I hope Phoenix has some major funding behind it. I'd hate to see the Altair battery limited to a company that isn't able to use it to the max.

"If a pack costs $75000"
It most likely does not, see the comments on the earlier post. The actual price ( not cost which is entirely different beast ) was claimed by someone to be $14 000 per battery pack.
The whole previous deal was $750 000 but what part of it was batteries and which parts were one-time R&D costs were not disclosed.

I don't want to be too much of a geek, but I get excited just reading this. Is this not the holy grail of transportation? A battery pack that can go 135 miles (or 250 with the larger one), up to 100 mph and recharge in 10 minutes, TEN minutes? That's fantastic! How can anyone possibly be excited about GM's new car with a big 40 mile range when we have these guys that can do 250? And then recharge in TEN minutes! It's just like having a gas vehicle. I'm actually surprized there isn't a lot more fan fare about this since it seems like these guys have broken down the technical barrier that we've been striving for for decades.

Please don't form strong opinions about things you don't understand. The $750,000 payment was for the initial 10 battery packs and payment for the engineering and prototyping services provided by AltairNano to engineer the battery packs for the cars Phonix Motors chose to use for the electric SUT/SUVs.
It should be obvious to even the brain damaged that a $75,000 battery pack cannot be installed into a vehicle that sells for $45,000.

Kent, aren't they only able to sell them for $45k because of the ZEV credits? I read somewhere that the true cost is much greater than $45k.

The numbers in this statement seem to contradict information that was supposedly from the horses mouth, stating that the batteries were around $14,000 each. 42,000,000 for 500 batteries doesn't look like $14,000 each to me. If this is the case, they are paying massive premium for exclusivity.

Note that the exclusivity is limited to BEVs only. None of the major car manufacturers seem even remotely interested in producing BEVs. Even their PHEVs are at least a couple of years away and Altair can still go after that market.

Could be BS or could be savvy IP protection. As noted earlier Altair announced a supplies agreement with Alcoa Alcoa is a giant mining and manufacturing op with deep pockets and a leg up on digging lithium out of the ground.

Ed Begley shot video driving the Phoenix around at a recent auto show and the thing worked. The video shows the NanoSafe batteries installed. Perhaps it's all hype - in which case the clanging of cell doors would ring loud for the highly exposed principles. Or it might just be smart to hang on to a technology that could be quickly 'disappeared' in the wrong hands.

Bulk buys of current li-ions for consumer can be had for $500 /kwh, in case of 35KwH pack its around $17500. By the descriptions Altair has changed only cathode materials in li-ion chemistry, and also supplies their KwHs in bigger packages than small li-ion cells of today. $14 000 for 35KwH in bulk sounds remotely plausible.
We will never know though, before something will be available for consumer.
BTW, A123 is 15-minute rechargeable too and widely available, as tested and confirmed extensively by RC hobbyists. Its just that they dont have larger cells suitable for automotive apps yet and 10-kwh range pack means complex battery management systems and putting together hundreds of cells.

On an Interview with autobloggreen, a GM offical said they never even heard of Altair, which leds me to think that Altair never even bothered approaching GM.

I wouldn't get so hung up on present costs. Bottom line is that in mass production once R&D is paid the costs will be much more reasonable. The thing here is that they are actually able to do this with a battery. This is well beyond anything to date that I know of. It may take an expensive charger but that's no big deal for a fill station, maybe just a home where charging overnight is no big deal. The only time you need a fill station is when travelling cross country. It may all be BS but with this much publicity I really doubt it.

I would like to make an interesting suggestion...

In a prior post regarding Altair Nano's batteries, the life expectancy was worked out:

"10,000 deep cycles were conducted... batteries retained 85% capacity..." or something like that was the press release. The estimated life expectancy range worked out to 1.5 million miles. In other words, more than most people would drive in their lives.

Perhaps one could finance these batteries over a VERY LONG period of time. Like 30 years. That's only $1k a year before interest, which is workable. Interest could be kept to a minimum seeing that the batteries would be the collateral which the bank could easily reclaim and sell.

One could move the batteries from one vehicle to next. To do this, however, some sort of standardized sizing would have to be conceived, such as ATX for computers. Good luck with that one...

John,

If you factor in future V2G usage, the math works even better given the larger BEV batteries. I believe the next logical step after PHEV’s will be intelligent V2G usage.