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Desperately seeking better batteries
January 15, 2008
The auto companies need to do a lot of work to comply with the new US federal fuel economy standards - known as Cafe - which require US vehicles to drive average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020.
One of their biggest challenges is getting hold of batteries that are more efficient, smaller and can power a vehicle for longer distances before running out of energy. The sad truth is that battery technology has not obeyed Moore’s Law for semiconductors by rapidly more efficient and powerful.
The importance the industry now places on the emergence of a new generation of batteries was brought home to me in a conversation yesterday with Jon Lauckner, who heads product development at General Motors. That, among other things, puts him in charge of the Chevrolet Volt electric car, which GM is hoping to start producing by 2010.
Mr Lauckner has a host of challenges to make GM cars more fuel efficient, or at least to burn less petrol. GM has announced one initiative this week in Detroit: a partnership with Coskata, a start-up backed by Vinod Khosla’s Khosla Ventures that aims to produce cellulosic ethanol for less than $1 per gallon.
But unless all vehicles switch to environmentally-friendly alternative fuels, the motor industry needs better batteries to power the next generation of hybrid vehicles and plug-in electric cars. Even hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle are likely to need a battery to store the power generated by the cell.
The range of the current generation of batteries is very low. The Volt concept car has a battery running the length of the car but could only go for 40 miles on it without a battery built to current standards needing to be recharged. The prototype Toyota plug-in car being shown off in Detroit can run seven miles on battery power before it must be plugged into the 110 volt US grid for three hours to recharge.
Mr Lauckner points to various technology initiatives that could improve matters, including work being done by researchers at Stanford Technology who have used nanotechnology to produce lithium-ion batteries 10 times more powerful than existing ones.
He also cites work done at Eestor, a start-up funded by the venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins Caufield and Byers, which is working on high-density batteries.
In other words, the industry now finds itself needing Silicon Valley to produce technological breakthroughs similar to the early days of semiconductors but this time in the mundane field of battery power.
