Thursday, May 27, 2010

Roughing in the Scenery in the EV Battery Landscape

Another piece of the puzzle is falling into place in the EV battery landscape.

This week, Canada's Magna announced they are in the process of scouting sites for two new lithium ion battery factories, one to be located in North America, the other in Europe. The amount of investment is between $400 million and $600-million and production of batteries could begin in 2013, Siegfried Wolf, Magna’s co-chief executive officer, said Tuesday.

This follows last October's news that Bollore Group, of France, is building a  $120 million EV battery factory  in Boucherville near Montreal. and is planning on further expansion in France in the near future. Bollore will be producing proprietary lithium-metal-polymer batteries.

A gaping hole in the EV battery/storage cell landscape continues to be the spot reserved for, but as yet unoccupied by, the Eestor storage unit, whose status for the time being is trending to vaporware. An April 22 entry on the GM-Volt blog or whatever it is reveals nothing new from the Eestor side of things although did include this interesting but not promising tidbit: High level GM sources have just recently told GM-Volt they tried in earnest to do some fact finding discussion with EEStor but “never got anything substantive from them.”

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"High level GM sources have just recently told GM-Volt they tried in earnest to do some fact finding discussion with EEStor but “never got anything substantive from them.”

Well, giving the above quote the most positive spin (accepting that there are numerous possible interpretations, almost all of them negative) I'd say that was an indication that Dick Weir takes his relationship with Clifford and his agreement with Zenn seriously. Why should GM try to muscle in and why should GM expect anything other than disdain, given that it was GM who "killed the electric car"?

Offroad Artist said...

No doubt that would be a plausible explanation.