At General Motors (NYSE: GM) battery cell research and development center, expansion work has already begun on a new manganese-based battery.

General Motors has displayed an unusual degree of technological boldness, having already started scaling up production of a groundbreaking power battery. Yet from the United States to China, the overwhelming majority of companies in the industry believe this technology is not yet ready for commercial deployment.

The automaker plans to launch a distinctive manganese-based electric vehicle battery starting in 2028. Vehicles equipped with this battery are expected to debut first as pickups, with a range of up to 400 miles; compared with comparable models using current mainstream high-nickel batteries, the overall vehicle cost will be reduced by several thousand dollars. This battery will push manganese 鈥?long a supporting player in power batteries 鈥?into the core position among cathode metals. If successful, the market will welcome an entirely new battery technology pathway alongside the current industry-mainstream nickel-based and iron-based batteries.

Over multiple rounds of communication during the past 18 months, General Motors executives introduced me to their technological breakthroughs: this battery has an energy density 30% higher than the premium lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries currently dominated by China, while matching their cost. General Motors claims that this lithium manganese-rich (LMR) battery's energy density can already match that of standard nickel-based batteries.

But skeptical industry figures say LMR batteries have fundamental flaws and still require extensive work before they can be used in commercial electric vehicles (details below). Still, in the field of new battery technologies, doubters have been wrong before. For most of the 2010s, the battery industry widely overlooked lithium iron phosphate. The technology was born in the United States but was sidelined at the time as insufficient in performance. The turning point came in 2019鈥?020, when Chinese battery manufacturers introduced iteratively optimized LFP products, and today the technology dominates the global battery market.

Similarly, companies in both China and the United States are now advancing the commercialization of silicon-based and lithium metal anodes, which can deliver extremely high range, even though the industry widely believed in earlier years that they could never be used in mass-produced batteries.

For decades, researchers have been interested in LMR batteries because of the theoretical advantages of manganese as a battery material: unlike LFP and nickel-based batteries, LMR batteries can withstand extremely high voltage shocks. For example, if a voltage of 4.8V is applied to an LMR battery while embedding a large amount of lithium in the cathode, in theory a super battery could be created. Theoretically, its specific energy could reach more than three times that of nickel-based batteries, up to 900 watt-hours per kilogram. Such an energy density would not only allow electric vehicles to exceed 1,000 miles of range but could even power medium-sized electric passenger aircraft.

But all of that remains only at the theoretical level. In practical applications, LMR batteries have been found to degrade rapidly after the first charge-discharge cycle. One major persistent problem is that manganese dissolves into the electrolyte, and the precipitated manganese particles attach to the anode, causing instability in the battery system and a series of other issues.

Jeff Dahn, one of the world's leading battery experts and a consultant to Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), said his laboratory at Dalhousie University conducted continuous research on LMR batteries for 12 years starting in 2000, and then restarted a four-year research effort in 2017. Both studies concluded that LMR batteries cannot outperform medium-nickel ternary batteries with 60% nickel content, while medium-nickel ternary batteries do not have the various defects of LMR. "So we abandoned this pathway," Dahn told me. (Dahn explained this view in a paper in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.)

In April of this year, I visited China and spoke with researchers at CATL (SZSE: 300750), the world's largest battery manufacturer. The researchers said their goals for LMR batteries are exactly the same as General Motors': to achieve energy density at the level of nickel-based batteries while having the cost of LFP. But they have still not overcome the various challenges of LMR. One researcher said: "If you use high voltage, this chemical system is very unstable; if you lower the voltage, the energy density advantage disappears." The researcher said CATL ultimately chose LFP because it is more cost-effective. The researcher said that if the problems with LMR were merely engineering improvements, CATL "could solve them in a short time." But "this is not an engineering problem, it is a scientific problem... within the next two to three years, we do not see the possibility of bringing LMR to market."

General Motors says it has already solved many key problems. Its research team has applied a coating to the battery cathode to isolate manganese from direct contact with the electrolyte and prevent manganese dissolution; at the same time, it has added dopants to the electrolyte so the battery can operate at higher voltage without performance damage. General Motors has also designed larger cells and battery packs that fit well with the pickup trucks and large SUVs that dominate the U.S. market. The battery's fast-charging limit is about 30 minutes, noticeably weaker than other commercially available competitors on the market. General Motors did not disclose the actual operating voltage, saying only that later iterations will further increase the voltage. But General Motors also says ordinary consumers will not care about the voltage curve; what really matters is the pickup's range and purchase cost.

Of course, not everyone outside General Motors takes a negative view. Jason Croy, head of the materials research group at Argonne National Laboratory and a leading authority on LMR, told me that his laboratory's research team has found a new path: using only lower voltages such as 4.4V while limiting the amount of lithium embedded in the cathode. In this way, although LMR loses the extreme performance that once made the industry so eager, it can achieve energy density better than LFP while keeping costs on par with LFP. In an academic paper, Croy's team reported that their LMR battery achieved a cell-level energy density of 270 watt-hours per kilogram. Although far below the grand expectations of earlier theory, it can already match the level of medium-nickel ternary batteries. The battery cost is about $81 per kilowatt-hour, making it market-competitive, with the full battery pack costing about $6,000. Croy said: "I believe this technology pathway will definitely become the core solution for all companies pursuing LMR technology."