[EricH]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

This is one of the reasons I love this chemistry. It's a huge bonus, not a negative.

It's a huge bonus, up to a point. For a normal vehicle, the rough equivalent would be running out of gas right when the warning light went on. Now, if you had the warning light on at quarter-tank, you might get quite a few false positives--but some sort of low-battery indicator would be useful, and it's just a little harder when the curve is flat up until an asymptotic curve.

As this is a vehicle application, this particular item is something that should be a pretty high driver of the size and number of batteries, particularly when combined with the desired range.

A couple of other comments:
-When using LiFePO4s in my aforementioned senior project, we used quite a bit of institutional knowledge from the college's SAE Clean Snowmobile team, who used a large bank of them under the seat of a snowmobile to power the drive motor. If I'm not mistaken, SAE's Collegiate Design Series competitions each have their own mini-forums... And wouldn't ya know it, http://forums.sae.org/access/dispatc...EAN_SNOWMOBILE can be read by the public. (You'll probably want the Archives, and zero-emissions entries.)

-From experience, they're actually pretty safe, particularly compared to normal LiPOs used in R/C aircraft. However, shipment can be a pain--as I recall, the originator has to have some sort of permit to ship them.