BMW iX travels 978 kilometres with Gemini battery from ONE
The Gemini battery is a mixed battery pack: a second, high-energy battery pack is coupled to the Aires battery from ONE (an LFP battery with CTP technology), which recharges the Aries battery like a range extender. Last year, Our Next Energy reached an agreement with BMW to integrate Gemini battery technology into a BMW iX. Now that the performance of the battery technology has been demonstrated, the company wants to focus on “further refinements of the system to prepare for commercialization”.
When announcing the collaboration in June 2022, ONE stated that it was aiming for a range of 600 miles or 965 kilometres. So the demonstration drive was a pretty accurate precision landing, going 8 miles or 13 kilometers further than planned.
BMW is known to be one of the investors in Our Next Energy – so it makes sense to use a BMW vehicle for the tests. In 2022, ONE also installed a prototype of its Gemini battery pack in a Tesla Model S and, according to its own statements, achieved a range of 752 miles, i.e. around 1,200 kilometres. At 203.7 kWh, the energy content of the installed battery pack was roughly twice as high as the original battery pack from Tesla – with the same dimensions.
In the latest press release on the demonstration drive, ONE reiterates that the Gemini battery can reduce the lithium requirement by 20 per cent and the graphite requirement by as much as 60 per cent. In addition, the use of nickel and cobalt is to be minimized – however, the company still does not provide exact figures.
“The 600+ miles covered by the Gemini-equipped BMW iX is an impressive demonstration,” commented Jürgen Hildinger, Head of High Voltage Storage at BMW Group New Technologies. “We enjoy working with the ONE team and look forward to taking the next steps together.”
“Electric vehicles will achieve mass adoption when they offer enough range that people will feel comfortable having an EV as their only vehicle,” says Mujeeb Ijaz, CEO and founder of ONE. The Gemini battery has proven that it can double the range of electric vehicles and overcome the biggest obstacle to electrification.
A few days ago, it was announced independently that ONE is letting go of around a quarter of its workforce. Specifically, the company is laying off 128 employees “in response to market conditions and to focus on core priorities”, the company wrote last week.
In February, the American company raised 300 million US dollars as part of a Series B financing round. According to The Detroit News, the downsizing of the workforce is due to the fact that ONE is currently “transitioning from research and development to scaling production”, which requires fewer staff in the meantime.
ONE expects the plant to reach full capacity by the end of 2027, producing cells on a scale to manufacture the equivalent of 200,000 battery packs per year. In early November, the startup announced that it had begun pilot production of lithium iron phosphate batteries at the new facility in Van Buren Township.
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