An anonymous reader writes "Tesla finally delivered its first production model of the all-electric Roadster this month. Coinciding with that, researchers from the big automakers and their outsourced startup labs are hitting stride in the development of cheap, high-powered lithium-ion batteries. These may actually end up in our garages. Toyota, in fact, says it's got enough of the chemistry down to roll out a test fleet for the plug-in Prius before the end of 2009. It's mass production of battery tech that's the holdup — which might mean Mercedes' electric hybrids beat the Prius to market en masse by 2010 or 2011."
How about one that just looks like it could take off [wikipedia.org]?:) It [youtube.com] comes out next fall. I get mine in late summer of '09.
Really, Tesla's approach is not economical for anything but the high-end market. "Laptop batteries" (graphite anode, LiCoO2 cathode) are ill-suited for EV applications. They're too expensive, and even if they weren't, their lifespans are too short, so only those who have money to burn can afford them. I think Aptera's approach is the most realistic: first, use a reasonable battery choice (lithium phosphate) -- sacrifice a little energy density for long life, a high degree of safety, high power density, low cost, and fast charging. Second, build the car light and ultra-aerodynamic. This adds extra cost, but it lets you get by on signficantly less battery power, meaning less battery expense (the Typ-1e only needs 10kWh for 120 mi). And since battery expense is the big cost in EVs, the extra you spent on streamlining is saved several times over in batteries.
All of these promise 2-3x energy density with current tech while retaining rapid charge ability, and lower cost -- thus keeping all of the EV advantages over gasoline vehicles (noise, efficiency, home charging, pollution reduction, pollution displacement, high torque, low maintenance, low energy costs, etc), while meeting all of gasoline's traditional advantages over EVs (purchase price, range, recharge time). They're game changers. For now, we'll stick with a normal gasoline sedan for long trips (until a fast charging infrastructure becomes widespread) and our (upcoming) Aptera for daily use.
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday February 07 2008, @09:14AM (#22332854)
"Picture's"? WTF dude... is that like saying "There are three dog's who take walk's on most day's when their owner come's home after teaching lesson's to many kid's"?
One picture. Two pictures. No apostrophe. English, motherfucker... do you speak it?
No matter how well R&D goes for these vehicles, I don't see how we can successfully convert people to electric cars without some sort of infrastructure in place. Sure, you can charge your car at home for the daily commute, but what about road trips?
Easy... 1) Buy an extension cable. 2) Find the nearest Starbucks. 3) Buy a cup of coffee. 4) Instead of plugging in your laptop you covertly plug in your car. 5) Profit! (for you) Same difference, isn't it?:D
For ordinary travel less than 150 miles from your starting point, and if you have your own house/driveway/garage, a 300 mile range is fine. But you can't count on a plug being within convenient reach of the parking lot, especially at places like hotels and apartments.
Infrastructure won't solve that problem either since it takes several hours to charge them. We will need something else, like Ultracapacitors. So for now, you'll need to rent a car or use some other transportation for road trips.
So for now, you'll need to rent a car or use some other transportation for road trips.
Or, more likely, the idea will flop and people will continue to use a transportation method that fills all their needs. Gas/Electric hybrids do that. They offer good range/economy, and are still flexible enough to be able to use for pretty much any road trip that another car can do.
Any car that can't be refueled both quickly and at common locations, is not likely to perform very well (in the market place) IMHO.
I would like to see the industry go. Granted Diesel deserved its bad rep as they escaped the EPA rules of the 70s (actually I think only gasoline automobiles got whacked). The problem is getting past zealots in California and other states who have taken on deciding for the rest of the country what they can have. Yes, rest of the country. These states acting on their own are large enough to force manufacturers to accomodate them instead of abandoning them simply with California being the base. I still thi
Sure, you can charge your car at home for the daily commute, but what about road trips?
Seriously -- how often do you go on a road trip? Most people only go on road trips a few times a year due to job and other considerations. So you rent a car, and you get to drive a new car that is fully maintained by *someone else* -- you don't have to take your car to the mechanic for a pre-trip "checkover". And you better hope that your mechanic doesn't cheat you and tell you something needs to be fixed when it doesn't.
