Cross country without plugging in?
Chrysler says Halcyon EV Concept has `unlimited' range
The first thing Chrysler wants you to notice about its Halcyon Concept is its futuristic shape. The second thing the company's press release was trying to convince us of was how high-tech its interior would be when — more like “if,” considering how little attention Stellantis is paying to sedans these days — something shaped like this might hit the streets. Lost — barely mentioned, in fact — in the 2,958 words pontificating on the Halcyon's beauty and high-tech-ery were some seriously impressive battery and charging technologies.
Do you care to guess which of those three highlights tickled my interest?
I'll cover the obvious first. The Halcyon looks to us like a super-streamlined combination of ancient Le Mans racer — I mean, check that windscreen disappearing into the front hood — and a little-known Corvette prototype, the CERV III, blended with a touch of a '60s Lincoln Town Car — via the rear suicide doors — thrown in for good measure.
Officially, Chrysler talks about “a distinctive vehicle character line travelling around the concept” and its “warm acrylic-tinted butterfly-hinged canopy,” but I think the highest compliment that can be paid is that the Halcyon seems totally futuristic without looking like it was penned by George Jetson. If this is what the future looks like, sign me up!
As for the high-techery, I am, being an old fart — not to mention having just read a treatise in automobile cyber-hacking — a little less enamoured. The doors, for instance, are autonomous — in other words, yes, they are self-opening. Seriously, it's now worth offering black-hat hackers another attack vector — and one that allows direct access to the vehicle — just so you can brag no door handles are needed?
Other new features will no doubt prove more useful. The STLA Brain system delivers over-the-air updates, and STLA AI will allow the Halcyon to diagnose its own ills far more comprehensively than current automotive electronic control units. The car itself is, no surprise, also autonomous, so much so that the steering wheel disappears into the dash, the pedals retract, and the “driver” is completely unencumbered — or is that freed from? — steering and driving the car.
Throw in a giant 15.6-inch touchscreen that can be rotated between a panoramic or portrait orientation for maximum graphics clarity, and — and, well, there's still a bunch more high-tech inside. For one thing, when it's set to autonomous driving, something Chrysler calls “Stargazing Mode” uses the huge augmented-reality windshield HUD to project information about the stars and constellations you might see above.
There's a bunch more Chrysler wants to brag about the Halcyon's interior, but I want to get to the meat of what really makes this concept so interesting, namely the battery tech claims will be driving the Halcyon to “unlimited” range. Yes, I said “unlimited,” and, yes, that's a direct quote from Stellantis.
First off there's the battery. While there's nothing overly special about the fact the Halcyon's running an 800-volt architecture — Porsche just boosted its 2025 Taycan to 830V and top-of-the-line Lucids run as much as 900V — the fact its batteries are based on lithium-sulphur chemistry certainly is.
Combining lithium with sulphur has all sorts of advantages, says San Jose, Calif.-based battery designer Lyten, not the least of which is that sulphur, being common as (literally) dirt is far less expensive than traditional nickel, manganese and cobalt (NMC) ingredients.
But the real attraction is that lithium-sulphur offers unheard-of energy density. Officially, Lyten says, its chemistry offers twice the energy density of current lithium-ion batteries. More impressively, lithium-sulfur's 0.6 kilowatt-hours per kilogram is 50 per cent greater than the 0.4 kWh/kg that much-toutedbut-yet-to-arrive solid-state batteries will boast. And compared with the LFP batteries that can compete on price, Li-S is three times as energy-dense, that 0.6 kWh/kg competing against just 0.2 kWh/kg.
What that means is that current batteries could be smaller and lighter, making cars — such as the Halcyon — more efficient and rangehappy.
But Celina Mikolajczak, chief battery technology officer of Lyten, says “sulphur is unruly.” So is lithium, says Mikolajczak, and, when you put the two together, she told a recent BNEF summit, you get a battery that is really “fussy” to work with.
So, Chrysler's contention the Halcyon will be powered by a lithium-sulphur battery may be an “if” — as opposed to the press release's inferring it's just a “when” — but its potential benefits seem well worth the work.
But that gets us “more,” not “unlimited” range. For that, we have to go to another unique feature Chrysler promises is in the Halcyon's future: Dynamic Wireless Power Transfer (DWPT) charging. What this adds to the equation is charging “pads” built into the roadways our future Halcyons will be driving over. Hence Chrysler's claim that so equipped — and with a highway that can accommodate DWPT — a Halcyon would be able to travel from “New York to Seattle without need of charger, charge cord, or charge stations.”
No such highway currently exists — or is planned for anything like the foreseeable future.