Man, Tesla's been busy today -- in addition to the announcement of the Model S and Elon Musk's promise of a sub-$30K electric car in four years, word on the street is that the company's inked a deal with Daimler AG to supply it with lithium-ion batteries for upcoming electric cars. Daimler's CEO has said the company was open to leasing battery tech to get out an electric Smart by 2010 and it's rumored that the German marque is looking to ditch gas entirely by 2015, so going to Tesla, which has been working on battery tech for some time, isn't a totally out there proposition. Just a rumor for now -- given Tesla's generally-prickly relationships with others, we'd wait for an official announcement before getting too excited about a Roadster-powered SLR, but it's certainly intriguing.

Nikkei's reporting that Hitachi Maxell, in association with Nagasaki University, NIAIST, and Fuji Heavy Industries, has developed a new kind of lithium ion battery that can supposedly store 20 times the power, but is also cheap and easily mass produced. Apparently this new kind of battery drops cobalt, an expensive staple of the traditional Li-ion recipe, instead making use of nano-infused lithium with manganese. You know how it goes though -- unrealistic and exponential battery developments are all well and good, but until we see it productized, we're not exactly liable to buy into the hype. [Warning: subscription req'd]

It's hardly the only one working on making lithium-ion batteries a little less likely to blow up in your face, but the prolific folks at Fraunhofer Institute seem to think that they've come up with a solid contender for your future laptop or cellphone, and they're now set to take the wraps off it at the Hannover Messe conference later this month. The key to their solution, it seems, is the use of a non-flammable polymer electrolyte instead of the liquid electrolyte now commonly used in lithium-ion batteries. While that switch cuts down on the explosiveness, it also introduced a fair number of challenges, not the least of which is the fact that polymer becomes less conductive as it gets more solid. Fraunhofer's apparently made some significant progress on that front, however, and while they're still not completely satisfied with the conductivity, they say the batteries could be ready for commercial use in three to five years. They also, not surprisingly, see no end to the uses for 'em, saying that they could not only wind up in laptops and cellphones, but power tools, lawnmowers, and potentially even cars.

[Thanks, Mademoiselle Y]

Although's Moore's Law continues to race along, battery tech hasn't nearly kept up pace -- so we're excited by developments like the one just announced by Argonne National Labs, which has managed to increase Li-on capacity by 30 percent while making the batteries safer and longer-lasting. The secret ingredients in Argonne's new juice box are a new composite battery material that's partially electrically inactive and manganese oxide-based electrodes in place of the traditional cobalt oxide. Argonne says it's already licensed the tech to Japanese manufacturer Toda Kogyo, which has the capability to produce 30 million laptop batteries a year, but the lab is still working on improving charging rates -- while it's adequate for laptops and cellphones, the battery will need to discharge at least three times faster to work in a car. No word on when we might see these start shipping, but you can bet "manganese battery" is being added to our dream machine spec list right... now.

[Via ExtremeTech]

Surely you remember the fear and lawsuits resulting from the 06/07 Lithium-battery fiasco? Who could forget. That's why Toshiba's going out of its way to assure us that their new "Super Li-ion" batteries (SCiBs) revealed yesterday will not result in an equally super meltdown. The new SCiBs feature a high flash point and separator with high heat resistance. As such, they are far less likely to suffer a thermal runaway resulting from a short-circuit. Don't believe us though, check the pneumatic, crush-test from Tosh after the break. We've even thrown in the ol' exploding laptop video for comparison. Ah, those were the days.

It looks like those waiting for the next generation Prius to hit the road are going to have to hold out a little bit longer. Toyota announced this week that it would be delaying plans to bring its plug-in, lithium-ion-based model to market until 2011, as opposed to 2008, due to safety concerns over the company's chosen battery. In very related news, GM has struck a deal with Massachusetts-based battery developer A123 Systems to produce flat lithium-ion batteries for use in upcoming plug-in electric vehicles, such as the Chevy Volt. With regards to whether Toyota's setback could give GM an edge in the electric car game, Vice Chairman Bob Lutz said, "I think that our No. 1 competitor has some problems with their technology, and I do think that it very definitely opens a window of opportunity for us to be first to market with a genuine plug-in hybrid," which sounds like fightin' words, if you ask us.

