The Mighty Volt wrote:Ypedal wrote:Just because a statement cannot be proven false, does not make it true.
Agreed.
The truth of the matter is that
nobody knows what the story is. Not yet.
We are in the dark. Or in the grey.
What we are relying on is tests. Thats why I ordered my own CBA III so I can start to order, test, and post results.
Its up to everyone to try to get a cell and test it and post their results. Then we can cross-reference and come up with some accurate conclusions.
Not
definite conclusions. Just
accurate ones.
This entire A123 thing is so typical of the United States- brilliant academic and engineering minds, zero business integrity.
I agree with both of you too. I was only offering what I learned so far only offering pure speculation & opinion & wishful thinking & also going by Doctorbass' posts of test results of finding no defective cells out of 180 cells!
Now, we can move beyond some speculation with some news I found & posted in the 7s3p A123 module thread I started...
Here is what I found:
bigmoose wrote:BTW, this is opinion, my opinion... I think these modules hitting the grey market shows the desperate financial state of A123. First they dumped loose cells, now they are dumping the modules. All off shore and in China, so (again IMHO) they are free of all legal obligations to ensure these are only sold to "qualified" individuals by US law.
I also think there is some mix of quality in the cells. If I had to guess I would think the cells sold months ago with cut tabs might be the poorest. They were dumped first (perhaps) and neutered by a company that was more healthy. Then they dumped production stockpiles that were aging. These cells may not have had all the QA done on them. So they may have undetected problems. Now I would bet that cells that made it into modules are darn good cells.
Just to follow-up further with what your interesting speculation is (see above) I found out from a news release what was the cause of the defect:
"The cause of the defects described today was faulty calibration of one of four welding machines in the Michigan plant that caused misalignment of a component in some cells, Vieau (he is the President of AONE) said today. The flaw could cause an electrical short, which could result in premature failure of the battery or decrease performance and reduce battery life, he said."
This probably means, IMO, imo,
that there will be a small percentage of these cells we are getting that WILL HAVE this defect. Using the NASA test =or= whatever Doctorbass suggests we do for each cell, then we should be able to weed these out. I'm getting greedy now!
IF, yes, IF, we can harvest the good cells out of any defective module or good 7s3p, THEN we should get SUPER PRICING for these modules... AND, make good batteries by finding the 1%-10% that are defective, IMO, imo,
of cells that are bad.
Here's the bottom line... A123 can not afford to find & replace the defective cells in the modules or batteries, so they are just going to dump all the gold & bits of coal en masse & be done with it. I think this is a golden opportunity to mine this gold... do I have "lithium fever"
Btw, at least some of these modules were likely destined for an expensive e-vehicle: $107,000 Fisker Karma model. The company admitted this defect affected 5 customers & it's going to cost them 55 million to replace the bad production runs. I think these cells should be high quality except for the ones effected by the faulty laser alignment, imo, IMO.
Either way, about 55 million in "surplus" product will be sold off to those willing to mine the lithium gold.
This is the link to the beginning of that thread:
Group Buy? Dr.Bass Steveo found 7s3p Module! Awesome Price!!
