Henrik: Your math is correct. The individual cell 251 Wh/Kg energy density will most probably drop betwen 200 to 225 Kw/Kg when assembled into larger battery packs. That is still higher than average packs and a good step towards 500 Wh/Kg.

Batteries energy density will reach 500+ Wh/Kg some time during the next decade. Simultaneously, durabilty and life cycles will increase to 4000+ and rate of charge/discharge will also multiply.

Electric vehicles will have e-range of 300 to 500 miles by 2020.

With all the resources being used worldwide for batterry development, many new chemistries and technologies will emerge, making current batteries look rather primitive.

State of the art, post 2020 batteries (with 1000+ Wh/Kg) will put an end to ICE for most vehicles. Electrified vehicles and HVAC will eliminate most oil imports and shortages, reduce pollution emissions and GHG.

ESStor may not have enough time to build and test its ultra capacitor before new ultra batteries come out with better performances. However, ultra capacitors with 1++ million cylcles may find applications in transmission lines leveling, solar and wind power systems, etc.

I'm not sure of the reason for all of the excitement. This is a 6% improvement over a 3yr old battery.
Laptop batteries have been using the 2006 formula for quite awhile:
http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPortal/en_US/catalog.workflow:item.detail?GroupID=38&Code=57Y4536&current-category-id=4364BD0F20B94413B5AD6E684D2848E9&model-number=6458
Tesla could have used the 2006 battery if it had met all of their needs.

The bigger news might be in the safety improvements

Every article about battery development brings out comments from “Eestor nuts”. Would Zillions of dollars be spent on battery and ultra capacitors research and development if the people in the know would believe that Eestor is anything more than vapor ware?

What is the cycle life of this battery? If not any better than ">500" advertised for other panasonic 18650s then I'm not excited. It is nice to see an example of increasing Li Ion energy density though.

ejj,

Please keep your attempts at political humor to yourself.
And oh by the way, Happy Holidays to you too.

If your average trip is only 20 km there is a wasted high capital expense to have a very heavy battery that can give you 100 km. A diesel range extender does not have to be noisy and a turbine could be less noisy and neither would have to be very big. A ZEBRA battery fully packaged has had about 200 watt-hours per kilogram for many years and needs only air blown through it for cooling in any climate, and its automobile life is 10 years and it can be used for UPS or HOME-TO-GRID operation for many more years after that. It uses only a small amount of nickel and cheap aluminum, steel and salt. For many cars a range of 20 km with a range extender would never use the range extender. ..HG..

Why don't they make larger cells?

Why not double the diameter and perhaps height?

Using 8000 of them in a battery pack sounds like a crazy solution to me - if each battery had 8x the capacity, you would only need 1000 which is still a lot, but nothing like 8000 connections (or connection pairs).

Also, how many cycles?

At one level this is great, at another, it suggests that Lion cells are a mature technology and that it is plateauing out.

@mahoni,
They are using this cell size because they could pump it straight into their existing manufacturing line. They stated that their strategy was to get to market with mass production this way and be able to beat everyone else on price in the short term.

This has nothing to do with the technology being plateaued. They are not trying to do anything that will slow them down from this short term goal for this production line. The 18650 is a silly form factor for electric vehicles. It requires huge numbers of interconnects, specialized cooling systems, packaging and overhead for each cell and simply lots of weight for the wiring itself.
It's a simple gamble that they can grab some market share short term.

Of course, they are looking at other technology and larger cells along with everyone else for further down the road.

I wonder why they standardize on the 18650 format except for other applications. It seems like the smart thing to do to offer larger format batteries. We know what happened to the EV-95 NiMH batteries, but there should be no such restrictions here.

Yes, batteries that can be used cheaply in plug-in-hybrid cars can be of benefit. One such battery was invented almost 200 years ago. The lead acid battery. Firefly and others have already shown that the weight and cost per cycle of lead batteries can be vastly improved.

Lithium ion batteries that can take a high performance vehicle on a 300 mile trip is bad engineering and economics for most uses of automobiles.

Import of fuels can be reduced to zero by making methanol produced from coal and waste the standard liquid fuel. Actually n-butanol would be better. Plug-in-hybrid cars could then use these compact low weight liquid fuels for long trips.

Remembering always that humans have over 3000 natural built in potassium nuclear explosions every second, and that radioactivity from nuclear power plants cannot even add a significant increase to this built in radio-activity, nuclear power plants can free up coal and natural gas to be used to power automobiles and planes. Eventually nuclear power plants can use captured CO2 to make into liquid fuels.
..HG..

Unfortunately, there is a huge difference in the application & construction of Li cells.
Nowhere in this article does it say the application is for EVs or HEVs. These NCR18650A cells are "power cells", not energy cells and have an internal resistance of ~60 milliohms which makes them useless for EV applications unless many are paralleled. The high heat loss due to this resistance creates an expensive thermal management issue that has to be financed.