By Reuters

Filed under: Company News, Technology, General Motors, Aerospace & Defense, Automotive Industry

By Deepa Seetharaman

TROY, Michigan — For nearly two years, a team of former Chevrolet Volt and Toyota Prius engineers has been working on the next big thing in electric cars: the latest version of the 154-year-old lead-acid battery.

Their aim is to build a battery strong enough to power a wider range of vehicles, something they think the current cutting-edge technology — lithium ion — can’t do cheaply, particularly given recent safety scares.

The focus of Energy Power Systems on a technology older than the automobile itself illustrates the difficulty with lithium-ion batteries. While widely used in everything from laptops to electric cars and satellites, a number of high-profile incidents involving smoke and fire have been a reminder of the risks and given them an image problem.

The overheating of the batteries on two of Boeing’s high-tech 787 Dreamliners, which prompted regulators to ground the aircraft, served to underline the concerns and forced the plane maker to redesign the battery system. Indeed, a growing number of engineers now say the lithium-ion battery revolution has stalled, undercut by high costs, technical complexity and safety concerns.

“Smart people have been working on this for 10 years already and no one is close to a new kind of battery,” said Fred Schlachter, a lithium-ion battery expert and retired physicist from the U.S.-funded Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Many experts now believe it will take at least another decade for lithium-ion technology to be ready for widespread adoption in transportation. Others, including Toyota Motor Corp. (TM), believe the solution lies beyond lithium-ion.

Interviews with two dozen battery executives, experts and researchers, including the founder of Securaplane, which made Boeing’s battery charger, reveal an industry in which some are having second thoughts about using lithium-ion, and are instead looking to enhance previous technologies or to leap ahead.

These people say expectations were set too high, too fast. People projected that “clean technology” batteries would shrink in size and weight at the speed of the microchip revolution. That hasn’t happened, and Schlachter says it won’t any time soon. “We’re not going to see a different chemistry, unless we’re very lucky, for decades.”

Just as recent developments in technology have allowed cars to improve their mileage using traditional engines, the lead-acid battery research is aiming for improved power in a smaller package.

Beyond Lithium-Ion

Lithium-ion supporters, including Boeing Co. (BA), Tesla Motors Co. (TSLA) and General Motors Co. (GM), maker of the Volt, say they can make the batteries safe, and problems with new technologies are to be expected.

GM overcame an early problem when a Volt caught fire during tests run by the U.S. National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, for instance, and after all,

From: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/04/16/cheap-safe-battery-power-cars-years-away/