On 2010-10-29, Jim Yanik > wrote:
> Dave Head > wrote in
> :
>
>> http://www.caradvice.com.au/89483/au...e-sets-600km-s
>> ingle-charge-record/
>>
>> Maybe, if it doesn't cost a million dollars. These guys have run a
>> car for about 400 miles on a single battery charge at around 70 - 80
>> mph. That's awesome if true. It could be America's way out of buying
>> foreign oil, and greatly reducing ur operating costs.
>>
>> My Subaru WRX gets 25 mpg on a typical long trip. A Chevy Volt goes
>> 40 miles on a 10 KwH charge. Around here, 10 KwH costs 62 1/2 cents.
>> The WRX takes premium and costs about $4.72 to go 40 miles. Big
>> difference. Maybe we have cheap transportation again? CAFE
>> standards? Unncessary. And we have absolutely oceans of domestic
>> natural gas to build clean power generation for these cars.
>>
>> Just hope its real.
>>
>
> go to Wiki and read about NiMH batteries;there's a section in there about
> NiMH for autos,and how the car companies blocked it's use.

Since I bothered to find the reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_...MH_batter ies

There's one of the real purposes of patents and other intellectual
property laws and government granted monopolies of intellectual property
(patents). Not to mention one of the fruits of corporatism. This
effectively gets ideas locked up in the dysfunction of a single company
or small group there of.

The wiki article paints a picture that GM and later Texaco intentionally
killed and locked up the technology. That picture seems rather
simplistic. Being in product development I've seen and been in the
internal battles between those who want to innovate and those who want
to keep everything the same. The strength of the later grows with the
size of the company and the more radically different the technology is
from their existing product line.

It sounds as if the forces of 'no change' won the war but I doubt
the purchases were made to close off the technology. Those purchases
were likely victories by the people who wanted to try something
different. The problem is that one of the key arguments of doing
something different is to get there before someone else does. That it is
better for your own new business to hurt your present one than somebody
else's new business. Then some 'no change' person gets deivious enough
to let the innovative people move forward, then sabotege it and close it
all down. Internal corporate politics at its finest.

Also keep in mind the control freak nature of many corporate executives.
That makes veto power etc and so forth unremarkable. It would have been
little different for some new technology to extract 5% more gasoline
from a barrel of oil.