A123Systems Announces Plan to Build U.S.-based Lithium Ion Battery Mass Production Facilities
Watertown, MA (A123Systems Press Release) – A123Systems today announced it has submitted an application under the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Incentive Program to qualify for $1.84 billion in direct loans to support the construction of new world-class lithium ion battery manufacturing facilities in the United States, with the first construction location in southeast Michigan.
If A123’s application is approved, this program would enable the company to dramatically expand production capacity in the United States, with full production volumes designed to supply battery systems for five million hybrid vehicles or half a million plug-in electric vehicles per year by 2013.
The Concept of Fuel Economy: Does it Lead to Good Decisions?
If you own two vehicles, a car and a SUV about the same age, then you will inevitably be faced with the decision of which car to replace first. If saving fuel is one of your motives, then you might be interested in this quick miles-per-gallon-math from Technology Review.
Say you’ve got two cars in your garage. One of them gets 34 miles per gallon; the other gets only 12. You drive both cars 10,000 miles in the course of a year.
Would you save more gas by a) trading in the 34-miles-per-gallon car for one that gets 50 miles per gallon, or by b) trading in the 12-miles-per-gallon car for one that gets 14 miles per gallon?
New experiments suggest that people tend to pick a). After all, a 16-miles-per-gallon improvement seems better than an improvement of just 2 miles per gallon.
The right answer is b).
If you start driving the 50-miles-per-gallon car instead of the 34-miles-per-gallon car, you’ll save 94.1 gallons of gas per year.
If you start driving the 14-miles-per-gallon car instead of the 12-miles-per-gallon car, you’ll save 119 gallons per year.
The math is simple arithmetic. Divide the total number of miles driven (10,000) by the miles per gallon to get the total gallons used to drive that distance. For 12 miles per gallon, the answer is 833. For 14 miles per gallon, it’s 714.
So what do you think — is “mpg” a good indicator of fuel economy?
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