[ausev] anyone heard of these guys?

[Chris Robison]

On Thu, 2007-12-13 at 16:37 -0600, Brian Lasseter wrote:

> I also agree to your $164 price for the T145.  I was pulling the $100
> price from Uve's page, that was my bad.

Unfortunately battery prices are rising rapidly these days, so it's hard
to keep up. Any time I ask for a quote, I get asked what the time frame
is when I'll be getting them. No one wants to make an estimate for too
long. The Comal guy is nice enough to warn you of an expected price
hike.

What's really weird is this, which came up on the EVDL recently:

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/fds/hi/business/market_data/commodities/11641/default.stm

Has anyone seen this?  Check the drop box to see the 3-month time
window. Prices for lead have been *falling* since mid-October! Maybe
it's just a momentary aberration, but what gives?


> > "Monetary" energy density:  :o)  (excluding one-time costs)
> > T145: $.157/Wh ($164/batt)
> > LifeBatt: 1.25Wh/$
> > ---
> > Lead is 10x to as little as 5x more expensive, depending on price of
> > lead battery
> 
> While your Specific energy and Volumetric energy density numbers I
> concur with, The "Monetary" energy density does not seem to correlate
> with the prices on their web page:
> http://www.lifebatt.com/LiFeBATT%20Web_4.html
> 
> They want $440 per 8 cells ordered, 8 cells weighs 2.872kg, that's
> $153.20/kg of batteries.  Dividing $153.20/kg by 80Wh/kg gives you
> $1.915/Wh for the raw cells, or 12x the cost of the T145 at $.157/Wh.

Ah? Ah? Hmmm? *BZZZT!* No! Still an idiot. <sigh>  (I mean, mistakes are
mistakes, but ouch, *how* did I miss that page? It was *right there* in
the menu!) Sorry guys, my bad on that one. And another mistake in units
too, below...

I am not following your calculations involving weight, and I may not
have communicated what I meant properly. By "monetary energy density" I
was trying to be humorous and just meant how many watt hours they're
"fitting into" a dollar. So I calculated in simple terms of dollars per
watt hour, not incorporating any other measure. 

According to LifeBatt, 8 cells, containing 32Wh apiece gives you 256
total Wh in the set. And they're selling those 256 total watt hours for
$440. That works out to $1.72/Wh retail. This is not so high that I
doubt its veracity, but in my pretty inexperienced opinion it is an
unreasonably high price to pay even for small quantity retail. Hopefully
they have more sensible dealer prices, though they'd have to come down a
lot from that number to be in the running, as you pointed further below
in your post.

I've been quoted as low as 75 cents per watt hour (unconfirmed estimate
from manufacturer) for decent cells as a dealer price, and most are
above that.

> If you want the battery management system, which is required to get
> the 2 year warranty, then it's $2.350/Wh for the raw cells, or 15x the
> cost of the T145 at $.157/Wh.  This, of course, does not even include
> the cost of making their cells into a car battery.

Configured with a BMS (but supply your own charger), LifeBatt is asking
$100 more for a circuit that only watches over 8 cells. I'm pretty
ignorant on this topic, but with what little I know it seems
unnecessarily excessive to me. It raises the price to $2.10/Wh. Soon
I'll be getting good competitive figures on managed modules and at least
in the near term I'll be able to say to some extent how reasonable that
is.


> Maybe in the quantities that you would need for an electric vehicle
> you could get LifeBatt down to 1.25Wh/$.

I mixed up my units and confused things, though I think you may have
noticed the error. I should have quoted both batteries in terms of
dollars per watt hour to keep it consistent. So again the typical
lithium battery wholesale I was talking about was $.80/Wh, I've seen as
low as $.75/Wh, and the wholesale on the LifeBatts is currently unknown
but retail is $1.72/Wh. I wouldn't even try to form comparisons on this
price. It's way above what you should expect to pay.

And of course, energy isn't the only measure of battery value, there's
also those three varieties of power density as well. Maybe less
important for those who aren't interested in high performance
applications, but important to me  :o)

  --chris



P.S. Writing that previous post was actually a bit complicated; maybe it
excuses my missing that price page somewhat (?). (Non-nerds may want to
skip the rest. I think it's funny, but I'm probably wrong.) I was adding
to it little by little during the day yesterday whenever I had a minute
(while waiting for programs to compile, etc) over the span of about 4
hours. When I was *almost* done and was proofreading to make sure I
hadn't gotten too inconsistent from intermittent writing, my email
program got stuck in a loop and froze, hard disk in a nonstop frenzy. I
noticed it was continuing to eat memory, and in about 30 minutes as I
waited to see if it would come back, it ate up about 1.8GB of RAM,
mostly swap space. Being a good little Linux geek, I opened gdb (command
line debugger), attached to the process, interrupted it and forced a
coredump (writing contents of RAM to disk). Which failed, because I
didn't have enough space in the swap partition left to process the dump.
So I created a temporary swap file, tried again, and then spent a couple
hours sifting through the segmented and scattered contents of the mail
program's digital vomit puddle, finding relevant chunks and nuggets and
eventually putting the email back together. I could have retyped it in
less time, but there was an ego thing involved.