One of the huge bonuses associated with electric cars is reduced maintenance. There are no timing chains to break, no radiators to leak, no oil to be changed. Electric motors are highly reliable and very easy to fix. In the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" they discussed that the dealers did not like the electric cars at all because of the tremendously lowered need for maintenance and repair. (Of course the mechanics loved them because the cars were easy to work and and the mechanics didn't end up covered in oil and grease all the time)
If you really do a lot of extended road trips, you should get a gas car or hybrid, but for everybody else the electric car + renting a gas car occasionally would be the much better choice.
OK, so rather than pollute the air as we burn fossil fuels, we'll fill up landfills with bazillions of batteries. Electric cars might not be as "green" and wonderful as people like to think.
These batteries are probably recyclable but it isn't cost effective, based on what I rad. So, the potential to recycle is there but are people actually going to do it?
OK, so rather than pollute the air as we burn fossil fuels, we'll fill up landfills with bazillions of batteries. Electric cars might not be as "green" and wonderful as people like to think.
Oh, it's worse than all that. You're still going to get that electricity for the batteries from mostly-coal.
You have no idea how clean or efficient modern coal plants are, do you? I work in the power industry and I can tell you that powering cars by charging batteries using electricity from the wall that came from a coal plant is way more efficient and clean than burning gasoline or diesel.
Oh, it's worse than all that. You're still going to get that electricity for the batteries from mostly-coal.
Uh-huh. And then we replace the coal plant with a nuclear plant, or augment it with wind power, or whatever, and your car magically becomes more environmentally friendly without you having to do anything!
This is the beauty of the plug-in electric car. It decouples transportation from the source of power. So when a better source of power comes along, you don't have to replace the entire fleet of existing cars to benefit, which would mean overcoming a huge amount of inertia.
I can't believe how many people can't be bothered to even visit the companies page. The price of the car includes battery replacement, and they require you ship it back to them and they recycle it.
These batteries are probably recyclable but it isn't cost effective, based on what I rad. So, the potential to recycle is there but are people actually going to do it?
Most people will, yes. Since most people won't be changing the batteries themselves, you can just mandate that mechanics recycle the batteries (and fine them heavily if they don't) and mechanics can just charge the customer the recycling fee, if any.
Today's cars have a single lead-acid battery, but this battery is almost completely recycled. Thus, there's reason to be optimistic about the prospects of recycling. The automobile is one of the most fully-recycled consumer products. Think about it... you don't just toss one in the trash. There are specific permitted ways to dispose of one, meaning anyone who wants to recover value from it are able to do so.
Batteries, especially 'bazillions' of them like what would be in electric cars would get recycled much like the lead-acid batteries currently are. The only reason NiCD and NiMH end up in landfills so much is that they're used and disposed of at home - most people can't be bothered to take them in somewhere to be reycled. Same with liIon.
An electric car battery, even a hybrid battery is such that you're taking it to a store to be replaced - and they'll have enough to haul them over to the recycling facility
We should first worry about making alternative power sources viable as a replacement for fossil fuels, only then can we worry about their environmental impact.
Why only then? What good does it do to depend on corn based ethanol, for example, if you have to cut down all the (rain) forests to grow it? Really, you DO have to worry about what is environmentally friendly BEFORE you find yourself dependent on it.
How do these things handle short trips in freezing weather?
Quite well, actually, speaking as an electric vehicle engineer.
A simple resistive water heater for cabing heating uses about 2000 watts on average, and perhaps 4000 watts worst case. Compared to a typical road load of 20,000 watts, it's obvious that the cabin heat makes a difference, but it's on the order of a 10% reduction in range.
In the future, electric vehicles will use heat pumps (basically a bi-directional air conditioner) that will reduce the cabin heat energy budget by at least a factor of 3. The air conditioner in AC Propulsion's eBox vehicle uses about 700 watts worst case, and less depending on duty cycle.
Apparently, part of the business strategy of selling electric cars is to let the customers drive them around for a year and then recall them for no apparent reason, with no option for the customer to keep them.
The electricity to charge all those batteries has to come from someplace. all you are doing is shifting the the consumption of fossil fuel from one place to another. The energy required to manufacture these batteries in VERY large quantities has to come from someplace as well.
Last time I checked there are not many rivers left to damn up for hydro so the juice has to come from someplace and since fusion power isn't quite ready for prime time you are going to have to build a hell of a lot more power plants to transfer the power generation from a facility on 4 wheels to some very big stationary ones.
That being said, you can gain a hell of a lot of efficiency because large power plants do much better then the internal combustion engine, but they still have to burn something, either that or be prepared to have a big nuclear power plant coming to a neighborhood near you.
