Electric cars certainly can look nice and promise big things, but the ones we can actually buy today rarely top 50 miles of range. Those promised for the next few years probably won't break 100, and they're not going to find wide success until things get a lot better in that department. That's the initiative of IBM's Battery 500 Project, bringing together a number of the brightest minds in anode/cathode tech to boost battery storage density by a factor of 10. The focus is on lithium-air technology, which uses nanoscale semiconductors and an open design relying on
