If someone out there knows the process for making nickel-metal hydride or lithium-ion batteries, I'd like to hear it (and analysis of how eco-friendly this whole system is).
Posted on 05/23/2008 6:35:48 PM PDT by lainie
TOKYO - Toyota is building a $192 million plant in Japan to produce batteries for gas-electric hybrid vehicles, as it seeks to keep its lead in an intensifying race for green cars among the world's automakers.
Toyota's joint venture with Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which makes Panasonic brand products, is building the plant in Shizuoka prefecture, in central Japan, Toyota spokesman Paul Nolasco said Friday. He declined to give more details.
The plant will produce nickel-metal hydride batteries, now in the company's hit Prius hybrid.
The Nikkei, Japan's top business daily, reported Friday that Toyota was building another plant in Japan to make lithium-ion batteries, set to be running by 2010, for future ecological cars. Nolasco said no decision has been made on such a plant.
Japan's top automaker, which leads the industry in gas-electric hybrids with its hit Prius, has said it will rev up hybrid sales to 1 million a year sometime after 2010.
Hybrids reduce pollution and emissions that are linked to global warming by switching between a gas engine and an electric motor to deliver better mileage than comparable standard cars. But they are still a niche market.
The Prius, which has been on sale for more than a decade, recently reached cumulative sales of 1 million vehicles.
Lithium-ion batteries, now common in laptops, produce more power and are smaller than nickel-metal hydride batteries. Toyota has said the lithium-ion batteries may be used in plug-in hybrids, which can be recharged from a home electrical outlet.
Rebecca Lindland, an industry research director at Global Insight, said hybrids are increasingly attractive in the U.S., which had in the past favored pickups and other gas guzzlers, as fuel prices surge, environmental concerns grow and tougher emission standards kick in.
"Hybrids are starting to make a lot more economic sense," she said at the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Tokyo, noting that the payback for a hybrid's higher price comes a lot faster these days.
Lindland said the Prius owed its success to being "very well-badged" as an unmistakable hybrid to consumers.
The world's other major automakers are also working on environmentally-friendly cars, and the race is on to produce the best batteries to power them.
Earlier this week, Honda Motor Co., Japan's second-biggest automaker, said it will boost hybrid sales to 500,000 a year by sometime after 2010. Honda said it will introduce a new model sold solely as a hybrid next year, so the Tokyo-based company will have four hybrids in its lineup.
Nissan Motor Co., which still hasn't developed its own hybrid system for commercial sale, said it will have its original hybrid by 2010. Nissan is focusing more on electric vehicles, promising them for the U.S. and Japanese markets by 2010.
Nissan said this week its joint venture with electronics maker NEC Corp. will start mass-producing lithium-ion batteries in 2009 at a plant in Japan.
If someone out there knows the process for making nickel-metal hydride or lithium-ion batteries, I'd like to hear it (and analysis of how eco-friendly this whole system is).
Oh and I forgot to ask about battery disposal.
They must be color blind - or that's a bad picture - cuz I see a blue-car and a couple of black-cars!
Also from that pic it looks like some nice expensive damage can happen if someone overloads their trunk, especially where the wires are in the upper left corner of the battery bank.
Here are some nickel-metal-hydride batteries:
This chemistry is lighter and environmentally friendlier than lead-based systems. The battery consists of cylindrical cells that are connected in series to attain several hundred volts. The cell strings are suspended in mid air to allow air-cooling. Figure 1 shows a demonstration pack of an early Toyota hybrid car battery.
I wonder if they painted the batteries green once they go into production.
:-)
won’t surprise me.
I also was wondering, doesn’t it take more energy to recharge a battery than you’ll actually get out of it? As far as I know, that’s true of the little rechargables you put in kids’ toys.
That brings up a good point. We hardly ever hear about repairs to the things, but there’s no way they’re not inhabiting automotive shops. Where I live, they’re *everywhere*.
Just because Global warming is a hoax doesn't mean electric cars don't have some advantages. Low maintenance, high efficiency, great acceleration. Check out Tesla.com, phoenixmotorcars.com, milesev.com.
(deep breath)..yes. It is. But there are quite a few wildly speculative assessments in those comments, and I’m hoping to avoid them. I mean, a NiMH battery does not contain depleted uranium. sigh.
Ok. Thanks for the reply. Though I don’t think they’re using lithium batteries in cars yet.
True. However, there’s more to it than getting power off the grid. Drive a DC motor externally and it becomes a generator. Clutch in the motors when you want to stop and the wheels drive the motors as generators. The effort of driving the motors slows the car down and the resultant generated current recharges the batteries. So you recover some energy from the gas it took to accelerate the car in the first place.
ah ha! Most excellent information. So that’s regenerative braking (was just reading about it). That actually makes sense. Without the system, the generated current would dissipate through the brake pads as heat, right?
Exactly. When you stop a car, the energy has to go somewhere. In standard friction brakes it is dissipated as waste heat. In regenerative braking it’s used to generate electricity.
I took a trip to Japan in 2004 and did some driving around with some of the locals in a hybrid. It had an LCD display that was switchable between a GPS map and a diagram of the power train. It showed a schematic diagram with the wheels, the motors, the engine and the battery. It would show the direction of energy flows as the various systems switched on and off, and you could see the arrows going from the motors to the batteries as he stopped.
I can just imagine the next Hollyweird movie, the car chase scene has a hybrid car, car gets shot at puncturing lithium batteries, driver crashes car into water, lake, off of pier etc, water and lithium do not agree favorably, mini-nuke explosion is next.
That’s amazing. Well, as far as regenerative braking goes, it’s kind of funny that no one thought of it before. How much r&d money went into brake pads instead? ;)
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