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday February 07 2008, @11:46AM (#22335198)
I think everyone with a rudimentary knowledge of science understands that electric cars are not free-energy/perpetual-motion devices. Of course the energy has to come from some place, and we all know where it's coming from: the power grid. In the U.S. this corresponds to roughly 50% coal, 20% nuclear, and the rest a mixture of fossil fuels, hydro, and renewables.
What many people fail to realize is that using gasoline is hardly a direct way of powering cars. There are two important components that go in a car: gasoline, and motor oil. The distillation of gasoline uses an enormous amount of energy that we do not account for when arguing against electric vehicles. 19% of the pump price of gasoline is the cost of refining (distillation, cracking, reforming, etc.). So, no, we are not merely shifting the consumption of fossil fuels from one place to another. In effect, having all-electric vehicles would mean 20% of the electricity used is from nuclear energy, ~10% from renewable sources, minus the energy used for refining the gasoline, and the energy saved due to the efficiency of power generation and the efficiency of the electric motors. As for motor oil, this is also a component handled by the petroleum refining industry. Its manufacture is very energy intensive and there is a large market for it. Remember all those signs you see around storm drains that tell you not to dump your motor oil there? Guess what, it turns out motor oil is pretty bad for the environment. When people bring up the argument that electric vehicles have batteries that need to be replaced every so often, well internal-combustion vehicles have motor oil that needs replacing every 4000 miles.
Another thing that bothers me that people don't talk about is pollution. There are two type of pollution: point source and non-point source pollution. The former means that there is a well defined area where the pollutants are being put into the environment, while the latter means the source of pollutants is diffuse and comes from many sources. Pollution from automobiles is non-point; they are everywhere. Pollution from power plants is point; you can point your finger at the building and say "that is where the pollution is coming from." When you shift to all-electric vehicles, you are effectively moving millions of diffuse points of pollution (tailpipes) into a few source locations (power plants). The advantages of this are enormous. With electric vehicles there is no need to worry about the emissions from individual vehicles (that means the emissions testing industry dies), all you need to worry about are the power plants. If the policy makers decide we need better air quality, we just need to fit the power plants with better scrubbers, or carbon sequestering equipment. If there is a development in fuel-to-electricity efficiency only the power plants need to implement it, and the benefits are immediately passed on to the electric car drivers. This is to say that you don't have to retrofit millions upon millions of vehicles with a new technology every time the emission or efficiency standards change. All of this is of course very inconvenient for car manufacturers, the car service industry, and the oil industry in the U.S. and abroad. No wonder the EV1 went the way it did.
"The electricity to charge all those batteries has to come from someplace. all you are doing is shifting the the consumption of fossil fuel from one place to another. The energy required to manufacture these batteries in VERY large quantities has to come from someplace as well." The above is correct. But there are two other factors
(1) In the US only about 1/2 of our electric power is from burning fuels like coal. But even coal, as bad as it is, it is not imported. We expect this trend to improve as other
Actually, a lot of research has gone into making those tanks as safe a possible. In a crash: they will bend, not break. How often does a car catch file after a crash? Only very rarely.
Wasn't that the point of him saying "How safe is that tank..." ?
Anyway - any technology that stores a lot of energy is going to have some potential (ha ha) for danger. There haven't been that many problems with LiIon batteries when you take into account the number of batteries that exist in the world.
With that said, there's this problem of obtaining lithium which isn't nearly as abundant as nickel. I still like NiMH batteries for EVs, and I'm sure they will give lithium a run for the money (if not for w
How often does a car catch file after a crash? Only very rarely.
Wrong. Everyone knows that cars always explode after a crash. Sometimes, though, the explosion happens after the driver and occupants escape to a safe distance.
I've seen it myself hundreds of times, both on TV and in movies.
Actually pretty safe. How often do you hear about cars blowing up in a car crash? I mean aside from Hollywood-style movies. Leaking gasoline my incinerate and burn, but it won't detonate on impact or when getting wet. Two things I'm not 100% sure about when it comes to Lithium-Ion.
It's all a matter of educating the public on the safety concerns of what they're driving. "Normal" drivers have been sitting a few feet away from a long, controlled explosion for generations. The only snag here is forcing people to change over from their old habits, but those bugs will work themselves out (or blow themselves up) given time.
