A look at some of the cool tech we saw at Detroit’s Battery Show

Many of the challenges of the EV transition have to do with batteries—from consumer concerns about charging to industry-wide efforts to make batteries cheaper so plug-in vehicles are more accessible.

Tech Brew went deep on all things battery tech this week at Detroit’s Battery Show, a conference and expo featuring roughly 1,150 battery and hybrid/EV suppliers. The schedule was chock full of informative discussions on everything from emerging battery chemistry innovations to considerations for commercial fleets to EV charging infrastructure.

Here’s a roundup of some cool tech that caught our eye.

Get in formation: Tech Brew caught up with Don Wright, VP of engineering at Unico, which provides EV test solutions. The company unveiled the BAT350, the latest iteration of its battery cell formation and testing technology.

Wright explained that the tech could significantly speed up the battery-cell manufacturing process, enabling automakers to either reduce the size of their battery plants or as much as triple their output of battery cells. It could also help drive cost efficiencies, a key consideration for automakers looking to bring down the cost of EV batteries.

“Instead of it taking three weeks to make a cell, it might take you one week,” Wright said.

The BAT350 is based off of Unico’s IDAC power platform, and it’s now being sent to pilot customers. Wright said he expects it to be widely available in Q2 2025.

“It is really the thing that kick-starts the electrical, chemical process that’s going on in the cell,” he said of the formation process. “So, it’s extremely critical.”

All aboard: Cars aren’t the only forms of transportation going electric. The show featured a presentation by David Donovick, president and COO of Zin Boats, on the state of maritime electrification.

The benefits of electrifying boats are similar to those of electrifying cars, Donovick explained: savings on fuel and maintenance. “That $100,000 boat’s gonna cost you $20,000 a year to maintain, fuel, use,” he said. “What’s great about electrifying our fleets is we can make those problems go away.”

Though the history of electric boats dates back to the mid-19th century, Donovick noted, the industry’s electrification efforts have gone through fits and starts over the decades. Now, he described the state of affairs as a “massive gold rush focused on replicating what we’ve done with automotive.”

“It makes sense, right? We’ve got Teslas. We’ve got Rivians,” he said. “Why don’t we have electric boats?”

Zin is among the players trying to make marine electrification a reality. The startup recalibrated after facing some setbacks during the pandemic, but it’s now back at it—and working on an electric tender, dubbed the Z11, for what Donovick described as “the world’s first hydrogen-powered megayacht.”

Testing, testing: Tech Brew also checked out precision equipment manufacturer Marposs’s solution for leak-testing battery cells.

The solution is designed to detect the presence of liquid electrolytes, which are a crucial component in lithium-ion batteries. Marposs’s process involves vaporizing and discarding the volatile organic compounds found in lithium-ion batteries in the case of a leak, “and then tracing and quantifying their presence in the vacuum chamber,” per the company.

Making sure that each battery cell in a module is in good shape is an important part of assembling battery packs, because even small defects can have significant impacts on the battery.

A leak is “a bad thing. It has to be set aside and discarded,” Alberto Tomirotti, product manager for electrical testing and vehicle solutions for Marposs, told us. “You don’t want to have anything like that [assembled] into a big battery.”