QuantumScape (QS): Leading the Solid-State Battery Race

Why Solid-State Batteries Are the Next Big Leap

With the electrification of all forms of transportation, starting with cars, and soon also encompassing trucks, ships, and possibly even planes, battery storage has become the key technology of the decade.

This is especially true for transportation, requiring high energy density, but could also be crucial to balance the intermittency of renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

The industry has been dominated by lithium-ion technology, as the best compromise so far between cost, energy density, and resource availability.

However, lithium-ion technology presents a few key issues that might limit its adoption:

• It tends to form metal dendrites that can cause catastrophic failures and battery fire.
• It operates poorly in freezing temperatures, making it unsuitable for cold climates and fixed storage in cold regions.
• Its energy density is high, but still not ideal for long-range drive, or heavy-duty applications like trucks and buses.
• Most batteries lose power and degrade quickly than the rest of the EV, creating anxiety in buyers about the resale value and the risk of needing an expensive new battery pack.

For all these reasons, scientists and battery manufacturers have been trying to create a better battery design.

And more importantly, lithium-ion is very much a mature design by now, with new models rarely showing an improvement in energy density since 2020.

Source: QuantumScape

A key idea, called a solid-state battery, is to replace the liquid electrolyte between the anode and cathode with a solid electrolyte. This not only makes the battery potentially denser (as liquid electrolyte and its containment add weight), but also safer, as conventional liquid electrolytes are a main source of fire risk in lithium batteries.

While easy in theory, the practice of building a solid-state battery prototype is more complex. We covered several examples of experimental designs before, including those without an anode at all, or using AI to do so.

But bringing these experimental designs to the mass production stage, with a stable quality level and at reasonable costs, is another challenge.

One company in the West seems to be finally reaching the arrival line of mass-producing solid-state batteries: QuantumScape.

QuantumScape Overview

Since its foundation in 2010, Californian QuantumScape has been a prominent startup in the solid-state battery space, remarkable by its move into the field early, and its independence from larger battery manufacturers also pursuing solid-state technology, like CATL (300750.SZ), Samsung, or LG Energy Solution (373220.KS).

Since then, the company formed in 2018 a joint venture with Volkswagen’s battery department PowerCo.

This started the slow process of developing a mass manufacturing method and extensive testing to check the design performance in a real EV.

Source: QuantumScape

In September 2025, the company finally showcased its battery in a real commercial vehicle, a fully electric Ducati V21L race motorcycle.

The modified electric Ducati motorcycle powered by QS solid-state technology contains a first-of-its-kind battery system designed by specialists at VW Group-owned Audi specifically for QS solid-state battery cells and highlights the potential capabilities of the technology on the racetrack.

Ducati is part of the Volkswagen group, together with brands like Audi, Bentley, CUPRA, Lamborghini, Porsche, SEAT, and Škoda (you can read more about Volkswagen and its EV strategy to turn around the situation of the German automaker in our dedicated report on the group).

The focus on an electric motorbike is justified by the possibility it offers for a “low-volume but high-visibility demonstration”. As track motorcycles require both extremely high power capability and high energy density, they also demonstrate the technical capacity of the battery pack.

The Volkswagen Partnership

As an independent startup, instead of a giant automaker or well-established battery makers like its Chinese, Japanese, or Korean counterparts, QuantumScape’s risk has always been higher for investors.

The technology might be great, but the expertise and financial capacity to bring it to mass production were always an interrogation mark.

This is changing thanks to the repeating funding rounds and agreements signed with Volkswagen, the second-largest automotive manufacturing group in the world, which is so important to QuantumScape’s shareholders.

Source: QuantumScape

The German automotive company will integrate the solid-state batteries in its Scalable System Platform (SSP), designed to form a common EV platform for all the models of all the brands of the company.

Under the 2024 agreement, PowerCo can manufacture up to 40 gigawatt-hours per year of electric vehicle batteries, with the option to expand to 80 GWh a year.

The relation with PowerCo is getting closer in 2025, with solid-state batteries used in a Ducati motorbike, and as PowerCo will be providing up to $131 million in new payments over the next two years upon the joint scale-up team achieving certain milestones.

“This expanded agreement is a clear signal of the growing strategic, technical, and financial alignment between the two companies.

It reflects our shared confidence in QSE-5 as a game-changing platform for the battery industry.”

Dr. Siva Sivaram – CEO and president of QunatumScape.

In 2025, Volkswagen agreed to provide up to $131 million in new payments over the next two years upon the joint scale-up team achieving certain milestones.

It also lets Volkswagen provide up to an extra 5 GWh of spare capacity QuantumScape has each year, for customers beyond Volkswagen Group, as well as the right to license certain future QS technology.

Other Partnerships

The Volkswagen deals are not the only important deals for the company, as it has also undisclosed joint-development agreements with a major global automotive OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer), and agreements with the leading auto OEM by revenue, luxury and premium OEMs, as well as for stationary storage and consumer electronics.

QuantumScape is also ramping up partnerships to improve the mass production of its ceramic separator: on September 30, it announced an agreement with Corning (GLW -1.04%) to jointly develop ceramic separator manufacturing capabilities, and with Murata Manufacturing, with further progress in the collaboration, with both companies’ world-class ceramic manufacturing experts.

