One of the biggest pieces of Tesla news isn’t a new car, or an FSD update, but a quiet comment from Tesla’s VP of Vehicle Engineering, Lars Moravy, during an interview on Jay Leno’s Garage. He revealed that Tesla’s next-generation nickel-based battery technology is much more durable than existing technology, and as a result, Tesla will suggest charging to the previous recommendation of 90% instead of today’s recommendation of 80%.
This isn’t just a minor tweak; it’s the result of a material-science breakthrough that gives Tesla’s Long Range and Performance batteries almost the same everyday convenience as their LFP counterparts.
A recently published patent application, US20240383770A1, provides a look at the science behind this improvement, revealing how Tesla’s updated techniques create a more resilient, longer-lasting battery cathode.
The LFP Benchmark and Nickel Compromise
To understand the importance of this change, one must first understand the two distinct battery lineups currently available from Tesla.
Lithium Iron Phosphate, or LFP batteries, are durable workhorses. Their primary advantage for the user is the convenience of charging to 100% every day, without needing to worry about accelerated long-term degradation. This makes them ideal for standard or short-range vehicles. However, they require more precise temperature gradients to work best — too hot or too cold, and they won’t charge fast enough, or be able to release enough power.
Nickel-based (NMC/NCA) batteries, on the other hand, are the high-performance marathon runners. Their key advantage is a higher energy density, alongside higher peak power output. This allows for the longer range and quicker acceleration found in Tesla’s Long Range and Performance Models. For years, the trade-off for this performance has been the need to limit the daily charging to 80% to preserve the battery’s long-term health and minimize degradation.
This created a convenience gap. Now, as Lars Moravy puts it, Tesla has closed the gap between LFP and Nickel-based batteries by half, making their high-performance batteries almost as user-friendly as their standard-range counterparts, but without any of the drawbacks.
The Secret Sauce: Cathode Doping
So, how has Tesla managed to pull off such a change? The answer lies in a patent application titled “Doped Cathode Active Materials and Methods Thereof”. Quite weighty, but in short, it details a process for Tesla to improve the chemistry of their nickel-based batteries. This helps increase their performance, and crucially, their long-term longevity.
The core innovation is doping, a material science technique in which small, precise amounts of other metallic elements (dopants) are mixed into the primary cathode material during manufacturing. This process helps address the primary drawback of many cathodes, which often experience a significant loss of charge capacity over repeated usage cycles.
Tesla has managed to increase the charge retention from 83% with its older cathodes to nearly 91% with its newer, doped cathodes. According to the patent, the standard, non-doped cell loses nearly 20% of its energy capacity over time. In stark contrast, a cathode doped with a combination of four elements loses less than 5% of its capacity over the same period.
That’s a fourfold reduction in degradation, and exactly the key material science jump that Tesla needs to improve its battery technology.
This is a major engineering win, and a shift to a 90% daily charging recommendation for newer vehicles will make them more user-friendly and give owners more range, while also increasing the longevity of Tesla’s batteries.
You can check out the full episode of Jay Leno’s garage below:
