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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (10872)	7/8/2009 10:51:37 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 86356

Time Tested: New EV Battery Displays Remarkable Lifespan Excuse me.... Li-Ion is known for losing charge capacity each year, whether you use them or not. Now YES, they've tested this for 2 1/2 years and put a lot of miles on the battery, but I want to know they actual life span of the battery, including cycle rate. What is the "shelf life" of the battery, which will be important to providing replacements. If my replacement battery has been sitting on the shelf for 2 years, then I'm screwed. Thus, replacement Li-Ion batteries will require "Just in Time" manufacturing. The other unknown with transportation-related batteries is shelf life. Lithium-ion batteries used in laptops and cell phones have a shelf life of about three to four years. This tends not to be a problem because most people upgrade their gadgets before the batteries fail. But a car battery has to last much longer. Hanssen concedes that this is a concern and that a tremendous amount of improvement has been made in this area. "One of the things that we've learned is that completely charging and discharging these packs leads to a shortened lifespan, so most hybrids only allow the battery to charge as high as 80 percent and discharge down to 30 percent, which improves the lives of the cells significantly." edmunds.com So figure that your battery is only going to provide about 50% of it's actual capacity because the software won't let it over or under charge. Hawk