“Corning’s world-class capabilities in ceramics manufacturing make it an ideal addition to the QS technology ecosystem.

Together with our ecosystem partners, we’re building the foundation for scalable production of our high-performance solid-state batteries and furthering our mission to revolutionize energy storage.”

Dr. Siva Sivaram – CEO and President of QuantumScape

QuantumScape Technology

Swipe to scroll →

Why QuantumScape’s Anode-Free Design Matters

One unique feature of the QuantumScape battery, which at the time of the reveal was considered revolutionary, is that it uses an anode-free design.

Since then, other experimental designs have further explored this concept, but it is still a rather rare and very advanced type of solid-state battery.

Source: QuantumScape

The anode-free design significantly improves the durability of the battery by eliminating capacity loss at the anode interface. It also further increases the battery density by removing the space and volume normally used by the anode in a normal battery.

No anode also means no need for material to build it and the associated manufacturing costs.

This gives the company a solid cost advantage not only against traditional lithium-ion designs, but also other future solid-state battery manufacturers (for example Toyota (TM -0.33%), see our report on this other automaker).

Source: QuantumScape

Like all solid-state batteries, QuantumScape’s design is significantly superior to lithium-ion batteries in almost all metrics:

• It can charge in just 15 minutes (10-80% at 45 ºC).
• The separator replacing the liquid electrolyte is nonflammable and noncombustible.
• Its battery cells’ energy density is 844 Wh/L and 301 Wh/kg.
  • For reference, Tesla’s 4680 cellsstand at 643 Wh/L and 241 Wh/kg, and BYD’s blade cells at ~375 Wh/l and 160 Wh/kg.

So while there might be a lot of reasons to still value Tesla highly (see our report for more info), the quality of the company’s batteries might not be one of them soon.

It should also be noted that these performances are likely going to be improved further once QuantumScape starts producing larger cell formats, with energy density >1.000 Wh/L likely reachable.

Source: QuantumScape

These results were hard-won and achieved thanks to the company’s early move into the anode-free solid-state battery space.

To date, it seems that it is mostly only CATL’s honeycomb battery architecture that seems likely to achieve a similar reduction in dendrite formation, and maybe ION’s anode-free solid-state batteries.

“It took us over 10 years, over two million tests, and over $300 million to get to the level of performance we have demonstrated, so we believe this is a very hard problem and will be difficult for competitors to solve.”

Matching Customer Preferences

QuantumScape battery’s higher performance matches the general requirements for complete replacement of ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles with EVs:

• Maximum range higher than 375 miles / 600 kilometers.
• Fast charging in 15 minutes maximum, with this number only widely accepted if a full charge has enough range.
• Battery life is at least 12 years/ 150,000 miles (240,000 kilometers).
• Same cost as ICE vehicles.
• Functioning well in all weather, both hot and cold extremes.
• No fire risks.

Our 24-layer A0 prototype cell has completed more than 1,000 full charge-discharge cycle equivalents with more than 95% energy retention. This would be the equivalent of driving ~300,000 miles and still maintaining 95% of the original energy retention (with ~300 miles of range on a single charge).

“The final result of this development could be a battery cell that enables long ranges, can be charged super-quickly, and practically does not age.

Frank Blome – PowerCo CEO

The Cobra Separator: Scaling QuantumScape Manufacturing

QuantumScape batteries will be mostly manufactured in a highly automated facility in San Jose, California. It will use a new type of heat treatment for its newer “Cobra” cell design.

This 25x more efficient heat treatment drastically reduces the physical space taken by the battery production, making it a key in unfolding mass production. It is also less energy intensive, reducing costs somewhat furthers and improving the process’s green profile.

Later iterations of Cobra are expected to improve this element of the production process even further in the future. The Cobra separator process entered baseline production in June 2025 and should significantly improve throughput volumes.

Future Milestones for QuantumScape (QS)

Swipe to scroll →

While revealed publicly, the Ducati motorcycle will only undergo field testing in 2026, after equipment for higher production volume is installed in 2025.

Overall, 2026 is shaping up to be the transition moment for QuantumScape, when it moves from partnerships, agreements, and providing samples of its QSE-5 battery cells, toward the beginning of mass production and serious commercial deliveries.

However, before most Volkswagen bikes, and then cars, run on QuantumScape / PowerCo, a few years are still going to be required.

This is because, in the words of Elon Musk, back when Tesla was experiencing the difficulty of ramping up production above small batch volumes in 2017, “mass production is hell”.

Conclusion

QuantumScape is a company that became very popular with investors in 2021, before experiencing a brutal stock price decline until July 2025, where skepticism over the company’s ability to ever reach mass production dominated the conversation around it.

It has since rebounded strongly from its lowest point, but is still far from its 2021 levels. As the deepening partnership with Volkswagen illustrates, today’s QuantumScape has a radically different risk profile than in the past.

It is now entering the expansion phase of its production capacity, finally seeing its batteries enter a commercial product with the Ducati motorbike, and getting ready to expand into EVs of the world’s second-largest automaker.

In parallel, it is also becoming a key partner for OEM companies looking for a non-Asian alternative battery supply.

So the long wait for QuantumScape moving past the startup phase is likely soon over. The recent stock price surge seems to show the market agrees as well, with the change in the company image still ongoing.

Latest QuantumScape (QS) Stock News and Developments