-
INTRO: As long as I can remember, I've been obsessed with cars. Growing up in the 60's, there was no shortage of cool new cars to keep up with. In high school in the 70's, I read an article in Popular Mechanics about a car a hobbyist built, with an electric motor, a ton of lead-acid batteries, and a very small jet turbine motor hooked to an electric generator. This was obviously the future. Of course, I also knew Jet Packs were just around the corner.
So I was enthralled to see the Volt being developed, some 40 years after I first saw the idea of an electric car with an on-board generator.
But the Volt and the pure electrics being produced are never going to achieve widespread popularity until two things happen. The price of a battery pack has to come way down, and the energy density of the packs has to go way up. I wasn't holding out much hope for this as most advances in battery tech the last 40 years have only been incremental, not game-changing.
Then I saw the first article in this blog, about the breakthrough at Stanford in 2007, showing the huge potential of Lithium Ion batteries if we could just get silicon to work in place of carbon for the anode. At that point, I started collecting articles about battery breakthroughs, and soon realized many many companies are pursuing this full tilt, and we should actually see huge gains by mid-decade. I present this collection here for your enjoyment.
Please refrain from turning this into a "I hate electric cars" discussion, or a GM bail-out discussion, or a political discussion. Sorry, not interested. This is simply a BATTERY BREAKTHROUGH blog, and any off subject remarks will be removed. Thank you.
Hal's battery blog 
Hey Hal I’m an amateur futurist. Been reading about the future since I was 17 (I’m now 24) so I’m no slouch when it comes to this stuff. Like you I’ve also been following the electric car revolution at hand and have come to the conclusion, like you, that battery tech isn’t there yet. But!!!! And its a big but, in the coming years we should see a game changer come to fruition. Matter of fact it was on this article’s comment section where I read your comment and followed you here.
I must say that this is a great blog and it just essentially reiterated what I’ve seen over the years. Envia is definitely the front runner and I’ve known about them for probly a year now. I’d love to ask you questions cause of course you know more than I do so please email cause I’ve got many questions pertaining to the subject.
p.s email me I must commune with you!!!!
Sorry Scott, couldn’t find a way to get your email address. I’m not real familiar with wordpress, so I may be missing something.
uh how were you able to email me if you couldn’t find my email?????
On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 5:33 AM, Hal’s battery blog wrote:
> ** > hal commented: “Sorry Scott, couldn’t find a way to get your email > address. I’m not real familiar with wordpress, so I may be missing > something.”
AHA! Apparently it emailed you automatically when I responded to your comment on my blog. I was looking for an email address in your posts or in your profile and it is not shown, so I thought I couldn’t email you as you requested. Anyway, glad to hear of your electric car enthusiasm and I’ll keep posting articles when I find them.
Hal.