GM and Toyota, Fisker and BYD, Bring You The Handmade Battery. Wouldn't It Be Easier Just To Say That The Technology Isn't Ready?

Implications: The lead-acid battery was mass produced for more than twenty-five years, before it was ever used in a car. The lithium technology battery has been in development for mobile applications for nearly fifty years. The nickel metal hydride battery has been mass produced for fifteen years, and has been used in every hybrid car made by a mass producer for the last ten years. No one has any mass production experience of the safety, reliability, or ability of any lithium technology, other than lithium cobalt ion batteries, made for personal entertainment products, and those have been plagued by a perceived tendency to overheat and in laptop applications to have caused some recorded fires and perhaps deaths.

Analysis:

The 41st President of the US, George Herbert Walker Bush, was encouraged, in his campaign for the presidency, by the little men who wrote speeches for him and convened focus groups to test concepts, to keep repeating the silly sounding phrase "a thousand points of light" to make it seem as if he were philosophically minded and very upbeat. He really sounded foolish and looked uncomfortable as he debated his opponent, Michael Dukakis, and kept using the phrase in his answers to questions. Luckily for him his opponent had even worse advisors who encouraged him to look like the neighborhood jerk by appearing in a tank commander's helmet and projecting his torso through a hatch in an M1A1 Abrams Battle Tank. The silly sounding candidate trounced the silly looking candidate.

Now, it's happening again, only this time it's 6'5" Robert Lutz, non-senile 76 year old vice-chairman of GM for product planning who, along with his equally altitudinous boss, "Rick" Wagoner, 56 keeps mouthing the phrase 'plug-in hybrid.' This concept for a backup propulsion system for those who have run out of liquid fuel, most likely from overloading on personal liquid fuel, is touted by the towering titans of GM, as well as the diminutive CEO of Toyota, as some kind of reason for spending billions of dollars in a race between them to be the first mass marketer to introduce such a backup propulsion system to the global marketplace.

At the same time a California startup, which, so far has never built a car, and a Chinese battery maker have both promised that it will be one of them that is the first to make and sell a plug-in hybrid.

This contest, which is costing shareholders and investors of the companies involved billions of dollars is, in fact, a Popular Mechanics wet dream, signifying very little, and, in fact, may be a giant step backwards.

I well remember when the very first nickel metal hydride batteries were being made and then hand tested and selected for quality-to avoid, for example, internal shorting due to plates touching each other and leaks from faulty cases-and then hand wired together to make propulsion system packs for the GM EV1. No GM EV1 was ever sold to a customer; a thousand of therm were leased out, and the cost of the battery pack was not then an issue and never became one as GM withdrew the cars from the market after deciding that the costs of making and servicing this car did not justify the investment for mass production of it.
 
Toyota shortly after that introduced the hybrid car, which found a use for the nickel metal hydride battery while, like with the EV1, not really considering it as a cost issue. In 1999 when the Prius hybrid was introduced, nickel, cobalt, and rare earth metals, the materials of construction of nickel metal hydride batteries,  cost only around a tenth what they cost today, in 2008! 

Nickel metal hydride batteries do not have the properties needed to start an internal combustion engine; they are not able to sustain a drain of 300 amperes at 12 volts without overheating internally, typically fatally, and even if they survive a starting cycle they may not recharge properly, or at all, so hybrid cars come with a lead-acid starting battery for their internal combustion engines.

So far, lithium-ion technology is also subject to the same limitations; it cannot be used as a substitute for a lead-acid battery in a starting application for exactly the same reason as a nickel metal hydride battery cannot. Manufacturers make the individual lithium-ion cells and then wire them together and test each stage of construction until they get it right; this isn't even close to mass production; it's hand made, or, as they now like to say, individual or artisanal construction. 

So, will even the plug-in hybrids have a lead-acid battery to get the car in motion by overcoming the forces of friction and gravity with a large starting drain and then switch over to nickel metal hydride or lithium-ion battery power only when the car is under way?

Why this hocuspocus? It is simply because the car makers have talked themselves into a corner? None of them will admit that the plug-in hybrid would be on the road today if the range and performance allowed by nickel metal hydride batteries had not been foolishly poo-poo'd by marketing morons who did not question, or if they did, did not understand what the battery engineers were telling them.

The technology for lithium batteries is hopelessly behind the hype, so that the first 'lithium' powered plug-in hybrids will be cars with limited functions, limited ability to operate in temperature extremes, and a high probability of catastrophic failure.

Who wants the first ones which have such a potential to become paperweights? They won't be fixed on the roadside or in  a gas station; they will be picked up on a truck and taken to a company laboratory for diagnosis and repair. Better have a spare car around.