I've run into this education issue personally. I have a sand rail [wikipedia.org] (what most people call a "Dune Buggy"). The gas tank is right behind the passenger's heads, inside the roll cage. My mother freaked when she saw that - she was concerned it was so close to passengers. "What happens in an accident?" she asked. I pointed out that the best place for the tank is where there's the most protection, and that's near the people, inside the roll cage. If it were outside, you'd guarantee a ruptured tank (no body skins on this vehicle, just tubular frame). Inside, your body would take as much damage as it takes to rupture the tank, meaning you'd probably be dead of blunt force trauma before a fire started from a ruptured tank.
Um, to the Telsa Motor's site, and they'll have answered this already. Basically a cell in the battery pack can be on fire, and it won't affect the other cells.
Lithium iron phosphate batteries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery [wikipedia.org]) are supposed to be pretty safe, at the expense of storing a bit less energy per size and weight than current Li-Ion batteries. They are also made from relatively cheap and plentiful raw materials, so I'd expect them to become the most frequently used batteries in electric cars.
Or, with an analogy, how will new computers hold up vs the current computers? If something was wrong with the current computers, you would think they should have built the new ones to start with.
(I do realize I'll be hanged for making an analogy without cars in it on Slashdot. But the argument is already about cars! Adding more cars into the analogy would probably cause a pile-up crash or something.)
Or, perhaps an increased demand for electricity might spur on searches for alternative ways of producing it rather than through the burning of coal. Geothermal, wind, solar, hydro and even nuclear power all hold some immediate promise in this regard as potentially more environmentally friendly alternatives. At least with an existing electric car infrastructure, as the centralized methods used for generating the electricity might slowly change over time, the infrastructure of existing cars wouldn't need to
That's why it would be great to recharge these cars from a solar or wind source, where possible.
That's why I recommend a wind generator be installed on every car. That way you can charge as you drive. Ever hang your hand out the car window and think "Wow, if I could just harness this power, I'd be rich!"
Still waiting (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Still waiting (Score:4, Insightful)
Really, Tesla's approach is not economical for anything but the high-end market. "Laptop batteries" (graphite anode, LiCoO2 cathode) are ill-suited for EV applications. They're too expensive, and even if they weren't, their lifespans are too short, so only those who have money to burn can afford them. I think Aptera's approach is the most realistic: first, use a reasonable battery choice (lithium phosphate) -- sacrifice a little energy density for long life, a high degree of safety, high power density, low cost, and fast charging. Second, build the car light and ultra-aerodynamic. This adds extra cost, but it lets you get by on signficantly less battery power, meaning less battery expense (the Typ-1e only needs 10kWh for 120 mi). And since battery expense is the big cost in EVs, the extra you spent on streamlining is saved several times over in batteries.
Anyways, keep your eyes out for:
Lithium vanadium oxide batteries
Silicon nanowire batteries
Barium titanate ultracapacitors
All of these promise 2-3x energy density with current tech while retaining rapid charge ability, and lower cost -- thus keeping all of the EV advantages over gasoline vehicles (noise, efficiency, home charging, pollution reduction, pollution displacement, high torque, low maintenance, low energy costs, etc), while meeting all of gasoline's traditional advantages over EVs (purchase price, range, recharge time). They're game changers. For now, we'll stick with a normal gasoline sedan for long trips (until a fast charging infrastructure becomes widespread) and our (upcoming) Aptera for daily use.
Parent
Picture's for those that want to see the car! (Score:3, Informative)
http://forumpix.co.uk/i.php?I=1202393049 [forumpix.co.uk]
http://forumpix.co.uk/i.php?I=1202393063 [forumpix.co.uk]
http://forumpix.co.uk/i.php?I=1202393091 [forumpix.co.uk]
Re:Picture's for those that want to see the car! (Score:5, Funny)
One picture. Two pictures. No apostrophe. English, motherfucker... do you speak it?
Parent
Re:Picture's for those that want to see the car! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Dude, where the heck is she driving, Neo Tokyo?
The publishers of those photos should put the driver in LA at peak hour, instead
Oh noes!!! (Score:5, Funny)
"50 cars caught fire on I-4 today."
Git yer marsmallows and grahams ready for... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Infrastructure? (Score:3, Insightful)
Plug-in hybrids are a good compromise, though.
Re:Infrastructure? (Score:5, Funny)
1) Buy an extension cable.
2) Find the nearest Starbucks.
3) Buy a cup of coffee.
4) Instead of plugging in your laptop you covertly plug in your car.
