Already in the late 1970s when I was the Managing Director of Husqvarna Motorcycles, I was involved in a project where we tried to build useful and light electric scooters. We were forced to give up. The batteries of those days were simply insufficient regarding energy storage. In addition, there were few control components that worked at high enough powers.

Today, 30 years later, we see the first generation of electric vehicles – cars and scooters, as well as city buses – emerge. This is made possible through new types of batteries available in configurations that actually work at high-power outputs and relatively large amounts of stored energy. Today there are also computers capable of monitoring the batteries and there are high-power electronic components based on semiconductors. Altogether this provides the opportunity to construct systems suitable for vehicles. As CEO of the Volvo Group, I was happy and proud of the projects emerging with the electrification and hybrid electrification of vehicles during the first decade of the twenty-first century, and with which Helena Berg, among others, was working.

The task is bigger, though, than only supplying vehicles with well-functioning battery packs. As human beings, we are identifying increasing demands on mobility in our everyday life. This implies a desire to make extensive use of mobile devices such as cameras, smart telephones, tablets, media players, and in the future a vast number of products we cannot even imagine today.

‘The internet of things’ will result in many billions of products needing to communicate with one another in order to establish a society as efficient and accessible as we all wish. All these products will need an energy source most likely a battery. And when building the future electric power supply and distribution system – ‘The smart grid’ – we will need load levelling and energy storage.

For all this, batteries and battery technologies are needed. We need to deepen our understanding of today's batteries and to better assess what we can expect of batteries in the future.