Battery materials company Talga (ASX:TLG) is developing products to make electric vehicles charge faster, perform better and go further on the road.

Batteries are made up of an anode (positive) electrode and a cathode (negative) electrode and the electrical current flows between the two.

Talga’s Talnode products – made from its undeveloped graphite deposit in Sweden — is garnering a fair bit of interest from commercial end users, the company says.

Some of these commercial partners include carmaker Jaguar Land Rover, speciality chemical producers BASF and Johnson Matthey, Schunk Group, and car parts supplier Bosch. These companies turn over billions of dollars each year.

And so far, testing shows batteries containing Talga anodes outperforming the competition.

One of these, Talnode-C, is the subject of undergoing full-cell qualification testing by Italian electric motorbike company, IV Electrics.

IV Electrics tested lithium-ion batteries containing Talnode-C anodes under (replicated) real-world conditions.

One of these tests, named ‘Stelvio’ after the really steep road going through the Italian Alps, simulates driving up a mountain at high speed in low temperature conditions.

Look at this beast:

It’s pretty steep.

Results were good. Battery cells containing Talnode C outperformed the endurance of market leading commercial cells by up to 36 per cent, Talga says.

The tests also confirmed the fast charge, high power, and low temperature properties of Talnode-C anodes translate well to the full cell-level.

The ability to perform in low temps is very important because this has traditionally been the lithium-ion battery’s Achilles Heel.

Even Tesla says that in cold weather, “some of the stored energy in the battery may not be available because the battery is too cold”.

Last week, Talga told investors that Talnode-C had smoked the competition in freezing temperature performance.

Talnode-C retained 100 per cent capacity and 100 per cent cycle efficiency at 0°C, outperforming current commercial products in tests at a leading independent battery institute in Japan, the company says.

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