Honda, The World's Largest Manufacturer of OEM Automotive Internal Combustion Engines, Wisely Chooses Nickel Metal Hydride Batteries, Not Lithium-Ion, For Its "Prius Fighter" Hybrid

Implications: Honda has more experience engineering, designing, and manufacturing internal combustion engines than anyone else on earth. It is thus, by default, the most experienced and successful at the quality control and servicing of OEM automotive power trains. Are these the reasons why it has chosen to use nickel metal hydride batteries for its entry into the market for designed-from-the-wheels-up hybrid cars? 

Analysis: Is Toyota rushing into the substitution of lithium-ion batteries for hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and battery driven cars too soon, because of competitive pressure from GM in the worlds-so far-only real market for such vehicles, the USA?

Honda thinks that the answer is, clearly, yes, so Honda is going to validate Toyota's original choice of nickel metal hydride as the chemistry for the Prius, currently the world's leading selling hybrid vehicle, by choosing to engineer a new generation of hybrids marrying a low emission Honda gasoline burning engine, specially designed for this specific purpose, with the latest version of the nickel metal hydride battery, which it can obtain either from Matsushita, Sanyo, or a number of undisclosed others.

Honda admits that it is also pursuing the lithium-ion battery technology, which is being developed by all of its currently chosen battery manufacturers named above, but it is significant that Matsushita and Sanyo are today the largest and most significant mass producers of nickel metal hydride batteries for cars in the world. Sanyo, for example, actually makes all of the components which GM uses for the nickel metal hydride batteries in its current line up-some of them are finally assembled by COBASYS in the US, but none of COBASYS products is made without Sanyo components.

Matsushita, the parent of Panasonic, has sold its share in the j/v it had with Toyota to manufacture and develop vehicle power train batteries
to Toyota, supposedly to allow Toyota to continue the development of its own lithium-ion battery pack, but Matsushita manufactures millions of personal electronics batteries both rechargeable types  and one time use types, utilizing nickel metal hydride, established lithium ion, and carbon zinc technology, every week.

Matsushita and Sanyo both will be glad to supply Honda with nickel metal hydride batteries for vehicles, because it enables them to continue funding the development of such batteries and to continue to buy critical raw materials from Chinese suppliers who do not react well to customers who hesitate to buy or to use such raw materials to keep Chinese factories open. Additionally China is the world's major supplier of the rare earth metals critically required to build nickel metal hydride batteries, and China is a huge market with many customers for new Matsushita and Sanyo technologies for such batteries for use in the millions of electric motor bikes built in China each year. The Chinese domestic nickel metal hydride market is in fact the world's largest and dwarfs the US market even with the usage in the Prius factored in.

Nickel metal hydride batteries are safe, reliable, and, when properly maintained by built-in computer management, very long lived. Honda's CEO, Takeo Fukui, says, bluntly: " In terms of reliability and durabiity, I must say there still remain some concerns [about lithium-ion batteries]...I don't think they are necessarily best suited for mass- produced [italics mine] vehicles."   

Nickel metal hydride batteries have one major drawback; they are expensive,because of their need for 12kg each of rare earth metals and of at least 30 kg of nickel, and 1 1/2 kg of cobalt. In addition the batteries need to be configured so that their temperature can be held within a fairly narrow range and be controlled by an in-battery computer control module. Lithium-ion batteries are also expensive but not because of raw material costs, lithium is cheap, but rather because of critically important temperature control and computer monitoring.

The experience of manufacturing millions of large nickel metal hydride battery packs for hybrids has made such manufacturing engineering almost routine. The manufacturing of large scale, vehicle size,Lithium-ion battery packs is in its infancy and cannot progress until long duration full scale testing has been completed for the best type of lithium-ion chemistry, which is not subject to uncontrolled overheating; this may be years away at best.

NO one, not GM, not Toyota, and certainly not Daimler says that they are going to mass produce and sell lithium-ion battery equipped cars any time soon. What they are saying is that they will test manufacture perhaps up to a 100,000 of each per year soon. 

Honda' s plan to start with the best car that can be built with nickel metal hydride batteries on board is the best idea of all if battery technology is to stick around.