Toyota Adopts Tesla Laptop & laptop battery Strategy for Electric Cars
Toyota Adopts Tesla Laptop & laptop battery Strategy for Electric Cars
Toyota Motor Corp., Daimler AG and Bayerische Motoren Werke AG are turning to laptops for a cheaper way to power their electric cars -- and their sales.
Automakers are testing packs of lithium-ion batteries assembled by Silicon Valley startup Tesla Motors Inc. costing less than bigger, car-only batteries favored by General Motors Co., Nissan Motor Co. and Mitsubishi Motors Corp. A pack of 6,831 cylinder-shaped cells made by Panasonic Corp. powers Tesla's $109,000 Roadster sports car for up to 245 miles per charge.
The car industry will help lithium-ion battery makers more than triple sales to 5 trillion yen ($60 billion) in a decade from 1.5 trillion yen in the year ending in March, according to Sanyo Electric Co., the world's biggest maker of the dell inspiron 1300 battery batteries. Rechargeable consumer-electronics batteries benefit from an economy of scale that may help cut manufacturing costs and sticker prices in the nascent electric-car industry, said Koji Endo, a Tokyo-based analyst at Advanced Research Japan.
"It may lead to the total component cost of an electric car getting lower than that of a gasoline car," Endo said. "As the cost lowers, there'll be more likelihood that retail prices of electric cars will drop."
Full-Line Maker'
Factories making small cells are running at high capacity, Eberhard said. That also benefits EV makers who don't have the resources to develop their own batteries, said Menahem Anderman, president of Advanced Automotive Batteries, a consulting firm in Oregon House, California.
GM partners with South Korea's LG Chem Ltd. for the Volt pack, and Nissan partners with NEC Corp., Japan's biggest personal-computer maker, for the Leaf.
Toyota, the world's largest automaker, is working with Tesla on the electric RAV4, while its plug-in Prius hybrid and a small, electric car planned for 2012 employ larger batteries.
"When the customer decides This is the car I want,' we want to be that full-line maker who has the answer for that customer," Toyota President Akio Toyoda said. "By using both car batteries and laptop batteries, we are able to provide customers with a wider variety of choice."
The alliances with Toyota and Daimler helped Tesla generate an initial public offering in June that raised about $226 million.
Battery Recalls
Tesla's shares have surged more than 80 percent this year, compared with an 11 percent increase in the Russell 1000 Index, even though the company has delivered fewer than 1,500 Roadsters since 2008.
Shares of Toyota have fallen 15 percent this year, more than a 3 percent decline by Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average.
A123 Systems Inc., a Watertown, Hp elitebook 8530w battery Massachusetts-based lithium-ion battery maker part-owned by General Electric Co., also is promoting small, cylindrical cells originally designed for power tools.
Lithium-ion batteries in consumer electronics have a history of recalls because of overheating that can cause a fire. Nokia Oyj, the world's largest mobile-phone maker, offered in 2007 to replace as many as 46 million Panasonic phone batteries.
Panasonic now uses an insulator film between electrodes to limit the risk of overheating, said Yuji Tsuzaki, a spokesman for the battery unit.
"I've never been found wanting on the batteries," said Painter, chief executive officer of Truecar Inc., an automotive- sales data-marketing company in Santa Monica, California. "I step on the pedal and it goes like a bat out of hell."
--With assistance from Makiko Kitamura, Maki Shiraki, Yuki Hagiwara in Tokyo; Masatsugu Horie in Osaka. Editors: Michael Tighe, Bret Okeson
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