One of the main obstacles in getting the general population to embrace electric cars is that because of the length of time it takes to charge a battery, long trips are impossible unless you pull over and take a five hour break every 100 miles or so.

Thanks to a recent breakthrough at MIT, we will be using lithium-ion car batteries that can be charged in less than an hour within the next two to three years. While this is still a ways from being as fast as filling up at the gas pump, it now makes longer trips a possibility in electric cars.

There is other research going on out there right now that is looking to reduce the charge time to mere minutes but what is exciting about the MIT battery breakthrough is that it does not use drastically different technology from the standard lithium-ion battery, which is why we can expect to see them in cars so quickly.

The new batteries have been nicknamed “Beltway Batteries”, after the orbital motorway in Washington DC, because it uses a bypass system that allows the lithium ions move more quickly.

The MIT scientists found that by coating the lithium iron phosphate cathodes in a lithium pyrophosphate it allows charged ions to move faster allowing the battery to expend and receive its charge faster.

The Beltway Batteries will have a use in not only electric cars but anything that uses a battery including cell phones and even solar power and wind energy generation since better batteries means that more surplus energy could be stored.