How Cars Work
By the Time You Drive
CHAPTER TWELVE
You are about ten years old. In five or six years you will probably learn to drive. Maybe seven, depending on where you live.
The car you first drive will not be the same as the car your mom drives today. Cars keep changing, and 2032 or 2033 is a long time away in car years.
This chapter is about a few things that are already changing, and a few things that might.
I am going to be careful here. Predicting the future of cars has a long history of being completely wrong. In 1900, smart people said there would never be more than a few thousand cars in the United States. In 1985, smart people said the year 2000 would have flying cars. They didn’t. So instead of guessing, I will tell you what is actually happening in 2026, and let you watch how it plays out.
Bigger and faster batteries
The most certain change is in the battery. Lithium-ion has been getting steadily better for thirty years — about 7% more energy per kilogram each year, on average. That doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up. The battery in a 2025 EV holds roughly twice the energy of one from 2010, in the same space.
Two specific things will keep that going. The first is solid-state batteries. The lithium-ion batteries in today’s cars (and your phone) use a liquid called electrolyte to let lithium ions move between the two electrodes. Solid-state batteries replace that liquid with a solid material — usually a special glass or ceramic. They are smaller for the same energy, charge faster, and don’t catch fire as easily as liquid ones. Companies have been promising them for over a decade. As of 2026, only a few prototype cars actually have them. By the time you drive, most new EVs probably will.
The second is faster charging. The fastest charging stations in 2026 can take an EV from 20% to 80% in about 18 minutes. (That is a lot quicker than the 8 to 20 hours your home charger needs.) Within another five or ten years, charging an EV at a highway stop will probably be about as fast as a long bathroom break — maybe ten minutes for a full road-trip charge. Once that happens, one of the biggest practical objections to EVs will go away.