Read -- Toyota delays next-gen lithium-ion Prius
Read -- GM says it could lead electric car race

We've been overdue for a lithium-ion successor since forever, and we can't deny the urgency has been bumped a notch by the recent spat of battery explosions. Of course, many have pretended to the throne, but newcomer Zinc Matrix Power thinks their new silver-zinc battery packs really have a shot. They just unveiled the tech at the Intel Developers Forum, and they claim their batteries are safer, longer lasting and more environmentally friendly than those lithium-ion clunkers. As much as we treasure our lap in an intact form -- which silver-zinc provides for due to a safer "inherent chemistry" of silver, zinc and water -- we're especially happy to hear of the "significant" performance gains over lithium-ion, because if there's anything we hate worse than shrapnel in the upper thigh, it's running out of battery mid-way through a high-scoring game of Snood on a cross-country flight. We suppose easy recycling wouldn't suck either. Zinc Matrix says they'll have the new power cells in the hands of device manufacturers for evaluation in early '07, so hopefully we won't have too long of a wait.

[Via Tech Digest]

It's hard to imagine a world where a few batteries strapped together is more dangerous than an internal combustion engine, but with the recent publicity exploding laptop batteries have been getting, lithium-ion-based electric cars aren't looking so much like the "safe alternative" anymore. According to U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission, more than 300 cell phone and laptops batteries overheated or caught fire from 2003 to 2005, with plenty of personal injury thrown into the mix. Car battery packs just compound the problem. That new Tesla roadster, for instance, packs in nearly 7,000 batteries behind the passenger compartment. Tesla's CEO says they've done much more than the average consumer electronics manufacturer to keep their system safe, including liquid cooling, overcharge protection, three layers of fuses, and sensors to automatically disconnect the batteries in case of high-temperatures or if the car rashes. The individual batteries are also each protected in their own steel case to isolate them from the other ticking time-bombs power units. Unfortunately, even with the best engineered safety precautions, an accidentally faulty manufacture is out of the designer's hands, and if one batter explodes violently enough to effect neighboring cells and start a chain reaction. Even with a failure rate of one in ten million, the odds are still pretty high for failure with 7,000 batteries in every car. As per usual, we will attempt to avoid reality, glue our cellphone to our skull, keep our MacBook in our lap, and drag race our Tesla roadster like there's no tomorrow. 'Cause just like Alphaville said -- do you really want to live forever?

With laptops blowing up left and right, it's no surprise that the same lithium-ion battery technology has been slow to take off in larger applications, like cars, where the danger of spontaneous combustion is even more serious. But as CNET reports, at least one company says they've managed to create a lithium-ion car battery that's safe enough to power your ride. Valence Technology's U-Charge Power System keeps the fireworks in check by using a metal phosphate cathode instead of the cobalt oxide cathode commonly used in lithium-ion batteries. The downside to that choice is that the battery can only store about 75% of the power of traditional batteries, but then again, it won't catch on fire. While the batteries have so far only been put to use in wheelchairs, scooters and hybrid vehicles, the company says that the technology could eventually be adapted for use in laptops -- though we're sure not everyone's gonna be willing to take a performance hit just for a bit more peace of mind.

It looks like laptop batteries are fast gaining on cellphones as the technology most likely to kill you, or at least give you a nasty, potentially embarrassing burn. Hot on the heels of Dell investigating its own case of spontaneous combustion, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is now getting in on the act, looking into the possibility that laptop batteries may have started a fire on a UPS cargo plane that was forced to make an emergency landing last February. The plane's three crew members managed to escape with only minor injuries, but the fire ultimately destroyed the plane and most of the cargo on board. While the NTSB investigation hasn't pinned the blame on the batteries just yet, the FAA's has Harry Webster has testified that lithium-ion batteries can vent flammable liquid and "pose a risk to the cargo compartment." We've already seen warnings not to use your laptop on your lap -- think warnings not to travel with them are far behind?

We've seen hybrid batteries, hairy capacitors, and ultracapacitors, but considering how much we depend on batteries, we're not ones to turn up our noses at yet another new battery development. This latest one comes from researchers in France, who have turned to nanotechnology to create lithium-ion battery electrodes that have several times the energy capacity of traditional electrodes, meaning that batteries could either be significantly smaller or remain the same size and squeeze a whole lot more juice out of a single charge. Of course, one of the many big application for nano batteries is in remote sensors and medical implants, where smaller and longer lasting are definitely better. Which is probably why those smaller-scaled applications are the first we're likely to see, as larger electrodes are currently far less efficient than small ones. Thankfully the researchers at hand believe the technology could eventually be used to power electric and hybrid vehicles, which is always the dream, right?

[Via MobileMag]