Great development. So may be the ultra-light Prius at 100 mpg, weighing in at 430 kg with a 500-cc engine will have a much better chance of becoming a reality!

High-strength metals with extremely fine grains tend to be quite brittle. Great care is required for applications in which they will be exposed to impact and/or cyclic loads. Depending on the metal used, the problem can be substantially worse at low temperatures. Note that nickel is an expensive metal used in e.g. many stainless steels and, NiMH batteries for HEVs.

German company Alphaform AG recently contributed an article on applications for metalcoated polymer components in the automotive industry to the MTZ/ATZ special issue Automotive Engineering Partners (June 2007, in German only; Vieweg Publishers). They use copper and nickel to coat the thermoset polymer compound Prototool from DSM Somos. Applications focus on rapid prototyping, replacing more expensive carbon fiber parts. The company also sees applications for high-quality interior parts and decorative exterior panels for pre-production and small-scale production runs of luxury vehicles.

"I remember the big deal about how hybrids can hurt rescue workers, and when the first hybrid comes with lithium batteries, the exploding laptop batteries will be front and center again."

Explosions/thermal runaway problems for Li-Ion batteries have been completely mitigated by improvements in cell construction and chemistry. Look up firms like Valence, EnerDel, A123, CPI, etc, for details.

I'd like to see a comparison to existing materials; carbon fiber, Ti, Al alloys, High strength steels, etc, including cost. It does seem like a great new technology with some significant promise.

@ Jcwinnie -

carbon fiber is what is normally used to today to rapidly prototype a new model during development to check proportions, joins, access during manufacturing etc. This is true even for those that contain no carbon fiber parts in the production version.

In an ideal world, all of this could be done virtually. Afaik, Fiat actually pulled that off for the new Bravo but it's not yet the norm.

roger pham;

I agree with you. Less weight + lower drag design would contribute to more mpg and more electric mode range for PHEVs and BEVs. Battery packs (and on board generator for PHEVs) could be smaller and cheaper. Who will do it?

There are no defendable reasons to drive around in 10-15 mpg, 4000+ lbs bricks.

More electrified sub-units such as, brakes, steering, HVAC, pumps etc could also contribute to lower total weight. Thin 6 to 8 sq meter rooftop PV could supply free power (most of the time) for such sub-units.

@ Roger:

Why do you want to know how much energy the car body can store? So you know just how powerful the arc will be when you crash the damn thing into something, explosively discharging your ad hoc capacitor into everything within a 30 foot radius?

This is why I never read the comments at GCC. Because it seems like it devolves into utterly impractical silliness like integrating the capacitors into the body of the car itself. That is, when everybody isn't pooh-poohing a technology they know nothing about on theoretical grounds only - Rafael, I'm looking straight at you.