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The rising interest in vehicles powered by electricity — either part-time, as in hybrids like the Tesla Roadster — has increased the pressure to develop more efficient devices to store the power. Progress has been steady, but huge breakthroughs have not emerged from the research labs.
The baby-step pace is prompting automakers to move cautiously with their production plans. Toyota, which had been expected to use lithium-ion batteries in the next-generation Prius, announced that the car, which goes on sale next spring, will stick with proven nickel-metal hydride chemistry.
Toyota’s engineers were not ready to adopt the compact high-energy, lithium-ion batteries in a mass-production vehicle, opting to run them in test fleets first. Though the company is optimistic about the potential of lithium batteries, challenges in their durability and operating temperature ranges remain.
While General Motors, Mitsubishi and Nissan have announced plans to employ such batteries in the future, and each has a battery manufacturer as a partner, Honda has set off in a different direction. Last March, Honda’s president, Takeo Fukui, told Automotive News that “lithium-ion batteries are still not usable from our perspective.”
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