The workers were making laptop batteries pinkie-size cylinders, to be lined up and encased in the familiar plastic brick.
The batteries, lithium iron phosphate (LifePo4), are similar to laptop batteries providing large amounts of power and short recharge times.
Dell, he says, gained a lot of goodwill when it started talking openly about its products' technical problems, such as exploding laptop batteries.
Not surprisingly, you can also expect the battery to come in at a premium price compared to traditional laptop batteries, although the company isn't saying exactly how much more they'll run.
The start-up founded by PayPal founder Elon Musk strung together 6, 831 laptop batteries and designed an elaborate control system meant to ensure the car doesn't burst into flames if one of the batteries fails.
It seems odd: After all the research Toyota Motor and its partner, Panasonic, have done in the area of advanced lithium-ion batteries, the Japanese carmaker decided that maybe Tesla Motors' crude approach--stringing together a bunch of laptop batteries--is the preferred way to power electric vehicles, at least for now.
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.
The digEplayer 5500 has a 7-inch 16:9 widescreen LCD and comes loaded with about 10 movies, a few TV shows, and over 100 songs, which should be more than enough to keep you busy for the duration of your flight, and is probably more than the poor battery can handle (heaven knows our laptop batteries are looking pretty low after just an hour and a half of watching DivX movies).
Consider, for example, the poor souls who design batteries for laptop computers.
In another set of tests last year, the FAA caused lithium batteries in a laptop computer to ignite in the cockpit of a Boeing 737 jet.
Fujitsu is recalling Sony-made batteries from 19 of its laptop models, but no word on exact quantity of laptops.
ENGADGET: Dell recalls 100,000 more batteries while Toshiba and Fujitsu join the fray
One such deft manoeuvre has just been proposed by physicists who have worked out how to recharge the batteries in mobile phones and laptop computers without using power cables.
Forecasts made as recently as three months ago predicted that electric cars would become the leading application for lithium ion batteries by 2015, surpassing laptop PCs and other handheld devices.
The company's also taken the opportunity to add some more specificity to its claims, boasting that the Sonata battery will last the life of your laptop and charge faster than any other batteries on the market, filling up to eighty percent capacity in just half an hour -- not to mention be less likely to explode.
It is widely accepted that all possible power has been squeezed out of lithium ion batteries and alternatives are needed if laptop life is to extend beyond eight hours between recharges.
To meet the need for low weight and high power output, the designers opted for the same lithium ion technology as used in the batteries of most modern smartphones and laptop computers, where the demands are rather similar, but on a much smaller scale.
Toshiba is recalling 840, 000 batteries across a wide swath of their laptop lines, in addition to the 340, 000 they recalled a couple of weeks ago for an unrelated power-loss issue.
ENGADGET: Dell recalls 100,000 more batteries while Toshiba and Fujitsu join the fray
Nereus, on the other hand, uses rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, similar to those used in laptop computers, for power and a single hairs-width fibre optic cables - borrowed from Torpedoes - for control and telemetry.
What they have in common are rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, similar in concept to the ones in laptop computers, only bigger.
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