5) Profit! (for you)
Same difference, isn't it?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If it is anything like my laptop, it'll start off at 300 mile range and slowly decrease to about 150 within a year or so.
-matthew
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So for now, you'll need to rent a car or use some other transportation for road trips.
Or, more likely, the idea will flop and people will continue to use a transportation method that fills all their needs. Gas/Electric hybrids do that. They offer good range/economy, and are still flexible enough to be able to use for pretty much any road trip that another car can do.
Any car that can't be refueled both quickly and at common locations, is not likely to perform very well (in the market place) IMHO.
Diesel electric hybrids is where (Score:2)
I still thi
Just Rent A Car (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the huge bonuses associated with electric cars is reduced maintenance. There are no timing chains to break, no radiators to leak, no oil to be changed. Electric motors are highly reliable and very easy to fix. In the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" they discussed that the dealers did not like the electric cars at all because of the tremendously lowered need for maintenance and repair. (Of course the mechanics loved them because the cars were easy to work and and the mechanics didn't end up covered in oil and grease all the time)
If you really do a lot of extended road trips, you should get a gas car or hybrid, but for everybody else the electric car + renting a gas car occasionally would be the much better choice.
Parent
Are Batteries Evil? (Score:3, Insightful)
These batteries are probably recyclable but it isn't cost effective, based on what I rad. So, the potential to recycle is there but are people actually going to do it?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Go troll some place else.
Re:Are Batteries Evil? (Score:4, Interesting)
Uh-huh. And then we replace the coal plant with a nuclear plant, or augment it with wind power, or whatever, and your car magically becomes more environmentally friendly without you having to do anything!
This is the beauty of the plug-in electric car. It decouples transportation from the source of power. So when a better source of power comes along, you don't have to replace the entire fleet of existing cars to benefit, which would mean overcoming a huge amount of inertia.
Parent
Re:Are Batteries Evil? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Most people will, yes. Since most people won't be changing the batteries themselves, you can just mandate that mechanics recycle the batteries (and fine them heavily if they don't) and mechanics can just charge the customer the recycling fee, if any.
-matthew
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The only reason NiCD and NiMH end up in landfills so much is that they're used and disposed of at home - most people can't be bothered to take them in somewhere to be reycled. Same with liIon.
An electric car battery, even a hybrid battery is such that you're taking it to a store to be replaced - and they'll have enough to haul them over to the recycling facility
Re: (Score:2)
Why only then? What good does it do to depend on corn based ethanol, for example, if you have to cut down all the (rain) forests to grow it? Really, you DO have to worry about what is environmentally friendly BEFORE you find yourself dependent on it.
-matthew
The Cold (Score:3, Interesting)
How quick they are to forget hydrogen... (Score:5, Insightful)
...in 1899!!!
Heat (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems a bit odd they would be used in cars.
Re: (Score:2)
How do these things handle short trips in freezing weather?
Re:Heat (Score:5, Informative)
Quite well, actually, speaking as an electric vehicle engineer.
A simple resistive water heater for cabing heating uses about 2000 watts on average, and perhaps 4000 watts worst case. Compared to a typical road load of 20,000 watts, it's obvious that the cabin heat makes a difference, but it's on the order of a 10% reduction in range.
In the future, electric vehicles will use heat pumps (basically a bi-directional air conditioner) that will reduce the cabin heat energy budget by at least a factor of 3. The air conditioner in AC Propulsion's eBox vehicle uses about 700 watts worst case, and less depending on duty cycle.
Parent
And what happens next... (Score:2)
I wonder when it will happen this time.
I'm sure it's Bush's fault. Somehow.
There is no free lunch (Score:3, Interesting)
The electricity to charge all those batteries has to come from someplace. all you are doing is shifting the the consumption of fossil fuel from one place to another. The energy required to manufacture these batteries in VERY large quantities has to come from someplace as well.
Last time I checked there are not many rivers left to damn up for hydro so the juice has to come from someplace and since fusion power isn't quite ready for prime time you are going to have to build a hell of a lot more power plants to transfer the power generation from a facility on 4 wheels to some very big stationary ones.
That being said, you can gain a hell of a lot of efficiency because large power plants do much better then the internal combustion engine, but they still have to burn something, either that or be prepared to have a big nuclear power plant coming to a neighborhood near you.
