Enter Aquion Energy, a new battery company that uses nontoxic aqueous hybrid ion (AHI) chemistry to produce large-scale battery storage for renewable energy.
Johnson Controls serves this market by providing a variety of automotive batteries like lead-acid for traditional gasoline-powered vehicles, AGM (Absorbent Glass Mat) for start-stop vehicles and Li-ion for hybrid and electric vehicles.
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Business Daily said Thursday the electronic and industrial giant planned to raise production capacity of lithium-ion batteries for hybrid cars seventyfold to 700, 000 units by 2015.
Automakers are scrambling to get lithium ion batteries into hybrid vehicles, and they are hoping these batteries will make plug-in hybrids and all-electric vehicles possible soon, too.
Johnson Controls is also increasing its production capacity of advanced battery types like Absorbent Glass Mat that power start-stop vehicles and Li-ion that power hybrid and electric vehicles.
Adding a plug and a more powerful lithium-ion battery to a hybrid can give that sprinter a bit more stamina: It can travel at higher speeds up to 10 miles or so on electric power before the gasoline engine kicks in.
Only 11% of mild hybrid EVs in 2010 used Li-ion but predictions double that percentage come 2017.
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In other words, Li-ion is slowly taking over the hybrid market as NiMH goes the way of the dodo.
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As a continued indication of a trend away from NiMH, full hybrid EVs will bump from 0% Li-ion-powered to 17% over the same interval.
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Johnson Controls is positioning itself to be a technology leader in hybrid car batteries as the industry shifts to lithium ion batteries from nickel metal hydride batteries used in today's hybrids.
Toyota, the leader in conventional hybrid vehicles, has been at work on lithium-ion batteries longer than GM.
It has a 2-liter DOHC 16V Duratec engine and a 7.6kWh Advanced Lithium Ion battery (the regular C-MAX hybrid uses a 1.4kWh battery instead) that unfortunately takes up quite a bit of room in the trunk.
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The Karma Sedan is a series Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) powered by a lithium-ion battery and an efficient 2.0-liter range-extending gasoline engine.
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Also, earlier this month, GM awarded contracts for undisclosed sums to Johnson Controls and Cobasys to develop Li-ion batteries for its upcoming Saturn Vue Green Line hybrid.
Ford calls C-MAX Energi a "hybrid-plus" because it not only operates just like C-MAX Hybrid, but also features an external charge port and larger lithium-ion battery pack so owners can plug in the vehicles to fully charge the battery using either a standard 120-volt outlet or the available 240-volt charge station.
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The contract will fund development of a lower-cost lithium-ion phosphate battery technology with enhanced power, lifetime and durability for hybrid-electric vehicle applications.
Toyota's top hybrid engineers say they are all for plug-ins, but they don't think the lithium-ion batteries they depend on will be ready to meet their stringent quality standards for several years. (They cannot resist a polite titter about spontaneously combusting laptop batteries.) Toyota is therefore likely to stick with the heavy and range-limited nickel-metal hydride battery for the third-generation Prius, due in 2009.
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