More Powerful Batteries

Can't wait to stick these suckers in my radio controlled airplane!

You obviously have not seen "Who Killed the Electric Car"... buy, borrow or rent it.  The problem is not that the Nanosafe is not good enough, it's that it's TOO GOOD.

A really outstanding electric battery such as the Nanosafe scares the hell out of GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda, and all of the other car companies because if we start buying really good electric cars, their profits crash.

The only reason that GM or any other car company ever sold an electric car to start with was not because they wanted to, but because the state of California told them that if they wanted to sell cars in California, ten percent of them had to be zero pollution, which in essence means battery power.  The car manufacturers sued the state and eventually got the mandate removed, but only after some electric cars had already been leased out.

GM designed and built the EV-1 electric car... but there was an intense internal battle in the company over that car.  The engineers, salespeople, and many others involwed in the project were in face-offs- with those in the company interested in nothing but profit, since the EV-1 would cost consumers much less, especially in their parts and service departments in years to come.

Those not concerned about pollution, smog and greenhouse effect were terrified that the EV-1 would become popular and actually motivate people to buy electric.

The ones what were strictly profit-motivated won out... there were hundreds of EV-1 users that were totally in love with their cars, and GM brass knew it... the EV-1 needed none of the stuff ICEs (internal combustion engines)needed: no oil changes, valve adjustments, smog checks, spark plugs, catalytic convertors, mufflers, timing belts, radiator hoses, fan belts, oxgen sensors, and transmission rebuilds that are common in the first few years of a car's life... in later years they are even more expensive to keep running, and more lucrative to the manufacturer-- hundreds of moving parts need to be replaced as they wear out, and GM makes money on all of it.

An electric car needs virtually nothing but an occasional battery charge-- it is quiet, so needs no muffler... it is smog-free, so needs no smog tests or smog equipment... it has ONE moving part-- the motor itself--  and, unlike the movements of the hundreds of parts in an engine that jump up and down and move in so many complicated ways, the electric motor just does one thing-- it just spins... it requires no adjustments or maintenance.  WVhen you calulate for all the costs of producing the eletricity for an electric car and all the costs of operating a regular car, the electric car can be driven for just a few cents per mile as opposed to the dollar-plus cost per mile of a gasoline powered vehicle of similar specs.

When GM brass realized that the electric car was capable of depriving them of a huge percentage of the profit they would usually be able to look forward to, and that it would have a much longer useful life than an ICE-powered car, they pulled out all the stops to take it off the road... hudreds of happy EV-1 drivers got notices that the leases on their cars were expiring and would not be renewed.  The drdvers (none were owners, just leasees) made huge desperate cash offers to GM to keep their cars, but GM threatened to charge them with car theft if they did not return the cars when the lease was up.

Hundreds of these beautiul cars, in great shape, were taken to lots in the desert and crushed, much to the shock of the former drivers... there were a few dozen more that were left.  When the former drivers found out that the last few were due to meet the same fate, they gathered outside the facility where they were being stored, and blockaded the entrance with their bodies and their cars and trucks.  Many of them were handcuffed and jailed rather than allow the cars to be trucked off without resistance.

There are only about two or three EV-1s left... GM allowed one of them to be put on display at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles (I saw it recently) but before they released it, GM gutted it of all batteries and running gear... it's not driveable.  The only other car I know of was put on display at the Smithsonian Institute.  It seems that even as pig-headed as they were at GM, even they could not bring themselves to completely destroying all of these remarkable cars.

Since the oil companies also would stand to lose huge profits if electric cars caught on, they also went to great trouble to suppress EVs: when the legendary genius inventor Stanford Ovshinsky designed an improved nickel-metal hydride battery optimized for use in electric cars, one of the oil companies {I don't recall which one... Arco? Standard?} praised him and bought a controlling interest in the battery.  Ovshinsky made a press release to that effect, and the oil company had a fit, saying he had no right to do so.  They sat on the battery patent ever since, not allowing it to be used in any cars.  If  Ovshinsky would have realized that they had intended to do what they did, we would never have sold them the controlling interest.

The only reason GM recently unveiled its "Volt" hybrid was as a PR move... they give no indication they really want to produce it, saying it's far too expenisive to produce, and when they get the cost down on the batteries, then maybe in a decade they'll do something with it... but they're very worried about anything electric.  They're far more likely to sell a hyrid than a full electric, since hybrids are even more expensive than regular ICE cars... they have both an engine and a complicated electric management system.  And, by comparison, the hybrid that American car companies want to sell us will be far less efficient-- estimated mileage in the range of 25 miles per gallon or so.

Even though GM was the biggest bully in this matter, if you see "Who Killed the Electric Car", you'll see that Toyota, Ford and others did the same thing GM did-- Toyota retrofitted some of their cars for use as battery-only operation to meet California's mandate, but as soon as they had the opportunity, they did the same thing GM did-- they took back all of their electric cars under heavy protest from the customers leasing them, and crushed all of them.

I hope I answered your question.