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A123 Systems is a window on how the government's multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle gambit is working. The company was founded at MIT in 2001 with a $100,000 Department of Energy grant. One of its early products was lithium-ion batteries for power-tool maker Black & Decker. Last year, A123 Systems got a $249 million federal grant to open at least three lithium-ion-battery plants in Michigan that will employ hundreds of workers. Michigan is home to or close to many of the plants where electric vehicles are being made, of course, and the state has a surplus...
...miles (about 320 km) - between charges. The goal for electric-car manufacturers is an affordable battery that can handle countless partial charge-discharge cycles over an eight-to-10-year life cycle. The battery has to absorb energy from braking and provide short bursts of power for acceleration. Lithium-ion batteries, with their high density-to-weight ratio, provide the greatest acceleration and range with the fewest batteries compared with lead-acid or nickel-metal-hydride batteries. One big problem: they can overheat and even blow up - bad enough in a single-battery laptop but potentially disastrous in a multibattery...
...affordability, lithium-ion battery packs currently cost about $1,000 per kilowatt-hour of capacity. Which means the GM Volt's 16-kW-h battery pack alone would cost $16,000, according to some industry analysts. The price per kilowatt-hour has to fall below $500 to make production viable - and it will. (See pictures of Detroit's beautiful, horrible decline...
Sakti3 is another company trying to create a breakthrough. The company was launched a few years ago at the University of Michigan by an ambitious young engineering professor, Ann Marie Sastry. Sakti3 is developing solid-state (as opposed to liquid) lithium-ion batteries that Sastry believes will enable cars to travel twice as far as batteries do now, allowing the cars to be used the way internal-combustion-engine-driven vehicles are. Her firm is developing prototypes to deliver to automakers later this year. Sastry's 20-employee firm, based in Ann Arbor, has generated millions of dollars in government...
Automakers, meanwhile, are developing their own battery capability. Ford, for one, believes that designing its own lithium-ion battery packs will help streamline the development of its electric vehicles and reduce the cost. Design experts will be brought in-house, says Nancy Gioia, Ford's director of global electrification. By developing battery packs, Gioia says, "we get the volume and scale of more than 1 million units on our battery-management systems. Our suppliers aren't in a position to do that...