Is there an electric or hybrid car in your future? It all depends on one thing: the batteries. Toyota, for one, has established that they are good enough for hybrids today and they are selling a lot of them. In fact, Toyota sells more hybrid cars in the U.S. than Volkswagen sells total cars. Why aren't other manufacturers stepping up to the plate and making hybrid cars? At this point, the general claim is that the batteries aren't good enough to make a hybrid better than a conventional drivetrain.

Mostly those claims come from European manufacturers who have really good diesel cars in production. While the diesel engine is more expensive to produce, it sure isn't as expensive as all the extra stuff that is needed for a hybrid drivetrain. There are some people who still claim that Toyota loses money on every Prius they sell. Since we have no way to look into Toyota's finances, we will never know, but I am positive that they aren't making much, if any, profit on them. Manufacturers other than huge Toyota can't afford to do that.

The new upcoming bit of technology that is attracting a lot of attention these days is the plug-in hybrid. This seems to be the ideal approach for a commuter car. When you get home at night, you plug it in and then drive for 25 miles or so the next day on just electric power. Of course, that assumes that the electric drivetrain in the car has sufficient power to cruise in traffic and climb the hills on the way to the office.

But we still get back to the big issue making any electric-powered car, whether it is completely electric, or a hybrid -- the batteries. Any battery you can mention is awful when compared to gasoline for powering a car. All of them are lots heavier than gasoline when you look at energy content. All of them take a long time to fill with energy when compared to your gas tank in the car. And all of them are bigger than a gas tank (lots bigger!) when comparing equal energy storage. Okay, but we should still look into the past and what will be available in the future.

Long ago there was the lead-acid battery. That is the technology the car makers used at the turn of the century (the nineteenth to twentieth!) when electric cars were the rage. That was a long time ago. The problem is that those old batteries haven't changed a lot up to now. That is the same kind of battery that is in your regular car today that is used to power the electrical stuff and start the car. GM used that technology battery to power their Impact electric when it was introduced in 1996. Unfortunately they couldn't convince enough people to lease them. I won't go into the reasons, but there were a lot of them. So what has happened to batteries since then?

The computer industry has happened! That may seem like a strange reason when talking about cars, but the computer industry began to drive research into batteries for their notebook and laptop computers. Lead acid batteries just weren't good enough -- not even close -- to power a laptop computer. In the beginning, the company Compaq designed a PC that was in a portable case, but needed to be plugged in. The revolution really started when the Grid Compass was introduced in 1982. It was much smaller and lighter than the Compaq, had a flat screen rather than a CRT, but still needed to be plugged in (it also was really expensive).

At this point, the Japanese stepped in and developed the nickel-cadmium battery, or NiCad, enough to power computers and some other electronic devices. While they work well for weight, size, and energy reasons, they were (and still are) evil for a lot of reasons. The primary bad thing is that they are made from cadmium, a very poisonous chemical, which is really bad when they end up in landfills. The other problem is that the user sees the battery's "charge history". A NiCad battery doesn't like to stay fully charged because it remembers that and when discharged doesn't remember how to be discharged. That means that eventually it won't take any charge at all and needs replacement. So, seeing these problems, the Japanese looked around and found an alternative.

The new battery that replaced the NiCad in portable computers was the nickel-metal-hydride battery, or NiMH. These batteries were a bit lighter than NiCads, were made with non-poisonous chemicals, didn't have a "charge history", and could be charged a little faster. Also, when production techniques were developed, they were cheaper to make than NiCads as well.

At this point, some engineer at Toyota in Japan thought it would be interesting to put a whole bunch of these computer batteries together and make a hybrid car with them as the electric energy source. I'm sure it wasn't quite as simple as that statement, but I am sure that it summarizes it pretty well. Corporate Toyota got together with Panasonic with a big investment to refine the batteries -- and presto -- the original Prius.

