Nissan Motor Company (Nasdaq: NSANY) recently previewed its latest all-electric plug-in car, an electrified version of the “Cube”, a popular model that Nissan sells in Japan, modified to carry three lithium ion batteries under the floor and an 80kW motor and inverter. The news of this event was carried widely by many news sources but universally, the stories all focused on Nissan and the car it was unveiling and largely relegated the real news to a paragraph. Still, we were duly impressed by the real news and how it will effect alternative energy stocks in general and lithium-ion stocks specifically. The real news, mentioned in the same articles, is about an advancement by Nissan in their battery technology.
Nissan's "Cube" Electric Vehicle
We are convinced, however, this is actually the meat of the story so we will to cover it here. The latest version of Nissan’s plug-in electric car features a lithium-ion battery, manufactured by Automotive Energy Supply Corp. (AESC), with twice the capacity of Nissan’s previous battery yet it only occupies 75% of the space.
In an industry that is on the verge of transitioning from petroleum to electric or hybrid power, and where the battery is currently the weakest link, this is incredible news. In the recent CNBC-TV show “Saving GM,” engineers acknowledged that they were ready with their new plug-in Chevy Volt except for the battery yet had confidence that technology would advance sufficiently in the next year and a half to put the Volt in showrooms across America on time.
Batteries used in Nissan prototypes between around 1995 and 2002 were cylindrical, but that meant the entire cell would sometimes need to be redesigned if engineers needed to make the batteries just a few millimeters thinner. In order to accelerate the progress, in April 2007 Nissan announced that they were joining forces with NEC and their affiliated company, NEC Tokin and forming a joint venture company for the specific purpose of advancing the battery-side technology for their future plug-in cars.
AESC Lithium-ion Battery
The joint venture dubbed “Automotive Energy Supply Corp.” launched operations in May 2008 with a commitment from Nissan of $110.8 million over the next three years. The result, today’s next generation lithium ion battery, is the first major advancement produced by AESC but clearly reminds the world that this technology is still at the stage where very significant progress can be made in a very short period of time.
Like many technologies, early advancements can be grand in scale while later refinements tend to add less to performance. At some point in the future, it may be that gaining another 5% capacity while maintaining the size will be considered significant but if AESC can double capacity and, at the same time shrink the size of a battery by 25%, then this tells us that the technology has a long way to go and suggests great promise for the future of the industry.
An additional advantage of the new generation battery is that the group is experimenting with laminated cells that are stacked on top of each other inside batteries. If the dimensions of the battery need to be changed its easy to add or remove a few of the cells, which are just a few millimeters thick. The laminated batteries also run cooler so they are much less likely to overheat.
Apparently, reports that GM engineers expressed confidence that the lithium-ion battery technology would catch up with the rest of their development in time for a model year 2010 introduction of the Volt are greatly clarified given this latest announcement.
PSI - The New Alternative Energy
So, regardless of how exciting it was to see Nissan officially coming to the party with the preview of their latest EV, for us, the true excitement lies in the sub-plot of how lithium-ion technology now seems to be on the fast track with Nissan and AESC taking the stage as perhaps the front runners in advancing this technology to the point where, within the next few years, standard sized vehicles like a Toyota Camry or a Ford Fusion can drive 150 miles on a single charge at freeway speeds. If the Chinese and Arabs haven’t already purchased controlling interest in America by that time, we should be in pretty good stead. In the interim, I suggest we all check the inflation of our tires.
