Battery durability as a future problem
A fundamental of entrepreneurship is timing. Too early and the market isn’t ready. Too late and the ship has sailed. But nail the market timing and you can sometimes simply unlock the next level in a timing game you’d rather not play; discovering that the lead time on training the talent pool is a multiple of your runway, or that selling solutions to future problems is a fast-track to languishing in the #2 spot on the spending priorities of your customer’s budget.
The latter scenario - selling solutions to future problems - is compounded by some realities. Entrepreneurship is about solving problems, but future problems aren’t really problems at all, they’re just concerns. That persists until they eventually become today’s concerns, and only then do they morph into problems, and somebody starts referring to your meeting as a “war room”. This is the disposition of “temporal discounting” - prioritisation of short-term relief to today’s problems over long-term benefits, even when the future consequences might be far more significant.
The job market and shifting cultural attitude to work play a role, too. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median employee tenure at a company is now around 3.9 years. Contrast this with the multi-year development programmes of battery-powered products, plus the product’s expected design life (the average age of cars on U.S. roads is around 14 years) and it’s easy to see that the concerns of one team today are far from guaranteed to morph into their problems - but rather into problems for their successors, or even for their successor’s successors, to address. Accountability for battery durability can be elusive.
Some firms have a trump card; durability is a core brand attribute that they’re committed to nourishing. Ford literally used the word to create a portmanteau. Porsche, Audi and many more spend vast sums courting prospective customers with their endurance qualities through series such as the World Endurance Championship and World Rally Championship.
For everyone else, where durability is just one of the myriad of objectives screaming for scarce resources, the temptation to succumb to temporal discounting is often irresistible.
How to exhibit awful responsiveness
Responsiveness - or the quality by which firms can quickly spin-up activities and return cash - is an effective antidote to the challenges of the timing dilemma. R&D-heavy solutions, for some years after a company’s inception, exhibit inherently awful responsiveness. You can’t cashflow if your product depends on a future R&D milestone.
For examples of what R&D-heavy looks like, look no further than Lowercarbon Capital’s portfolio, or a pair of rocket boosters autonomously returning to earth’s surface. These hit different. One experiences them and processes them emotionally, and one can point to them and quip Arthur C. Clarke’s line that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Trying saying that with a straight face for a ride-hailing app.
The problem is that the reality of requiring liquidity every single day is very real. Civilisation has foregone a lot of upside as a consequence of companies dying because, for only a brief moment in time, they didn’t have liquidity.
Beauty from superchaos
Battery degradation is extravagantly chaotic. By now, every in-house battery team has a desktop shortcut to a presentation communicating this to an executive. The multiple intertwined degradation mechanisms, the path dependency and superposition; the frustration caused by not being able to add calendar ageing to cycle ageing is real and is a fair criticism of the field’s slow progress. And the kicker; that neither calendar nor cycle ageing are quantifiable without brute force empirical testing on timelines that are at odds with the gateways in production programmes.
For firms developing R&D-heavy solutions, betting the house on solving a future problem, while leading a team into the murky depths of unresponsiveness seems like a toxic cocktail. Yet, the waters clear with the realisation that every battery problem is a degradation problem. It enables focus, because the only thing to spend energy on is mitigating degradation mechanisms. It gives license to pursue a Big Hairy Audacious Goal because en-route, it’s possible to eat the cake too; to release products whose value is derived from a new-found ability to mitigate some of the degradation that’s taking place.
Over at Breathe, we’ve been doing exactly that with our flagship embedded product, Breathe Charge. Our PHI X2 platform provides us high fidelity control of the lithium plating degradation process, and we’ve been packaging that technology into a product designed to focus on the rate capability - or charging experience - attribute of the battery system.
The beauty that emerges is that it just makes sense to work towards solving degradation in its entirety - a de facto future problem - because it doesn’t matter if a firm values durability today or not. All of today’s battery problems, regardless of which attribute they relate to, are degradation problems. And that’s beautifully monetisable, also today.
Charging experiences
Long ago charging stopped being about “fast charging” or “slow charging”. That binary classification died in the 2000s when vacuum cleaner manufacturers committed a crime against humanity and starting shipping product with a “fast charging” feature measured in the region of three hours. The crime didn’t matter, because today, the world’s leading brands understand that charging is an experience to be enjoyed like one enjoys the tonal composition of premium audio - an experience that they can leverage to influence purchasing decisions and to drive consumer loyalty.
This trajectory delivers some beautiful engineering. So here Breathe is, on March 5th 2025, liquid and capitalised, focused on mitigating degradation, and appreciating the beauty that emerges from years of unresponsiveness and R&D. You can check out the Volvo ES90 reveal here, featuring Breathe Charge, with which people like you and me the world over will be plugging in to benefit from the world’s most complete charging experience. Volvo ES90 is the first car running a real-time, physics based battery model on its embedded hardware, delivering adaptive charging with Breathe Charge.