Many of the current drawbacks of electric cars stem from how batteries work. Batteries rely on chemical reactions, which means when using or charging a lithium ion battery, you have to wait for the lithium to shuffle through an electrolyte and then shuffle back.Lithium batteries also degrade and can be very expensive to replace in electric cars.
Alternatively, capacitors store static electricity and can be as simple as two metal plates separated by air. As a result, a capacitor can be fully charged almost instantly and can deliver that energy quickly, meaning they can provide more power and degrade slower than lithium batteries. The problem is, the amount of energy our best capacitors can hold is still relatively small.
However, we may now have a solution to that thanks to contact lenses. Soft lenses use polymer that swell up and store water. But now, after tinkering with the material, one of the original inventors has discovered that adding different elements gives the polymer different properties, like the ability to store electricity! A 2016 test found that this modified polymer could store 100 times the energy researchers expected.
