The idea of an all-electric car isn’t a new concept, the first electric car; the Scottish inventor, Robert Anderson, invented the first crude electric car in 1835. Anderson’s electric horseless carriage was powered by primary cells. Anderson’s electric car never caught on because primary cells aren’t rechargeable and had to be replaced when their charge was depleted. The first practical electric vehicle, a small electric locomotive, was built by the American inventor Thomas Davenport in 1835 It wasn’t until the French physicist Gaston Plante invented the first lead-acid storage battery, a battery capable of being recharged, in 1859 did the idea of an electric car really become practical. William Morrison of Des Moines, Iowa built the first electric car in America in 1891. The production and sales of electric cars reached it peak in 1900 when 28 percent of the 4, 192 cars sold were electric cars. By 1920, the electric car had lost out to Henry Ford’s mass produced internal combustion engine powered cars.
The electric cars of the 1900’s share some common problems with the electric cars of the 21st century, the high initial cost of the vehicle and the distance one could drive before having to recharge the batteries. Most electric cars today, cars like the new Chevrolet Volt, still have a problem with the distance they can transverse before having to have their batteries recharged. The Chevrolet Volt, like most electric cars can only average 40 miles between recharges. There are exceptions to that rule. The Tesla Roadster designed and manufactured by the Tesla Motor Company, can go 256 miles between charges and has an acceleration that rival many high performance sport cars with a 0 to 60 acceleration time under 4 seconds. The Tesla also has a price tag that rivals many high-performance sport cars at $100,000 compared to the Chevrolet Volts sticker price of…well I really don’t even have a projected cost for the production Volt which isn’t scheduled to appear until 2011 but I’m sure it won’t be anywhere near the Tesla’s $100,000 price tag.
A great portion of the $100,000 one will pay for the high performance Tesla Roadster goes into its Li-ion (Lithium Ion) batteries. The cost of the Li-ion batteries used in the Tesla Roadster is $36,000 and a Tesla owner can expect to have to replace those batteries every 7 years or 100,000 miles, which ever comes sooner, as they like to say on all those automobile warranties. Besides the high cost of maintaining these vehicles there are some safety issues that I want to concentrate on in this article. Li-ion technology in its current state is outright dangerous. Cars like the Tesla Roadster and Chevrolet Volt, if it adopts the Li-ion battery packs will be a Ralph Nadar nightmare.
Li-ion is explosive technology, literally. Remember when all those laptop computers were bursting into flames back in 2006? It was the Li-ion batteries in them exploding like incendiary bombs. Sony who pioneered the Li-ion battery technology in 1991 ended up recalling 6 million laptops. The heat generated during recharging caused the problem. The overheating sent the batteries into thermal runaway, which led to their exploding like the firebombs they were. In the years that have passed since then great strides have been made in Li-ion technology but who is to say that the problem won’t occur again. The charging current in a laptop is measured in the miliamperes or thousands of one ampere whereas electric cars will recharge by being plugged into a 15 or 20 ampere home branch circuit.
What caused these innocent looking batteries to turn into incendiary bombs? It was a basic flaw of the design. Li-ion batteries work by separating its positive and negative sides by a thin layer, called an electrolyte The electrolyte is perforated to allow the lithium ions to pass through from one side of the chamber to the other, thus generating a current. Tiny bits of metal that result from the manufacturing process can potentially get stuck in those perforations, preventing the ions from freely flowing. Pressure and heat can then build up, causing an explosion. In addition, allowing the ions to move too quickly can lead to overheating as well.
If one Li-ion battery was enough to send a laptop up in a ball of flames consider this, there are 6,831 Li-ion cells packed under the hood of the Tesla Roadster. Granted the car comes with a cooling system for the battery pack that’s supposed to keep them from overheating and going into a thermal runaway state. Then there’s solid state circuitry that’s suppose to control the charge rate and is designed to disconnect the charging circuit if the batteries begin to over heat of if they start to become overcharged. Nevertheless, there’s always the possibility of a problem with one or both of those systems malfunctioning and the unthinkable happens.
As with the safety issue, researchers are looking for a longer-lasting Lithium alternative. Again, nanotechnology seems to be leading the pack of potential solutions. One company, Altair Nanotechnologies announced in 2006 that it had found a new material that would far outlast Li-ion batteries and recharge faster for the same price, called lithium titanate. Canadian Car Company Phoenix Motorcars is using lithium titanate batteries in its line of electric cars that have a 100-plus mile range, less than half the range of the Tesla Roadster.
