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January 2009 Posts
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"The Tesla is 700 pounds heavier than a Lotus Elise, and you feel that weight while cornering. All of that extra weight comes from the 990-pound lithium ion battery that sits behind the passenger compartment."
Source: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-10108210-48.html
quote comment
My comment on carb is that I do not think they have the right to interfear with warenty issues. that should be between the buyer and shop doing the conversion. If the buyer is not comfortable with the wareny offered they have the choice to go with it or not.
Carb should only be envolved with air quality issues.
Boppster
Hi Bo & Ryan,
the "ferrous iron" battery of BYD, isn't this the LiFePO?
I don't know- I think in this case CARB is doing a good thing, for two reasons: one, this helps to ensure that a car that goes thru a conversion maintains its original emissions rating by ensuring that if the conversion messes with the ICE portion, the convertors will either fix it, or make sure that the manufacturer will still fix it. And two- it's easy to say to the customer "caveat emptor," but it is nice for laws to work for us when they can. And I notice that it is usually the seller who likes that saying, usually just before he asks you to send your life savings to Nigeria- or worse, a Madoff Mutual fund!
Besides, as we are all hopefuls for the adoption of EV's on this site, a law like this will make the adoption of EV's more accepted, and not be given a black eye by irresponsible conversion companies.
I spent some time trying to understand "Ferrous Iron". It seems likely that this is the LiFePO4 chemistry that we have been hearing about.
It looks like "ferrous" iron means that the iron is "divalently" bonded. Which just simply means that it is bonded to two other atoms. Getting the correct lattice structure in these battery materials is apparently key to their proper function. So having divalently bonded iron is apparently better than some other lattice structure.
In other words, not all LiFePO4 batteries are alike. This is perhaps not too surprising.
Any chemists out there?
CARB. I don't think someone converting a hybrid vehicle to plugin hybrid should have to pay any emission testing, since the basic car is unchanged. Why pay a mandated $3000. This money will eventually be sent back down to the consumer.
Most $50 emission test would easily show the car passes emissions. Why $3000?
CARB seems to be full of executives working for Detroit rather than the people and they show this over and over again. They made the decision to kill the eletric car, so we can drive cars made on oil buring hydrogen. The State needs to fire the whole department (and since we are in a credit crisis it would be the perfect time to do so).
Bill, from what I understand, the $1500-$3500 that is paid to a 3rd party testing facility goes far beyond the $50 tests done locally. This test looks in detail at all the components that effects emmissions and not only ensures they pass state standards, but compare output to the original car's output. Imagine if shoddy conversion companies took shortcuts to save money and increased emissions by just a few percent in doing conversions... this could minimize or reverse any enviromental gains for going plugin.
I dont believe the the CARB proposals to require emmisions testing is what is making many of us in the conversion industry worried. It has already been proven that what we do doesnt increase the emmisions. What does have us worried is the fact that they are also going to make it a requirement that we warranty the batteries that we install as well as the factory batteries for 10 years or 150K miles. There is virtually no way that any of the small conversion companies will be able to do this since many are using lead acid that lasts around 2 years. Even with lithium it would be hard to warranty them for 10 years or 150k miles since we cannot control how the customer treats the batteries. CARB should not be able to mandate warranties that are unrealistic, they are responsible for making sure vehicles comply with air quality rules they shoud stick to that and let the market sort out the warranty. If one shop offers a reasonable warranty and another doesnt who is the customer going to choose?
Dave Kois
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Carb is the one that requires Toyota to warranty the prius battery to 150K miles. Conversions should meet that standard.
Bo and Ryan:
Have we flushed out some info about the batteries included in the conversions?
