Is solid-state battery the future development trend?

The so-called product has not moved, and the patent comes first. The public patents of Tesla and Toyota inspired me. When new technologies emerge from the cocoon and develop at a high speed, in order to protect the rights of enterprises, great energy will always be spent on intellectual property rights. At the same time, if a technology is very promising to become a mainstream technology, then more and more companies will participate. From these two perspectives, it seems that it is of certain reference value to evaluate the present situation of a technology through the number of patents.

Will BMW put into production solid-state batteries in 2026? I'm not sure yet.

Lithium battery is the most fashionable battery technology at present, and it has high hopes in the fields of consumer market, power battery and energy storage. So when I used lithium ion or lithium battery as keywords, the number of patents retrieved was more than 20 thousand. Correspondingly, nearly 20,000 patented technologies such as fuel cells are about to surface. For mature battery technologies such as lead-acid batteries and nickel-hydrogen batteries, the number of patents is about 2,000. The number of patents related to solid-state batteries is only one or two hundred, which shows that the recognition of this technology in the industry is generally not high.

According to the above topic, I want to extend it: where is the turning point from technology to product? I remember Teacher Pang of Zhidian once asked me a sentence: "Do you think capital and investment can accelerate technology?" My answer at that time was yes. When resources are invested in a certain field, this field will inevitably develop. However, is it the destination of capital and capital, and which technology will be industrialized soon? I personally don't think so. Finance and capital can accelerate and promote the development of a technology, but development can never escape the objective law of the technology itself. Overinvestment may trigger more bubbles. So the direction of capital does not necessarily represent the direction of technology.

If we evaluate a company by the number of patents, it may not explain the problem, but if we evaluate an industry, it may be more objective. When a technology is recognized by the industry, the number of patents will increase rapidly. When a technology is really put into the market, the number of patents will naturally begin to decline, because the research and development behavior has been transformed into commercial behavior. When you hear that some patents have been sued to the court, it shows that the technology has produced commercial value and the technology is basically mature. Therefore, the number of patents for mature lead-acid batteries and nickel-hydrogen batteries is much less than that for developing lithium batteries and fuel cells.