Toyota Motor Corp., Daimler AG and Bayerische Motoren Werke AG are turning to laptops for a cheaper way to power their electric cars -- and their sales.
Automakers
are testing packs of lithium-ion batteries assembled by Silicon Valley
startup Tesla Motors Inc. costing less than bigger, car-only batteries
favored by General Motors Co.,
lexia Nissan Motor Co. and Mitsubishi Motors
Corp. A pack of 6,831 cylinder-shaped cells made by Panasonic Corp.
powers Tesla's $109,000 Roadster sports car for up to 245 miles per
charge.
The car industry will help lithium-ion battery makers more than
triple sales to 5 trillion yen ($60 billion) in a decade from 1.5
trillion yen in the year ending in March, according to Sanyo Electric Co., the world's biggest maker of the ds708 scanner
batteries. Rechargeable consumer-electronics batteries benefit from an
economy of scale that may help cut manufacturing costs and sticker
prices in the nascent electric-car industry, said Koji Endo, a Tokyo-based analyst at Advanced Research Japan.
"It may lead to the total component cost of an electric car getting lower than that of a gasoline car," Endo said. "As the cost lowers, there'll be more likelihood that retail prices of electric cars will drop."
‘Full-Line Maker'lexia
Factories making small cells are running
at high capacity, Eberhard said. That also benefits EV makers who don't
have the resources to develop their own batteries, said Menahem
Anderman, president of Advanced Automotive Batteries, a consulting firm
in Oregon House, California.
GM partners with
digimaster 3 South Korea's LG Chem Ltd. for the Volt pack, and
Nissan partners with NEC Corp., Japan's biggest personal-computer maker,
for the Leaf.
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