Don't count out Richard Dyson. He is building a solid state battery factory in Michigan. It will still be several years before anything will be available commercially.
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https://qz.com/948041/dyson-sakti3-tesla-battery-patents/Dyson, the UK appliance maker owned by billionaire James Dyson, has relinquished the core intellectual property of Sakti3, a hyper-secretive solid-state battery startup that it acquired for $90 million just 18 months ago as the first step in a plan to become a battery juggernaut.
The move—canceling its $200,000-a-year license for Sakti3’s patent portfolio from the University of Michigan, from which the startup was spun out—is stunning: When Dyson announced the deal in October 2015, much of the business press described it as potentially transformational, catapulting Dyson into the vanguard of the global race for long-lasting electronics and affordable electric cars. As though challenging industry trend-setter Tesla, Dyson would build a $1 billion battery factory, with Sakti3’s invention going initially into Dyson vacuum cleaners within two years. Leading up to the deal, founder Dyson said an initial $15 million investment in Sakti3 might one day be worth more than the entirety of his company at the time. (The value of privately held Dyson is not known, but Dyson himself is worth $4.2 billion, according to Forbes.)
Instead, that investment may be worth little more than the value of the equipment in Sakti3’s Ann Arbor, Michigan, laboratory.
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Just after the acquisition, Quartz published an in-depth article detailing profound doubts in the lithium-ion research community about Sakti3. The article described Sastry’s intense secrecy, her failure to publicly or privately document her claims of enormous breakthroughs in her company’s solid-state battery work, and the belief by former senior Sakti3 executives that the company had achieved few tangible advances. The reason was simple—solid-state battery technology, while extremely promising, has enormous barriers, especially cost, and Sakti3, like everyone else who has tried, had failed to overcome them.