[Sosfbay-discuss] Zenn

[cls]

The big problem with electric cars is still the batteries.
$2000 worth of lead-acid cells every three years for a car
that goes 40 miles on a charge in warm weather.
Ten or twenty times that cost for a car with 200 to 300 mile
range.

Private enterprise hardly ever invents anything really new.
The breakthroughs come from universities and government
"pork barrel" programs.  Once upon a time the Defense
Advanced Projects Agency decided to waste some money on
scalable, fault tolerant computer networking software.
No private, for-profit company would ever have done it
the way they did.  The Internet Protocols entered the
public domain while they were still being developed,
intellectual property of the taxpayers of the United States.

The winning implementation was done by a team at UC Berkeley.
After they kicked AT&T's ass in court for bringing a
bullshit lawsuit to stop them, they gave the technology away.
Their "TCP/IP stack" code was used in products like MS-Windows-95,
SunOS, Mac OS, and Linux-1.0.

We need a similar program for advanced rechargeable
batteries.  It costs a few billion dollars to double the
speed of a high end microprocessor chip, at the same power
consumption, and put the new one into volume production.
Intel does it every couple of years.  Nobody else has the
money.  It might cost twice that much to quadruple the power
density of today's polymer-barrier lithium-ion cells.
If the new technology entered the public domain immediately
so that anybody who wanted to could build a factory to make them,
it might be the best "pork barrel" investment any government
ever made.  No private company that would do it has the money.
No private company with the money will do it.


Cameron