You are WRONG on ALL counts.
You are WRONG on ALL counts. I can assure you that I and my colleague have done more research and crunched more numbers on this than you and maybe anyone other than CHEVRON's own scientists who informed their executives that the ONLY doable mass market battery is NIMH and that is why CHEVRON put it in a prison.
You wrote
NiMH suffers from serious drawbacks:
1) Lower voltage
2) Shorter lifespan (# of charge cycles)
3) Less tolerant to temperature changes
4) Low shelf life - sitting unused, they lose up to 25%/month
5) GM patent issues (controlling interest in Ovonics patents - Toyota pays GM a premium for every Prius made with a NiMH battery)
6) Generally slower charging/discharging than Li-ion
You are so utterly wrong on every point !!
1) By 2005 the EV95 would have matured into a battery 50% better than 1997.
NiMH has greater power density than Li-on.
2. Shorter lifespan ? ARE YOU RAVING BLOODY MAD !! Get this into your ignorant head. The RAV4-EV owners have been driving around on the original
1997 PANASONIC EV95 NiMH battery for over 14 YEARS !!!!! I know a woman in
Northern California who owns two of them with a combined mileage of over
275,000miles on ORIGINAL batteries !!
3. Less tolerant to temperature you are nuts it is Lithium that requires a far more
complex Battery Management System precisely due to the temperature volatile
lithium lack of tolerance. The PANASONIC EV95 circa 1997 that the following temperature range approx minus 30centigrade to plus70centrigrade while the average professional lithium powertool battery for gear used in factories has a temperature range of only Zero C to plus 30C.
4. The NiMH in the Prius is not relevant as it is so small CHEVRON does not object.
5. Slower or faster is not the point far more important is that NiMH is better at deep discharging and you can use more of the total available power.