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To: WWS who wrote (117)	12/19/1997 8:28:00 AM
From: Sid Turtlman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 407

Bill: If the automakers can come up with much cleaner internal combustion engines, that is great, but it doesn't necessarily hurt the prospects of hybrids. Car engines create the most pollution and are least efficient when the car is starting off at zero miles an hour until maybe 25 mph. That characteristic is unlikely to change, and that is the range where the battery part of the hybrid would kick in. If the car companies can come up with an engine that is much cleaner from 25 mpg on, that is fine. The issue is a much bigger threat to Ballard, which is trying to replace the entire i.c.e. rather than ERC. One other thing to mention. ERC's battery announcements will concentrate on vehicle applications for a while because it has licensed out most of the non-vehicle aps to Corning, which is being very secretive about its intentions and progress. Just looking at the characteristics of the battery, there are a wide range of potential consumer applications that I would imagine Corning is pursuing, such as portable tools, cell phones, computers, etc. The royalty potential to ERC from even moderate success on Corning's part would be significant.

To: WWS who wrote (117)	12/23/1997 4:06:00 PM
From: Michael Winkler	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 407

Bill: If vehicles such as Honda's turn out to be as low emission as they claim, then I agree with you that there is very little benefit as far as local pollution(NOx, SOx, CO, unburned hydrocarbons, particulates) is concerned using battery powered electric vehicles. A related question is whether these same vehicles will stay very low pollution as they age. A pure battery powered vehicle also has the problem of shifting emissions to the power plant rather than eliminating them. If the power plant fuel is coal, some emissions will increase as compared with buring gasoline in an internal combustion engine. Because of the high efficiency of hybrid and fuel cell vehicles, CO2 emissions are greatly reduced(global warming). Pollution from spills while refueling would be reduced somewhat although larger improvements could probably be made using interlock systems. A fuel cell hybrid generally will perform better than a pure fuel cell vehicle. The hybrid could either use a battery or an ultracapacitor for acceleration. Mazda is using an ultracapacitor in their fuel cell prototype. The charging and discharging losses in an ultracapacitor are much lower than in a battery and energy transfer rates and times are also much better. The limitation, so far, has been on the energy storage capacity of ultracapacitors.