The Only Value Created by This Small Test Site is Likely To Be For The Green Credential It Gives Its Ultimate Customers, GM, BMW, Daimler and Chrysler.

Implications: SAFT is at it again. In 1996 the company had a lithium-ion battery production  plant in Connecticut. The batteries made there never caught the public's fancy, so around that time, 1996, SAFT sold the plant and its equipment to a Chinese battery maker and moved out of the US market back to France. What's going to be different this time? Probably only that this experiment will be very costly and tie up scarce resources.

Analysis: Toyota makes more than 25,000 Priuses a month; it also makes an additional 5,000 per month of modified other cars, Camrys and Lexuses, as hybrids. At the moment all of these vehicles are delivered with nickel metal hydride battery packs that give the Prius a fuel efficiency of 46 miles per gallon of gasoline. and a range of hundreds of miles on a small (8 US gallons or so) fuel tank.

Toyota has some plug-in hybrids with Toyota-made lithium technology batteries running around, and it says that it will beat GM to the market with a true electric car and with a plug-in hybrid.

If Johnson Controls, International and SAFT should get their new French plant up and running at the full capacity they have announced, 5000 batteries per year, it will be for the sole purpose of testing mass production schemes, because if the company had a safe, efficient, reliable, cost effective battery design ready it would be already in mass production beta testing and be moving to producing the 5,000 batteries per day that the industry predicts it will need by 2012!

It is interesting that GM insisted on the j/v; GM must have reviewed SAFT's poor or at best limited record of lithium battery mass production and decided that SAFT should be relegated to the development of the technology only while the mass production challenge should be given to JCI, which has made hundreds of millions of lead-acid batteries and continues to make hundreds of thousands of them each week for the OEM automotive industry.

The OEM automotive industry designs its products years in advance of production, so that mass production kinks can be smoothed out before the vehicles are introduced.

If the beta test of lithium battery mass production has not even started yet then it would normally be three to six years after the final design is 'locked' in before the volumes necessary can be built with a high enough quality rating to be used.

There are battery developers out there now who say that they can improve the nickel metal hydride batteries now in use to give them a 50% higher energy density than currently produced ones. OEM auto makers cannot afford to ignore this.

Meanwhile Chinese car makers already have on the road hybrids and all battery powered cars using Chinese made lithium batteries descended from the technology they bought from SAFT more than ten years ago and the improvements on which they have not shared with anyone.

American OEM automakers, the only ones who still care about hybrids and hybrid performance are nervously watching lest they be blindsided by a better nickel metal hydride battery or a Chinese lithium battery not available to them.

Have they chosen the right horse(power)? Stay tuned.