---- Timothy Balcer <
[email protected]> wrote:
=============
On 8/8/07, Tony Hwang <
[email protected]> wrote:
> If you do make cheaper lithium cells (can't imagine it being easy, research, testing, etc), maybe a big company will buy you up and you can make your millions.

>
> Right now the cells are all made overseas in China mostly (A123, TS, etc). I think it would be too expensive to slap a "Made In The USA" on the cells. Safety, wages, health insurance for employees, etc...
Well the technical stuff would not be too difficult... it's the
production that is hard. I can get the chemical and physical specs for
a LiFEPO4 battery for free, even. It is patent issues and production
issues that you would have to surmount.
If you do a pull based manufacturing model, you can't do high volume,
but it is a lot cheaper in absolute costs since you can retool at any
time and play about with it to perfect the process a lot easier. Plus
you could do it in a garage, in theory, since you could encaps all the
important bits in an airtight polycarbonate shell.
Also there is a real misnomer about how expensive it is to produce
things in the US. The manufacturers all complain about it and yes, you
do have to pay people a living wage, plus make sure they aren't dying
of cancer.. but..
With fuel prices rising it is at a razor's edge now, as far as
overseas manufacturing being more profitable than domestic. And there
are a few companies doing domestic production and raking it in..
American Apparel, for example.
I'm not worried about outsourcing at all.. not for large format
anyway. And not for something that can be progressively more
automated.
--T
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