Manufacturing and innovation are tightly linked for sure. GE found this out by accident and they've started bringing jobs back to the US. A lot of that had to do with the rise in wages in China and the rise in fuel prices, I'm sure. But they also found they saved cost by having a multidisciplinary team redesign an appliance in just a few weeks.
This is one of the points made repeatedly in the book _Skunk Works_ by Ben Rich: the engineers works side-by-side with the folks building the parts, and have some manufacturing knowledge themselves. The Skunk Works fusion project that was here the other day made passing mention of that approach too.
"Manufacturers are secretive, but analysts say a lithium-ion battery pack costs an average of roughly $500 per kilowatt-hour"
This can not be true. Tesla will sell a 10kWhr pack for $3500 retail, which is $350.
Nissan will sell me a replacement 24kWhr pack for my LEAF for $5500, or $229. Are they losing money on it? Maybe, but I doubt they are losing THAT much.
$500/kWH could still be an average cost. Most lithium battery packs are much smaller than Tesla's (think mobile phones) and are probably much more expensive to manufacture on a per kilowatt-hour basis.
Which kind of average? Tesla manufactures a majority of car batteries -- by capacity, not by count. It's not interesting to conflate mobile phone batteries with car batteries. The article is clearly talking about cars.
Maybe it should be expected from any article claiming a revolution, but the first 15% or so seems nothing but strawmen placement.
The most egregious one is the entire base of the article, that we aren't making significant progress in making batteries cheap enough. While I would certainly love to see more progress, this is utter nonsense.
According to http://cleantechnica.com/2013/07/08/40-drop-in-ev-battery-pr..., EV batteries were over $1000/kwh in 2010, and then ~$650 in 2012. According to links in other comments, it's now near $300. This lines up with a fairly consistent drop in price of 22.5% every year.
So what does this revolution consist of?
30% cheaper batteries in two years when it's available, on top of existing progress. So not bad, but also not particularly revolutionary.
The other irritating strawman relates to the second point of the article. The suggestion that product improvements these days are always based on innovation in the product itself, rather than how it is manufactured.
Apple's entire product line at this point is reliant on manufacturing innovation. No other company can produce such impressive pieces of technology at those prices. They do many other things right, but their position at the top is based on manufacturing more than anything.
It seems like there is some revolutionary battery discovery every week. But we are stuck with nearly the same battery capacities as we were ten or fifteen years ago. It's frustrating. Meanwhile our phone battery life seems to get worse and worse every year.
Hypothesis: there has been a modest genuine increase in the amount of research being invested into batteries and there has been a great increase in the hype tendency of battery discoveries.
Unlike most battery articles, this one is credible. It's about the guy who did A123, which made a very good lithium battery (one that doesn't have thermal runaway and doesn't catch fire), but couldn't do it economically.
A123 makes some of the best and cheapest cells on the market. They're immensely popular in the DIY EV community because they get you more ranger per dollar than anything else you can source in small quantities.
Funny Elon Musk wasn't involved in this, it seems very similar to the approach followed by SpaceX, away with legacy to minimize everything. Considering most his business are involved into energy.
ps: the Sony anecdote was priceless. Haa.. Sony. So many times.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-inso...
I'm glad to see that there's one more example of actually knowing how stuff works makes everything better.