The Nissan Leaf All-Electric Car
The Nissan Leaf, packed with its lithium-ion battery, will be the first mass-produced, all electric plug-in car to come to the market when it goes on sale in selected markets this fall. Is the Leaf, with its 100-mile range, the forerunner of an all-electric fleet? Or are there limits to lithium-ion, or Li-ion, battery technology in terms of the ratio of weight and size to range and power?
Mark Perry, Nissan’s director of product planning, said by phone from Tennessee, that all-electric power trains have a strong future. “We believe the 100-mile range is a sweet spot,” he said, noting the key was to find the balance between cost, size and weight of the battery pack and the range. The Leaf will be available in the Northeast in the first or second quarter of next year. However, M. Stanley Whittingham, who first proposed the lithium-ion battery while working at Exxon in the 1970s, said he thought there were limits to all-electric power trains. “Basically, you’re paying X dollars for the car and Y dollars for the range,” he said from his office at the State University of New York, Binghamton, where he is a professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering, and director of the university’s Institute for Materials Research. Perry said hybrid technology would not solve problems with carbon emissions, noting that even with electricity produced from coal, an all-electric vehicle was more energy efficient. The vast majority of current hybrid electric vehicles use nickel metal hydride batteries. But lithium-ion batteries, are replacing them as they offer longer life, higher energy density and less weight. Indeed, lithium-ion battery technology has proved a boon to cell phones, laptops as well as electric vehicles because of its energy-to-weight ratio. Perry said the manganese lithium-ion battery pack in the Leaf was less susceptible to heat and had an expected life of 10 years and fast charging would only reduce its capacity to around 75 percent.
Source: ProJo.com
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