creativforce

Battery Wars

Texaco is right.

Battery Wars

Thank you for one of the most interesting articles I have read on the subject. Everyone who has followed the plight of the electric car since the late nineties has wondered "Who Stole the Electric Car?" As an investor in ENER during those heady days of the electric revolution with the EV1 in California, I thought I would soon be rich as ENER ramped up production of the NIMH battery. When Shell (who later sold to Chevron) initially bought into the company, I assumed the huge infusion of cash ENER needed would soon be on the way. As we know this was the beginning of the end. CA mysteriously repealed their zero emissions requirement, and the stock price at ENER went to hell for a decade. Cobasys has been a joke and their leaky batteries have seemed like intentional screw ups. Last year Mercedes had to sue them for failure to deliver and GM who built one of the most remarkable cars of the 20th century (EV1) can't get access to the batteries they helped test and develop.

So now we learn that the NIMH battery revolution failed, not because of oil company interference, and a deep, abiding faith in the profit power of planned obsolescence at GM ... but because Toyota cornered the market on lanthanum? The story just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

It would make more sense if oil money paid everyone involved to keep the technology on ice for a decade...just think of the billion$ the lack of an electric alternative has saved Big Oil until now!!

Lockheed Martin also makes most of their money on war in the middle east, providing the funds to keep EESTOR locked up for another decade or two seems like money well spent to me.

It's not that I want to believe in conspiracies, but any detective will tell you to follow the money. So rather than all these back room dealings we suspect, we now must believe that it all comes down to profound stupidity at GM. Well, I guess that's not too hard to believe either.

A Rustbelt Revival: From Doom to Boom

There will be no lack of refueling stations for hydrogen. Big Oil will fund the transistion as soon as their dominance in liquid fuel is challenged. They will also make sure that the hydrogen that goes into the fuel cells is derived from the fossil fuels they pump. What could GM's motivation possibly be for "still refusing to allow volunteer engineers from restoring museum-gutted EV1, and GM is still refusing to resume production of plug-in Electric cars" except that large sums of money have exchanged hands? Ask yourself why Chevron is sitting on the Cobasys battery that drove the EV1 so successfully. Why is Daimler sueing Chevron for delivery of batteries? As the world waits for lithium and ultracapacitor alternatives, Big Oil works behind the scenes to make batteries an undesirable alternative for manufacturers. If they are powerful enough to keep the US embroiled in an unpopular war for six years, do you really think that supressing nascent technology would be hard for them? Any backyard mechanic can make an electric car, but lead acid batteries are just too heavy. As long as lighter batteries are unavailable to the public, we must continue stopping at the local filling station. Every day this transition is delayed, it's another billion bucks for Big Oil, do you really think they wouldn't invest a little to keep the status quo?