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Our Favorite Battery Nonsense

Posted on Thursday, February 24, 2024 at 10:10 AM 0 Comments

By Phil Gow, CODA VP of Battery Systems

Usually it starts as follows:

“ A group of researchers have discovered a new:”

Then follows a purportedly novel approach. It is best if some cheap, everyday material like paper, urine, soap, ink, or potato is involved. Also it is best if an everyday method of construction is involved such as printing, growing crystals or electroplating. Of course something exotic needs to be included - something like carbon nano-tubes, nano-scision, nano-doping. Nano has been good, but we’ll need something different pretty soon; nano is wearing a bit thin - “Nano-Nano”, much as Mork from Ork used to say.

Next some wild, unjustified and frankly embarrassing claims are required – my favorites are:

• 10X the energy density of current technology

• Ultra low costs – 10 fold cost reduction

• 10X the life of current batteries

• Charging and or discharging in one second or one minute or another absurd unit of time

• Flexible construction allows building the battery in any shape – such as car body panels

• Totally safe and non-toxic new materials

It is best if these claims are made if the battery has never been fabricated in a size larger than a match head. This avoids all those pesky issues of scaling up by 1,000,000 fold. Never mention that the improvement of 10X is for a component of the battery which wasn’t limiting performance anyway, and that 10% is all the improvement you will see on an actual battery. It is also important that there be un-quantified, unjustified and unsubstantiated claims of low cost and easy assembly with no real world experience of a battery large enough to power a wristwatch. Summary and conclusion should claim that this new technology will revolutionize the automotive battery industry and that mass production is planned for 1-2 years from now.

Next week we’ll cover why putting a windmill on the roof of your electric car will make it charge as it drives down the road and makes it go faster at the same time. In the following week’s column we’ll explain why fuel cells are always 10-20 years away. Cold fusion is up next!

Learn more about CODA Automotive’s battery system in this video with Phil Gow and Plugin Cars at the Los Angeles auto show in November 2010.

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