Quote:
Originally Posted by lotus54
I'm hoping a huge jump in batteries will happen before too long- they really are not an order of magnitude different than they ever have been. At least as far as amount of storage. Yes, a lot better- but they need to be 40 or 50 times better than they are now.
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One of the major issues with batteries isn't the technology- it the legality. Oil companies buy the patents and then shelve them. Read up on the original electric RAV 4 which was a production Toyota vehicle for a very short period of time several years ago. Texaco sued them for $30 million (and won) for using that battery after they had bought the patent to it. That is why they made the Prius and had to have a gas engine on it to charge the smaller batteries.
Edit: from wikipedia: Whether or not Toyota wanted to continue production, it was unlikely to be able to do so, because the EV-95 battery was no longer available. Chevron had inherited control of the worldwide patent rights for the NiMH EV-95 battery when it merged with Texaco, which had purchased them from General Motors. Chevron's unit won a $30,000,000 settlement from Toyota and Panasonic, and the production line for the large NiMH batteries was closed down and dismantled. Only smaller NiMH batteries, incapable of powering an electric vehicle or plugging in, are currently allowed by Chevron-Texaco.
It appears Tesla was just ingenuitive enough to make a design to get around the patents locked up by oil companies- by using thousands of small batteries.
One of these days I'm going to watch it:
Who Killed the Electric Car?