The cells actually have twice the volume of a AA-sized battery. I am not sure why the author was not able to get that right; it makes me wonder about the credibility of the rest of the rest of the article.
As a rule of thumb... any time rechargeable batteries are charged at an accelerated rate it shortens their life and a significant amount of electricity will be wasted. The 18650 Lithium Ion cells retail for several dollars a piece in bulk. These batteries are going to be a lot more expensive than the batteries in our current batch of electric cars. Unsubsidized we are talking $20,000 minimum. No one really expects them to last more than two or three years with heavy use. And if you don't use the car much... what is the point of owning one of these super expensive "fuel saving" vehicles?
Unfortunately, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies for this project are largely being wasted. This project would never fly if left on its own. It probably won't fly even with the subsidies. Our country's electrical grid is not capable of supporting a large amount of additional load.
Anyone who thinks that the government should be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this should also be supporting spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new electrical generation plants and the additional infrastructure that will be needed to keep them on the road. But a trillion here and a trillion there... whose keeping track. Anyone who looks at this thing critically will realize that it is a massive boondoggle.
Just a few details made me see “boondoggle” in this whole thing anyhow, the biggest one being the word “subsidy”. The article reads like a sales pitch, about as shallow and transparent as those pitches used to attempt to sell the Chevy Volt.