By Kyle Proffitt
December 15, 2025 | The Advanced Automotive Battery Conference was held this month in Las Vegas, Nevada. Over four days, we heard from auto OEMs, battery startups, academics, and other industry professionals, with a central focus on the electrification of automotives. The keynote speakers this year included Kurt Kelty of GM, Colin Campbell from Redwood Materials, Jeong Hun Seo representing Hyundai, Rachid Yazami from KVI, and Emeritus MIT professor Donald Sadoway. Part one of coverage will include the automotive OEMs and battery recycling.
General Motors: Pushing Manganese, Prismatic Cells
GM Vice President of Battery, Propulsion, and Sustainability Kurt Kelty reflected on the industry status quo: despite that upwards of 25% of customers enter a dealership considering an EV purchase, only 8-9% walk out having purchased one. His contention, however, is that we just have to get people in the vehicles, because EV buyers are repeat EV buyers—it’s a superior experience.
A persistent concern for new customers is whether the battery will die prematurely, but Kelty said, “We’re getting more and more data showing that the batteries are lasting 200,000 … 250,000 … 300,000 miles.” For its part, GM is focused on reducing cost, improving performance (driving range, fast charging), and establishing North American supply chains.
Kelty championed the multi-center collaborative approach that GM has adopted to advance each stage of battery research through manufacture, much as he discussed in his keynote AABC presentation last year. A newer topic this year was the computational side of things. “Beyond our labs and prototyping facility, GM has also built one of the most advanced computational and virtual engineering capabilities in the industry,” he said. “All these things that we normally would build up samples and go through months and months of testing, we’re now doing that much more in a virtual world … what used to take months is now taking days.” Artificial intelligence is part of that picture. “These AI tools really allow us to accelerate material validation, confirm battery performance, and really fast-track the development,” he said.
Kelty reflected on GM’s dive into EVs. “We’ve got over a dozen EVs on the road today at GM, more than any other EV manufacturer, and that went a little too fast,” he said. However, he seemed confident about the road ahead, mentioning a couple of specific points of focus.
“We’re adding prismatic cells to our lineup,” Kelty said. “We can almost cut out half of the parts in our battery pack compared to our current generation by going prismatic.” He added that this cell design can cut costs on labor and warranty expenses. At the chemistry level, Kelty echoed GM battery engineer Andrew Oury speaking at AABC Europe, indicating that the lithium manganese-rich (LMR) cathode batteries, co-developed with LG Energy Solutions, can be a game changer, “an opportunity to really leapfrog where the Chinese are” with LFP.
“We aim to be the first automaker to be producing with LMR cells in 2028; we’ll introduce it with our trucks that year,” Kelty said. He says LMR checks all three boxes of reduced cost, improved performance, and localized supply chain, and GM claims that LMR will give 33% better energy density than LFP. He added that compared with the other chemistries, LMR is just getting started, and we can expect cost and performance improvements to continue to sweeten the deal.
As part of Kelty’s interest in a North American supply chain, he teed up Redwood’s Campbell by highlighting a joint venture they’ve pursued for repurposing spent vehicle batteries. Using many GM batteries, he said that Redwood has “built a 63 MWh installation in Sparks, NV, powering a data center for Crusoe … It’s the world’s largest second-life battery development and also the largest microgrid in North America.”
Redwood Adds Energy Storage to the Resume
“We really hate waste,” CTO of Redwood Materials Colin Campbell said, referring to the company culture that has driven their efforts. This year, Campbell reports that Redwood has expanded their business to cover three main components: the energy storage that Kelty mentioned; recycling and refining, “the engine of our business”; and fresh cathode synthesis at a commercial scale.
So how much battery material is making its way to reuse? “In 2025, we estimate 40 GWh came out and became available” for recycling, Campbell said. For context, roughly 100 GWh of batteries are being purchased annually in new EVs within the US. Campbell also said Redwood is taking the lion’s share of this material. “There’s an 80% chance that if you recycled a lithium-ion battery through some means over the last couple of years, it ended up at our plant in Nevada,” he said. He reported 25% growth from last year, from 30,000 tons to 40,000 tons of recycled material, and they’ve opened a new plant in South Carolina dedicated to recycling manufacturing scrap.
Redwood continues to perform the same function of a mine, as discussed at AABC last year. “If you look at the metals content of what we processed this year, it is the largest source of metals in the US,” Campbell said.
