AutoblogGreen

I just found your site and listened to podcast #4. You guys are right on track. I have been interested in AltairNano for some time now and when listening to podcast number 4 I thought of some other questions that I wished you'd asked.

While it may seem off the subject, why don't laptop manufacturers switch to lithium titanate? HP, Dell, Lenovo, Sony and Apple have multibillion dollar battery recalls. If they switched to Altair's Nanosafe batteries it would accelerate Altair's volume capacity and help to drive down the costs for automotive use.

I find it difficult to understand why Tesla Motors has not abandoned lithium Ion batteries in favor of Altair. The complexity of Tesla's battery pack's thermal management system adds weight and volume that more than makes up for the 30% power density hit of lithium titanate batteries. Add to that the necessity of multiple circuit breakers, the sheer number of cells (6800+), 1/4 the calendar life and number of recharges and 20 times the recharge time and I think they are insane not to switch to NanoSafe.

I think you should be doing more to assign numbers that we can all understand relating vehicle weight, vehicle range, battery volume, battery weight, against kilowatt hour ratings of the battery pack. This would help potential consumers better evaluate their potential investment. Furthermore, the consumer would need to know the relative cost of ownership of a battery pack lasting 15 years and recharging 25,000 times versus a pack lasting 5 years and recharging 1000 times.

Look at the downloadable PDF on the Tesla Motors website. It is the best written overview of the transportation energy sector available. It shows that the hydrogen approach is grossly inefficient in comparison to the electrical approach.

I firmly believe that electrical storage and distribution is the best common currency for whatever various energy sources arrive in the future. The cost to retrofit existing gas stations to charging stations is very minimal in comparison to the vast costs of hydrogen production, distribution and the storage of it at the point of production, the station and the vehicle itself.

As a final point, we'll have to break the habit of considering vehicles in isolation from the overall scene. A vehicle parked in the garage with a massive and expensive electrical resevoir can potentially get its energy from local solar and wind. It can feed back stored power to the house. Thus a systems engineering approach is called for, not different components considered in isolation from each other.

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