REMEMBER YOU HAVE TO BE HAPPY TO BE SUCCESS FULL !

no surprise that Deutsch company didn’t find plug-inability to be an issue … check out what they pay for electricity over there (even in the heavily advertised wind mill countries):

http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=92216

I suspect that gasoline, at 2-3 times what we pay in the US, is still cheaper than an equivalent amount of electrical power.

“no gas in Atlanta”

come on folks. how else to guarantee record profits than to choke off the source to limit supplies precisely when one knows demand is going to skyrocket … something like the long-term profit motive behind not building new refinerys over the past few decades … basic economics: keep supply down as demand rises equals more profit. My understanding was that refinerys in that end of the country intentionally slowed or stopped refining with the approach of the storm “for the public good”.

I’ll admit A123 has the manufacturing lead here right now BUT–and this is a big but–so many other larger players are committed here to large cell lithium production (Panasonic, Sanyo, Hitachi, Saft, Conti, the list goes on) that I seriously doubt there will be one big winner. Interesting horse race, though, and of course we’ll have a gazillion cheap Chinese knockoffs that may or may not work–their quality control to date on high discharge lipoly packs is fairly abysmal. ABAT and CBAK are two players in that space.

But returning to the real news here, the key points about Conti’s very positive announcement here are the claims that they have
a) developed a safe, reliable, and robust lithium-based HEV pack that I’m assuming has been vetted and approved by Daimler, which is a huge step forward if true–even Toyota hasn’t had the confidence to run lithium-based packs in their Prius beyond a handful of beta testers; and

b) the pack is ready NOW, and is going into some 2009 Mercedes hybrids.

Regardless of your preference for particular lithium chemistries, this is a major achievement and step forward for the entire HEV industry, and ought to be cheered. It will be interesting to see what kind of warranty Mercedes puts on these packs, and of course the big question here in the U.S. is, will these packs meet the very demanding 10-year/150,000-mile standard mandated by California and other greenie states that follow CA’s lead? Anyone know more details here?

GM should keep CPI in the wings, but should go to bed with A123. Also, GM does not need Conti. A123 packs are a lot simpler to build than CPI packs, and GM will master that someday and does not need Conti.