Monday May 12, 2008

VW and Sanyo Electric to partner on lithium-ion batteries for hybrid and electric cars

greencarcongress.com :

The Nikkei reports that Volkswagen and Sanyo jointly will develop a lithium-ion battery for hybrid and electric cars. VW hopes to start importing the battery for use in its vehicles by 2012. Sanyo showed a prototype Li-ion module for hybrid vehicles and a prototype Li-ion battery cell for plug-in hybrid vehicles at the 40th Tokyo Motor Show last November [2007]. Sanyo plans to invest nearly 100 billion yen (US$973 million) in developing and producing lithium-ion batteries over the next three years.

techon.nikkeibp.co.jp

Mitsuru Honma, senior vice president of Sanyo Electric, mentioned the cell for hybrid vehicles that was under development at 2007 Tokyo Automotive Conference, which ran from Oct 22-23, 2007, prior to the Motor Show. "The cell achieved an energy density of 90Wh/kg and output density of 3,500W/kg," he said.

- This comes hot on the heels of the earlier announcement that Nissan and NEC would mass-produce lithium-ion batteries for cars. Again, like that announcement, this one isn't exactly new and it goes back even further, with the previous post on this being dated Feb 2006. This time round, we have more concrete figures such as the size of the investment being close to a billion US dollars equivalent which eclipses Nissan/NEC's planned $194 million expenditure.

The big players are clearly coming together in the comptetition to power the next generation of hybrid, plug-in PHEV and electric vehicles. All that we need now is a major car manufacturer to actually put these new lithium-ion batteries into a new car model (2010 Toyota Prius, 2011 Honda Civic Hybrid, anyone?) and we're off to the races.

See also :

1. Nissan, NEC to mass produce lithium-ion batteries for cars
2. Nissan, NEC to make hybrid batteries
3. Hybrid vehicle battery market to reach $2.3 billion by 2015
4. A123Systems receives $30m funding to develop hybrid Li-Ion batteries
5. Sanyo, VW to co-develop hybrid batteries

(2008-05-12 23:46:40 SGT) [Energy] Permalink

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