Re:There is no free lunch (Score:4, Informative)
What many people fail to realize is that using gasoline is hardly a direct way of powering cars. There are two important components that go in a car: gasoline, and motor oil. The distillation of gasoline uses an enormous amount of energy that we do not account for when arguing against electric vehicles. 19% of the pump price of gasoline is the cost of refining (distillation, cracking, reforming, etc.). So, no, we are not merely shifting the consumption of fossil fuels from one place to another. In effect, having all-electric vehicles would mean 20% of the electricity used is from nuclear energy, ~10% from renewable sources, minus the energy used for refining the gasoline, and the energy saved due to the efficiency of power generation and the efficiency of the electric motors. As for motor oil, this is also a component handled by the petroleum refining industry. Its manufacture is very energy intensive and there is a large market for it. Remember all those signs you see around storm drains that tell you not to dump your motor oil there? Guess what, it turns out motor oil is pretty bad for the environment. When people bring up the argument that electric vehicles have batteries that need to be replaced every so often, well internal-combustion vehicles have motor oil that needs replacing every 4000 miles.
Another thing that bothers me that people don't talk about is pollution. There are two type of pollution: point source and non-point source pollution. The former means that there is a well defined area where the pollutants are being put into the environment, while the latter means the source of pollutants is diffuse and comes from many sources. Pollution from automobiles is non-point; they are everywhere. Pollution from power plants is point; you can point your finger at the building and say "that is where the pollution is coming from." When you shift to all-electric vehicles, you are effectively moving millions of diffuse points of pollution (tailpipes) into a few source locations (power plants). The advantages of this are enormous. With electric vehicles there is no need to worry about the emissions from individual vehicles (that means the emissions testing industry dies), all you need to worry about are the power plants. If the policy makers decide we need better air quality, we just need to fit the power plants with better scrubbers, or carbon sequestering equipment. If there is a development in fuel-to-electricity efficiency only the power plants need to implement it, and the benefits are immediately passed on to the electric car drivers. This is to say that you don't have to retrofit millions upon millions of vehicles with a new technology every time the emission or efficiency standards change. All of this is of course very inconvenient for car manufacturers, the car service industry, and the oil industry in the U.S. and abroad. No wonder the EV1 went the way it did.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The above is correct. But there are two other factors
(1) In the US only about 1/2 of our electric power is from burning fuels like coal. But even coal, as bad as it is, it is not imported. We expect this trend to improve as other
Re:Rolling Timebombs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Rolling Timebombs? (Score:4, Informative)
In a crash: they will bend, not break.
How often does a car catch file after a crash? Only very rarely.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Wasn't that the point of him saying "How safe is that tank ..." ?
Anyway - any technology that stores a lot of energy is going to have some potential (ha ha) for danger. There haven't been that many problems with LiIon batteries when you take into account the number of batteries that exist in the world.
With that said, there's this problem of obtaining lithium which isn't nearly as abundant as nickel. I still like NiMH batteries for EVs, and I'm sure they will give lithium a run for the money (if not for w
Texaco owns the patent! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Rolling Timebombs? (Score:5, Funny)
Wrong. Everyone knows that cars always explode after a crash. Sometimes, though, the explosion happens after the driver and occupants escape to a safe distance.
I've seen it myself hundreds of times, both on TV and in movies.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
How often do you hear about cars blowing up in a car crash? I mean aside from Hollywood-style movies.
Leaking gasoline my incinerate and burn, but it won't detonate on impact or when getting wet.
Two things I'm not 100% sure about when it comes to Lithium-Ion.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Rolling Timebombs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Rolling Timebombs? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Rolling Timebombs? (Score:4, Informative)
They are also made from relatively cheap and plentiful raw materials, so I'd expect them to become the most frequently used batteries in electric cars.
Parent
Re:Why now? (Score:4, Funny)
Or, with an analogy, how will new computers hold up vs the current computers? If something was wrong with the current computers, you would think they should have built the new ones to start with.
(I do realize I'll be hanged for making an analogy without cars in it on Slashdot. But the argument is already about cars! Adding more cars into the analogy would probably cause a pile-up crash or something.)
Parent
Recursion! (Score:3, Funny)
It would be even better if you could say that analogy with a LISP.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great News for the Coal Industry (Score:4, Funny)
That's why I recommend a wind generator be installed on every car. That way you can charge as you drive. Ever hang your hand out the car window and think "Wow, if I could just harness this power, I'd be rich!"
-matthew
Parent