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New Battery To Yield Big Hybrid Results

CSIRO researchers in Melbourne Australia have developed a new version of lead-acid battery that is cheap, and can store large amounts of energy like the current nickel-metal hydride batteries used in cars such as the Toyota Prius.

The current battery set-up works better than lead-acid because lead-acid batteries form corrosive deposits when they are charged and used repeatedly over a short period of time, and they lose their long life of power, making them break-down in a sense.

The researchers have combined a lead-acid battery with a capacitor to reduce the corrosion on the batteries metal plates.  Making the lead-acid batteries last as long as nivkel-metal hydrid ones.

"By acting as a buffer during charging and discharging, the capacitor boosts the battery's life to match that of NiMH batteries," The company reported.

The new battery is said to boost power output by fifty percent ad last four times as long as a standard lead-acid bettery.  A test vehicle has drivin more than 185,000 km's  with the prototype batteries installed. 

The cost of the battery is projected to be a third of the current battery costs in current hybrid auto's.  The battery is slated for production in 2009 in the US.

Toyota’s Bringing Battery Production State-side

Toyota says it will eventually manufacture it's hybrid batteries in North America

The Toyota prius's main stumbling block as a profitable automobile, is the cost of the battery packs used to give it such great fuel economy. To counter-act this, Toyota Plans to eventually bring production of the hybrid battery packs into north america.

Toyota plans to bring the profit margin of the Prius closer to that of a non-hybrid Toyota Corolla sedan.  This is just one of the cost cutting measures they plan to put into place to acheive this.

On the other hand, Chevrolet and it's Chevy Volt electric car, states that they plan on losing money initially with each hybrid vehicle they sell, because of the high cost of the battery packs.  Toyota is smart enough to combat this by bringing the production into North America where the majority of the cars are being sold.

On a final note, Toyota has also announced that it will be unveiling a dedicated hybrid vehicle for it's upscale Lexus brand at the Detroit Auto Show in January.