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Technology Stocks : Maxwell Technologies [MXWL]

MXWL 4.480

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May 16 5:00 PM EST

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From: Ausdauer	3/27/2009 10:45:48 AM
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Read in the NY Times today... ...that Tesla has announced its newest sedan. nytimes.com About 3 months ago I started looking into the available all-electric vehicles and it became apparent to me that 1) you can't swing a dead cat without bumping into someone who has started a company featuring all-electric vehicles, or 2) the notion of electric vehicles is not at all new. During my teens I spent the summers working at a private country club and worked my way up to the "rack room" at the golf course. Responsibilites included corraling all the electric carts at the end of the day in order to charge the batteries. The notion of a battery powered car is not a new one by far. This was back in the early 70's. I have since read that batter powered vehicles were conceived some 50 years earlier. I looked at the specs of Tesla's first sports car, a convertible with 2 seats, optimized for performance with a decent extended range between charges and a pricetag of over 100K. If you look deeper into the specs you will see that nearly 1,000 lbs or the car consists of the battery which itself consists of about 7,000 lithium-ion subunits about the size of a standard AA battery. The fact is that this solution may be great for northern California, but there is no mention as to the battery function in less temperate regions, say the Midwest or even the East Coast during a bad winter. Even worse is the fact that the battery pack has a limited life span and needs to be changed out after a few years, an expensive and not so ecologically sound decision in my opinion. I think the near future of green vehicles is going to be extremely efficient combustion engines either alone or in combination with an electrical storage system. It is even possible that there will be vehicles with electric motors and fossil fuel driven electric generators in combination. It seems less likely that lithium-ion batteries will be the ideal solution. Ultra-capacitor technology seems extremely interesting at this stage, both in terms of its use in energy recovery (braking), power utilization (accelerating) and energy storage (battery alternative). I am not saying Maxwell Technologies has the solution, but they are certainly in a technology area which may play a central role as fossil fuels are phased out. Aus

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