Video: US startup claims more than 1200km of driving range from new battery

A US company is claiming it has tested a new battery which offers up to 1210 kilometres of driving range from a single charge.

Two-year-old startup Our Next Energy (ONE) – which enjoys backing from the likes of BMW and Bill Gates – fitted a prototype battery to a Tesla Model S, travelling more than 1200km before the battery required charging.

ONE’s achievement far exceeds Tesla’s own claim of 652km of range for the Model S, using a 203.8kWh battery pack created as a direct plug-in replacement for the car’s usual 100kWh battery.

The company says it wants to eventually eliminate nickel and cobalt from its batteries without giving up driving range.

“We want to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles by eliminating range anxiety, which holds back most consumers today,” said Mujeeb Ijaz, Founder and CEO of ONE.

“We are now focused on evolving this proof-of-concept battery into a new product called GeminiTM, which will enable long distance trips on a single charge, while improving cost and safety using sustainable materials.”

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The Tesla Model S was chosen as a test vehicle as it is highly efficient and has a large area dedicated to the battery.

“The ONE Gemini battery aims to eliminate range as a barrier to electric vehicle adoption by doubling the available energy on board in the same package space,” said Ijaz, who is also a former Apple executive and has three decades of industry experience.

The company says a third party validated the results in a lab environment, where the vehicle was run on a dynamometer at a constant 89km/h and achieved a theoretical maximum driving range of 1419 kilometres.