And after getting $249 million in loans from the US Government, too. A123 Systems filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy so that they could reorganize their debt and avoid default on a loan with a payment due. What do you think?
I think that if they had not screwed up about $35million in batteries due to production problems they would have been fine. The factories built with fed money are already to be paid for by Johnson Controls. They want the buisness line for the automotive batteries and have already made a good offer.
I think we ought to keep it out of the hands of the Chinese at all costs. Johnson Controls has been given the first round but the Chinese are trying to make a big play for it. I don’t know much about the industry but some very worthwhile products just plain take a lot of money and a lot of time to become profitable.
Hope it gets turned around,maybe our whole national outlook needs to change.Gone are the days when the Ethyl corparation said"Drive more,it gets cheaper by the mile"-Kevin
A123 Battery was hoping GM would power the Volt with their batteries. They lost that contract and GM decided to build their own batteries in order to maintain tight quality control over the finished product…Tesla and Fisker both use A123 batteries but their production and sales have lagged far behind original estimates leaving a123 out in the cold… By limiting their production to automotive battery packs, they found themselves in a very tight space…There is a good market for storage batteries now dominated by the lead-acid battery companies used in off-grid homes and other projects, golf carts, marine applications, emergency lighting that A123 completely ignored. That was a big mistake…The long life, zero maintenance and tremendous capacity of the latest Lithium batteries makes them attractive in this market…
What is also needed is the technology to recycle Lithium batteries efficiently, like the lead-acid battery industry has done. At some point, the need to mine new Lithium will level off and the price of these batteries will come down as manufacturing and recycling them is perfected…
We are of the mind-set that storage batteries all fail sooner or later and must be replaced with a new battery. But it might be possible to make a storage battery with an extremely long life span good for tens of thousands of charge-discharge cycles if we can get the chemistry right…