 Wh/kg for most packages currently on the market. It also claims it can reduce production preparation costs from around £40m to £4m.
In other news, Tesla announces record production of electric vehicles.
Tesla posted record production results as the company continued to cut costs on its electric vehicles and boost demand for minerals.
Electric car giant Tesla on Sunday announced record deliveries for the first quarter of 2023. The company produced 440,808 vehicles and delivered 422,875 vehicles.
Despite missing sales targets, Musk claimed that Tesla could deliver 2 million vehicles this year, a 52% increase from last year.
Gene Munster from equity investment firm Deepwater Asset Management told reporters: “Tesla deliveries were in line with the consensus numbers, but it was a disappointment relative to some of the whispered numbers”. He went on to say: “They showed an acceleration, but they didn’t accelerate to the level that Musk had suggested it would”.
Tesla will report its full results for the quarter on April 19. Production increased at the company’s factories in Berlin, Germany and Texas, USA. Tesla claimed in a tweet that its Texas plant produced 4,000 Model Y vehicles last week, compared with 4,000 per week at its Berlin plant earlier this month.
On average, electric vehicles require more than twice as much copper and manganese as fossil fuel vehicles, according to the International Energy Agency. They also use several other minerals that are rarely used in other vehicles, such as lithium and graphite.
The electric vehicle and battery storage industries are the world’s largest consumers of lithium. According to the same report, the industry is expected to surpass stainless steel as the largest end-user of nickel by 2040.
Musk also suggested last year that Tesla has plans to enter the mining space to source its own lithium directly. Musk criticised rising lithium costs in a tweet last year stating that: “There is no shortage of the element itself, as lithium is almost everywhere on Earth, but pace of extraction/refinement is slow”.
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