With money to be made, investment in battery tech is making huge leaps, and the makers of the next Fisker electric car are claiming an impressive 400 miles between charges

Mainstream electric cars will soon be one step closer, whether we like it or not.

Henrik Fisker has announced that his next big project, the all-electric Fisker Emotion, will have a range of 400 miles. This comes after the company was resurrected following bankruptcy in 2013.

Leaps in battery technology involving graphene, a relatively new material based on carbon sheets just one atom thick, mean that the Emotion should be able to overcome its own weight and deliver both serious performance and impressive range.

That, of course, opens the door for mainstream car makers to adopt the technology on a larger scale, lowering costs and fitting it to everyday cars.

The first pictures of the Emotion have been released, showing the now-familiar grille-less electric car nose already used by Tesla, but the battery tech is coming straight from Fisker Inc’s sister company, Fisker Nanotech.

Among the claims is that the batteries will last longer and recharge faster. There will even be autonomous driving modes, with software supplied by third party companies. All this won’t come cheap, though, with production volumes likely to be low and cost certain to be high.

But there’s a second, cheaper model on the way, Fisker says. The dawn of the electric car era can’t be too far away.

Source: Car Throttle