So where are we now? We have the second-generation Prius and several other Toyota hybrids. The only other "real" hybrid is the Ford Escape (and badge-engineered variations). GM has some "sort of" hybrids as does Honda. I classify the "sort of" category as where the car cannot be driven on electric power alone. The 2007 Battery Industry Report predicts the current world-wide sale of hybrids growing from 384,000 to 1.1 million in 2010 and 2 million in 2015. At this time, battery suppliers Panasonic EV Energy and Sanyo hold 85% of the market.

The future holds a switch from the current NiMH batteries to lithium-ion, or Li-ion. These batteries are lighter than NiMH and can charge quicker. There are problems, though, as many laptop owners have discovered. They get hot when they are discharged quickly. Laptop owners have had fires. The first car to use Li-ion batteries is the Tesla. It uses an array of existing laptop batteries and has two air conditioning systems, one for the driver/passenger and the other for the batteries. Industry people also say that the current problems with Li-ion batteries are cost and durability.

GM is banking on improvement of Li-ion battery technology so that they can produce their Volt hybrid soon. But both NiMH and Li-ion battery manufacturers are working on improving technology as quickly as they can. There are three manufacturers in the United States working on making Li-ion batteries a commercial reality for cars: Johnson Controls-Saft Advanced Power Systems, Cobasys, and A123 Systems. They are members of a consortium supported by rather small government assistance to develop vehicle batteries in the United States.

A123 Systems is working on a new technique for manufacturing Li-ion batteries called nanophosphates. They are working on commercializing this with Cobasys and BAE Systems for delivery of batteries to GM in 2009 for a Saturn Vue plug-in hybrid.

It isn't just cars that will benefit from hybrid drive technology. GM has quite a few prototype municipal busses in use today. A123 and BAE were working with DaimlerChrysler for drivetrains for the Orion VII transit bus in 2008. Who knows which part of DaimlerChrysler will end up with this. They are promoting Li-ion battery technology as offering a better value through longer life, improved performance, and reduced maintenance in this application.

Actually MIT developed the technology that A123 is using for their proposed vehicle batteries. I suppose you could say that this is a proven technology because the batteries have been used in thousands of Black and Decker power tools.

General Motors is working with several suppliers. They used Johnson Controls-Saft Advanced Power Solutions Li-ion batteries for their Chevrolet Sequel fuel-cell prototypes. GM feels that Li-ion batteries provide better packaging, energy storage, and energy delivery than NiMH batteries currently.

Manufacturers would obviously rather package fewer bigger batteries in their cars rather and a huge number of smaller ones. For example Tesla uses some 6000-cells in their cars. Ford's engineers say that that really is impractical for larger production cars. One real problem with this large number of cells is the number of connections -- each one a possible source of a problem.

NiMH advocates claim that it is the only technology that is mature enough to use in real cars today. That's based mostly on their use in Toyotas.

It turns out that one mystery remains for hybrid vehicle manufacturers and that is drivetrain testing. It was pretty easy with just a gasoline engine driving the car. You just found a long hill and drove the car up that. With the engine developing lots of power, the ancillary parts of the drivetrain were tested with the heavy load. How do you test the electric components in a hybrid? They really aren't tested going up that hill, the gasoline engine drive is. A test cycle needs to be developed that runs with electric drive loading in the city.

One other technology that hasn't been mentioned is the ultracapacitor. It is an energy storage device, but really isn't a battery. Honda has supported their use for a long time because of their ability to charge and discharge quickly. Honda, however, has turned away from ultracapacitors for their FCX fuel-cell car. They are also desirable because of their long life, tolerance of high temperatures, and efficiency. The problem is that their energy density is only about one-tenth of a Li-ion battery. So that's the technology Honda will use in their FCX.

Hybrids are really immature in technology and that's not only the batteries. The rest of the drivetrain and electronics for controllers are being developed as quickly as possible as well. Will hybrids replace the gasoline-powered cars we mostly drive today? Not likely. A diesel-powered car will deliver much the same economy at a lower price (but with more emissions). A future plug-in hybrid, on the other hand, looks very attractive.