Are GM And Toyota, and All Of The Others, Apparently, Lying To The Public About The Quality And Capabilities Of Their Current Model Hybrids?

Implications: If you 'cannot' simply swap out the nickel metal hydride battery pack of an existing hybrid vehicle for one of the 'new' lithium technology battery packs 'when 'they become 'available' in 'about 3 to 5 years' then the hybrid car is a very strange machine.

Analysis: When the battery burns out or cannot be recharged in your flashlight, game station, iPod, laptop computer, or any one of a myriad of similar devices you simple buy a new one and replace the old one. You can in a flashlight, at least, use a carbon-zinc, nickel metal hydride (NiMH), or lithium-ion battery. The latter two types come in one-time use and rechargeable versions.

It's not going to be quite so simple to switch a large capacity lithium battery pack to be used for mobile power applications for a large nickel metal hydride battery pack, but to simply say you 'wont be able to do it' is disingenuous, at best, and a flat out lie, at worst.

Let's see why: 

1. No car company will want to sell you, or have a primary manufacturer, sell you a rechargeable nickel metal hydride or lithium battery, because they are very, very, expensive, and even so their pricing will still vary depending on the cost of their raw materials and the value of the dollar relative to other currencies on the day that you buy the battery. This means that batteries will be 'marked to market' every morning, and that is a new way of doing business for which car makers and their dealer networks in the US are not ready. Also, the public is considered not ready and frankly never likely to want to buy batteries that cost thousands of dollars and come with liabilities due to health hazards, fire hazards, and disposal costs.

2. No car maker wants you to keep a car indefinitely and just renew its batteries; they will not be able to make money just selling replacement batteries; it's not their business model. Toyota is already alarmed by the low rate of scrapping of Priuses even when they are more than 8 years old. 

3. It should be noted that lithium batteries operate at a higher voltage than nickel metal hydride or lead acid batteries so that they can be manufactured in high voltage packs that can deliver the same power at lower current thus keeping resistance heating down; this is a good thing, because overheating is a big problem, so far, for lithium batteries in continuous or continual operation, and this causes the batteries to age and lose their ability to be recharged.

4. Lithium and nickel metal hydride batteries in operation or not are very sensitive to the time which has elapsed since they were built ( a very good reason for not owning them) , the total amount of charge they retain, and the degree of discharge, or drain, to which they are subjected at one time. For this reason large lithium or NiMH battery packs come with, literally, computer controls, to prevent them from being too deeply discharged-in which case they may lose their ability to hold a charge-and to make sure that they are always charged to at least 40% of capacity-otherwise they may also, for this reason, lose their ability to be recharged. Unlike lead acid batteries they are also temperature sensitive so that they can not be used outside of a much narrower temperature range than lead acid cells.

5. Having discovered that making and selling cars, which depend for all or some of their motive power on very, very expensive and touchy battery packs, the car makers are scrambling to make financial sense of an impending disaster by thinking, for example, of leasing the batteries and requiring that they must get them back when they fail or when the car is scrapped. This is the old 'core charge" concept that was used on radiators to ensure that they would be returned to recover the brass, and is being thought of for catalytic converters to ensure they would be returned to recover their ever rarer platinum group metals.

The commodity supercycle, which even if it has paused, is only a waiting escalator of cost and availability, has pushed the cost of the raw materials for making a power train battery pack to never before seen high levels.

A Prius or Saturn Aura sized NiMH battery pack has gone up in price since 1999 by a factor of 10 times! It could cost as much as $10,000.00 today. Furthermore, none of its component metals are today produced in the US, so that if such a car is scrapped and the battery goes with the scrap the manufacturer will have literally thrown away as much as $10,000.00 of recoverable raw material value. The figure for a lithium battery pack made with lithium cobalt technology, assuming that the overheating and fire problems are solved satisfactorily, is nearly $4,000.00 just in raw materials.   

OEM automotive assemblers get nervous when they think of what could happen unless these strategic metals get recaptured for their account. If they don't do something soon the scrap industry will get a gift of between 5 and 15 Billion dollars from the strategic metals contained just in the batteries! Furthermore new metals will have to be purchased as new batteries for another 5 to 15 billion dollars at current prices and at the current dollar exchange rate just to replace the currently tiny existing global hybrid fleet of approximately 1.5 million vehicles out of a total worldwide of all vehicles of nearly 1 billion.

If the OEM automotive industry truly plans, as it conservatively says it does,  to make 2 million hybrids a year by 2012 they will have to find between 8 and 20 billion dollars worth of new production annually of nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth metals to do it. Yet none of them have factored in this cost, nor, unbelievably do any of them have a lease, core charge, recycling program in place. They are short sighted, crazy, in denial, or just plain stupid, because the mining industry is not ready for this.

Oh by the way, of course, you could switch a nickel metal hydride battery for a lithium one, but you would also have to switch the computer battery management controls and you might have to change the electric motors or their controls also.

This 'retrofit' would make your hybrid or battery powered car into a longer range, higher power, vehicle, and to avoid confusion and wasteful carbon emitting manufacturing processes it would be clearly best just to keep the same chassis and sheet metal (or plastic) exterior and upgrade the batteries.

So, do you see the problem, just switching batteries is a giant step on the way to keeping the same car and just improving it. Of course you could always trade a small car for a larger one but why on earth should we keep scrapping them? Electric power trains are easy to upgrade and maintain by replacing worn out bearings and shafts. Unlike internal combustion engines electric drive trains don't vibrate and wear anywhere near enough to need constant scrapping and rebuilding.

Now that I think about it the wiring in an electric powertrain is copper and if a fuel cell is to be used instead of a battery, it will need ounces of vanishing platinum and 60 pounds of molybdenum for corrosion resistant steam exhaust management.

You see, dear readers, in order for everyone on earth to have a car with all or partial electric propulsion there just won't be enough new strategic metals produced each year. We would have to conserve them, the metals and the cars, and recycle them and do away with constant wasteful cosmetic changes and the enormous amount of fossil fuels consumed to produce new metals for new cars for other than when they wear out.

That dear friends is why no one wants you to get the idea that you can just swap one battery for another; it would be the beginning of the end of planned obsolescence, the only business model that today's car makers know.

One day you'll be telling your grandchildren that new cars were once made simply as a fashion statement and that people changed them just as they changed their underwear. This is the nightmare that keeps Messrs Wagoner, Ford, and Watanabe from sleeping well.