Lithium in the future?

Since the car is a part while the engineering drawings are being made, I've been researching lithium batteries. I got a message lately reminding me that the price has come down quite a bit since I first wrote my FAQ on Lithium batteries too.

It does seem that Thunder Sky may be on their way to fixing their quality issues and the price is coming down. I found a couple of retailers (Elite Power for example) that offer 52 60 amp cells (equivalent to the 13 Optimas in my car) for $6240. Not bad.

The charger Elite Power offers is a HUGE thing, but I believe my Zivan can be reprogrammed for lithium. I haven't seen a good BMS system for sale though. Elite Power has a system designed to work with that big charger and Hot Juice Electric is dropping production of their BEQ boxes so that they can focus on bringing a controller to market. I'll keep looking.

Meanwhile, I'm having the kit racks tweaked a bit so that the 52 lithium cells can be installed without modification.