Here’s why Slate changed the battery in its cheap EV truck

Slate, maker of the stripped-down EV pickup truck, found another way to simplify its product: the battery. When the startup revealed its starting price on Wednesday — $24,950 before destination, taxes, and other fees — it also said it had changed its battery strategy, eliminating the optional 240-mile pack but bumping the standard pack from 150 miles to 205. How Slate pulled that off illustrates just how significantly the battery market in the U.S. has changed in the past four years. Initially, the startup planned to use nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) cells. The chemistry is widely used in the automotive industry and favored for its energy density, which translates into longer range. But NMC is also expensive, mostly due to high nickel and cobalt prices. More recently, automakers have begun to use another chemistry, lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP). Battery packs that use LFP are less energy dense but cheaper by about 40% , thanks in part to lower-cost ingredients like iron, one of the main cathode materials, which replaces nickel and cobalt. There were good reasons why Slate, and other automakers, started with NMC. The LFP supply chain today is today concentrated in China. That wasn’t always the case — early U.S. battery startup A123 Systems was founded to commercialize the technology. But after a few missteps, it fell into bankruptcy and was bought in 2013 by a Chinese auto parts company. …