However, energy storage is a new angle that kind of fell in their laps. According to Campbell, they were looking at the mass of batteries waiting to be recycled at the end of 2024, realizing that many weren’t in such bad shape. Maybe sending them through the shredder wasn’t the next best step. They considered the scale; the US installed about 40 GWh of stationary energy storage this year, but Redwood was sitting on 4 GWh of EV battery packs. Energy storage deployments are also anticipated to grow, and, “by 2030, 2040, we expect end-of-life packs to be half the volume of deployed energy storage in the US,” Campbell said.
He outlined some of the steps they took to make this a viable business. They are not modifying the packs at all, avoiding the labor necessary for disassembly and taking advantage of built-in safety features and cooling. The battery packs were designed to last for years and hundreds of thousands of vibrational miles strapped into a vehicle, after all. Unfortunately, these batteries come in many shapes, sizes, chemistries, and voltages. To address this, Redwood developed a pack manager.
“It’s a translator, it translates the telemetry coming off of the batteries … it has power electronics in it to individually control the power to each one of the thousands or tens of thousands of packs in this array,” Campbell said. And when it comes to thermal runaway, he said it’s cheaper to just space the packs apart than to add mitigation and containment measures. Campbell also said that stationary energy storage needs are much lower stress than those of an EV; you don’t need a quick discharge to accelerate for an interstate on-ramp or fast charging. “It’s a very easy life for a battery, relatively speaking, to be connected to the grid.”
And it is a viable business right now. Crusoe is an AI-focused company using clean solar power with Redwood’s 63-MWh battery installation. “It is cheaper to buy that electricity off this microgrid than it would be to connect to the grid in that location,” Campbell said. The best part, “this is just a detour,” he said. “We can still recycle them when they’re done.”
Hyundai: Affordability and How to Get It, Advanced Safety Features
Hyundai Head of Battery Engineering Design Jeong Hun Seo discussed the company’s pursuit of EV sales. “There is no doubt about market growth, and this momentum cannot be reversed, despite geopolitical uncertainties in the auto industry,” Seo said. However, he stressed the importance of bringing cost down to reach not just the first wave of customers who were willing to pay a premium for a superior experience but also the lower, more price-conscious segments. Seo discussed different chemistries as one lever. LFP is cheap, but energy density is low, 99% of the supply chain is concentrated in China, and recycling LFP only recovers lithium, he said. He noted that reduced energy density can be addressed by improved integration efficiency at the pack level. An intermediate option is mid-nickel, using 50-70% of the nickel in high-nickel NMC. Like LFP, it can be prepared with low-cost lithium carbonate (high-nickel chemistries need more expensive LiOH). It’s also lower energy density, but a high voltage design can compensate there. “High-voltage, mid-nickel could be a balanced solution,” Seo said.
Seo mentioned sodium-ion as an attractive option, but low energy density and technological immaturity limit greater adoption. Finally, Seo referenced the LMR technology Kelty discussed, replacing cobalt and nickel with low-cost, abundant manganese, although he noted challenges, including manganese dissolution and gas generation.
In addition to cost-cutting at the chemistry level, Seo said that innovations in cell manufacturing processes can net wins. “Roll-to-roll processes used to be the driving force in the past, but now dry electrode processes are actively being developed.” He shared data from a report by LG indicating 30% of battery costs are process costs and said that dry processing can reduce these costs by 30% compared to wet processes.”
Another cost-saving strategy is more efficient integration of batteries into vehicles. “Cell to vehicle technology is being gradually applied to the current EV market, and this efficient integration can also reduce processing cost,” Seo said. This idea involves integrating batteries directly into a vehicle’s body and even integrating electric motors into the pack design. Fewer components can yield cost savings.
Seo discussed where charging fits into EV adoption but presented some competing ideas. According to market data, Seo says the number one priority for consumers is improved charging accessibility, followed by improved speed. However, China’s EV sales now represent more than 50% of market share, despite that the “infrastructure for ultrafast charging is not ready yet,” Seo said. In any case, “charging and driving anxiety could be resolved by improving the accessibility to charging points,” he said.
Seo spent time calling for greater standardization, citing potential savings of 5-10% in process costs and up to 60% savings in development costs.
Finally, Seo highlighted the need for exceptional safety. “Hyundai batteries are equipped with an industry-leading battery management system that performs real-time predictive diagnosis; rapid detection of an anomaly enables proactive responses even before any unexpected condition,” he said. “Starting in 2026, we will take this further with a cloud-based [battery management system]; with this advanced feature, we’ll be able to deliver even faster and more precise predictive diagnostics.”
