They seem (both the article and the press release) to conspicuously avoid mentioning any details about important open problem with sodium-ion: Cycle life/longev

They seem (both the article and the press release) to conspicuously avoid mentioning any details about important open problem with sodium-ion: Cycle life/longevity. > On November 22, China’s Huawei announced a new patent for sodium-ion batteries named “Electrolyte Additives and Preparation Methods, Electrolytes and Sodium-ion Batteries.” The company’s latest work has focused on improving the shortcomings of sodium batteries – such as low coulombic efficiency and poor cycle life – by optimizing the electrolyte formula. Yes, you've "improved the shortcoming." By how much? The lack of numbers is concerning. Sodium ion has been in the labs for a while, but at least as of last I saw, they weren't managing more than a couple hundred cycles to 80% capacity. Lithium-ion is now typically thousands of cycles to 80% capacity (and associated higher internal resistance - 80% is just the standard benchmark for "lifespan" given the range of issues you see by that capacity loss). That they're "fluffy" batteries in terms of density isn't a huge problem for a lot of cases, but that their cycle life is "a few hundred cycles" has been a serious issue for any significant application of them. That they don't mention this in the slightest implies, rather strongly, that they've not fixed that particular problem with it... For a 70kWh battery pack, 300 cycles at 3 mi/kWh (a midrange average for year round driving) gets you 21MWh cycled through the pack, or 63k miles. Not exactly a stellar lifespan for a car battery pack. That same pack at a lithium-ion standard 1500 cycles gets you about 315k miles.