It's good that the battery works. Now it just needs to be affordable and available.

That tends to be where it falls apart

Jeez, everyone's a critic!

I'd rather see them do a good job, make sure they understand performance and life over time, then move forward. There's a lot of dead companies who didn't do a good enough job on their R&D and got hammered by surprises down the road.

Watch for Dennis to move his times down very quickly...

Well I can certainly understand the skepticism, the "ultimate" battery has been promised for years but never really delivered. I think there are a number of promising candidates out there right now, but none of them do me any good until I can buy them at an affordable price point. That day may or may not come.

And once the oil crash hits bigtime, new battery technology will likely stall. So it has to happen now or never.

How do you figure?

I think the dependence of modern technology on oil is not fully appreciated. I'm not saying it's impossible to do it. But I think peak oil will cause massive disruptions to large scale manufacturing and distribution of products. The world will become so busy with dealing with the fallout of these problems (in order to keep the flow of essential goods and services going) that it could set back pending technologies like this by many years.

The best hope of any new technology making a positive contribution is for it to take advantage of the remaining days of energy surplus while it can.

I think it's a fine line that has to be tread. Oil prices have to get high enough to encourage investment in better technology but not too high to make it prohibitively expensive to implement. May not be possible.

I think you're going a bit far by saying that modern technology is dependent on oil. A significant portion of our economy depends on oil in order to part people from money, but industry is very efficient at moving goods and only requires a relatively small portion of world liquid hydrocarbon production, and this can even drop in some cases. Not to say that everything is going to be peachy keen, it may or may not be, but the production and distribution of necessary goods isn't going to result in massive disruptions IMO.

However, expensive oil makes transportation and production more expensive across the board, which means all goods produced become more expensive and moving those goods costs more. I'd bet every part of everything that is manufactured today is in some way connected to the price of oil, from the smallest plastic part to each drop of lubricating oil for machinery. It's a snowball effect which could make products unprofitable and therefore they won't be developed. Living expenses go up as well so there is less and less disposable income which stifles the whole economy and reduces capital for investment in newer technology.

Phoenix test drive video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuhbfSfCzXs&NR=1

JRP3, consumer consumption will be cut out far sooner than industrial consumption due to inflated use, and while certain products will become less profitable and/or unprofitable, batteries suitable for use in personal transportation won't given the ratio of consumer use of oil for personal transportation compared to oil for transportation of goods. Thanks about this, we have a personal vehicle fleet on average that gets ~15mpg, but fully loaded semis that weigh ~10 times more get only a third or half of that, and smaller work vehicles like box trucks for transportation/towing get ~15mpg and are ~three times the size of the average vehicle in the states. Oil prices can't get high enough to significantly impact necessary goods because the consumer sector wastes so much of it. Maybe if we were all jetting around in 50mpg vehicles and still using as much as we did now, this could be a problem, but we have a lot of fat to cut out in personal transportation. Rightfully so too, since using as much oil as we have now would've been impossible using fairly efficient vehicles. If we were to have used them in the past, oil would've been replaced as a commodity before we could use half of what we've used so far.

Well you may be right but I still see it differently. You are only talking about transportation costs, I'm talking about everything from transportation of materials and finished products, maintenance costs, energy costs, raw material costs, heating and cooling costs, etc. coupled with a shrinking, possibly collapsing, economy. You could have the best battery in the world but if it costs more to make than anyone can afford to pay you won't sell a single one. I hope that's not the way it happens but I see it as a possibility.

I'd like to state that the "durability cycle" of these batteries have yet to be verified by a 3rd party. So until that happens I'm going to assume these batteries are no more special then regular ones. As for the "fast charge" claim that has been demonstrated by Toshiba already so I'm convinced on that angle....but the "10,000 durability cycle" claim has yet to be verified. Personally I'm "skeptical".

http://www.altairnano.com/markets_energy_systems.html
---> highly suspicious claim IMHO.

lets do some *back of the envelope calculations*
Suppose you drove and recharged the batteris in an EV car everyday. ("deep" discharge/recharge) There are 365 days in a year assume a 15,000 durability cycle.
15,000 / 365 == 41 years

But the stats get even more *suspicious*
With a 120 mile range you'd only need to recharge once every 2 days or perhaps 3. Personally for me it would definitely be 3 days.
41 x 2 == 82 years
41 x 3 == 123 years battery life!
the battery performance seems a bit "sexed up" if you ask me

I think you're referring to the economics side of oil as a commodity, which is fairly independent of physical constraints IMO. We're having a recession and possibly worse because some nitwits decided to make $$$ conning other nitwits in the housing/lending market. As far as I'm concerned a butterfly farting in China could destabilize the world economy and cause what you're talking about, so it's kind of a moot point, at least from the point of view of oil use.