Seven Generational Ruminations

I guess a technology writer understands "format war" and spun the article this way, giving it a subtitle of 'Prius-ray vs Dominant Volt Drive?' In any case they say that the Japanese automakers are presenting for consideration a potential "worldwide standard" for automotive Li-ion batteries and related technologies. It may be a bit too early to standardise on specific Li-Ion chemistries so hopefully the standard they propose will be flexible enough to accomodate the variety of Lithium based battery chemistries which are being developed.

At present, most electric vehicles run on older battery technologies such as lead-acid. This is true, even still. If you read that and thought "What electric vehicles?" please pay attention that the article is written by a resident of England. In England there is an upsurge of electric vehicles and I understand it's largely due to a congestion charge in London, and electric vehicles are exempt from the congestion charge. Further in London there are EV charging stations scattered in car parks around the city. This means London is very friendly to electric vehicles, and the author of the article may be accustomed to seeing EV's on the road.

As the article said, Li-ION batteries are seen to be the next big thing in terms of automobiles. Li-ION batteries have a high enough energy density to allow a pure battery EV to perform nearly to the same level as an equivalent gasoline driven car. Doubt this? Take a look at the specs of the Tesla Roadster.

I don't know the specific standards very well -- but I suppose they're referring to how in current cars the batteries, battery cables, alternators, voltage regulators, etc, are more or less interchangable. Did your car battery die? You don't have to go to the maker of your car to get a battery made specifically to your car, you go to the autoparts store and get a "battery" and they're all the same shape, they all use the same battery post design, the alternator and voltage regulators will accomodate the battery because it's the same as all other batteries.

Device makers have a long history of attempting to lock customers to proprietary widgets that prevent a customer from escaping the control of the device maker and going to a different device maker. Doubt this? Why are batteries for digital cameras so wildly different? Battery shapes vary wildly even within a given camera maker. And why are they different shapes than ones for other portable electronics devices? Wouldn't it be more convenient to users of portable electronics if the batteries were interchangable?

Returning to the format war theme .. the article talks about various incompatible developments. The Japanese are floating this specific standard .. GM with their Chevy Volt is working on a battery shape that's probably incompatible with the standard proposed by the Japanese. Further the Volt is expected to use Lithium-Iron-Phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries rather than the older Lithium-Cobalt batteries. Honda is not even using lithium-anything, but betting on fuel cells (the fools). And other makers are working with lithium-titanate batteries from Altairnano.

The various lithium based battery chemistries all have different characteristics and performance. The voltages differ, both the minimum allowable voltage, the charging voltage, the nominal voltage, etc. This means battery management systems have to accomodate whatever specific chemistry is being used, and makes it unlikely that a given battery management system would be unable to allow a car to use a different lithium-based chemistry. Suppose there is a spate of fires in cars using lithium-cobalt chemistries (those batteries are capable of exploding, remember the exploding laptop stories of 2006?). If a given car was designed to only take lithium-cobalt batteries and suddenly those batteries were pulled from the market in an effort to say "we've addressed the problem, we've shifted to a safe alternative", then the cars which have these batteries would have no source to replace the batteries when they wear out. As I said above hopefully the proposed standard accomodates multiple lithium based battery chemistries.

In any case this is an indication of a bright future.. standardization of parts indicates the car industry is expecting to sell a lot of EV's using these batteries.