Buy the prius for the electric drive....

Checked out the link, and it looks like they're getting up and running. Since Valence is providing the cells, I wonder who is building the modules? Probably EDrive making everything themselves ... modules, pack, BMS, software hack(?), etc.

I do believe it's the way to go, but I don't want to be the first ... the 101st ... or the 1,001st for this. I'll wait a while for a Li-Ion production car.

 

I contend that there are two important misunderstandings here:
1. Any battery is not a power source; it's a power storage device. You still need to get the energy from somewhere. This is also a basic point about hydrogen cars that many people don't understand; energy needs to be expended to yank hydrogen atoms off of molecules like water or methane, which we (mostly) get back when we burn hydrogen.
2. Regenerative driving=perpetual motion machine which ain't going to fly. Regenerative braking is a good thing; but if you use electricity to drive an electric motor but also try to use a generator to get some electricity back you are going to recover less than the extra you put in.

An important advantage of gas over batteries: almost 100 times better energy stored per mass. A full tank of gas in the Prius weighs only 80 pounds and drives you for around 400 miles, while the Prius battery holds the equivalent of only about a tenth of a gallon of gas. Do the math to figure out the mass of battery that would be required to drive the Prius 400 miles...

 

About 800 pounds of Li-ion batteries will give you ~300 mile range (and remember you get to swap out the fuel tank, the exhaust, the transmission and the ICE when you add the 800 pounds of batteries). But who needs 300 miles of range every day? When you can charge at home, you rarely need that kind of range anyway. The specs for Li-ion energy density improve about every six months. In general, battery energy density as about doubled every year for the past ten years. How's that going for gasoline?

Yup, gasoline is amazingly energy dense. What a waste to use such a valuable fuel to drive to the corner store for milk (while throwing at least 70% of the energy out the window, never to be recovered.... oh and the inevitable pollution, even from "clean" gas cars).

Good points about the losses of H2 energy storage. H2 Fuel Cells are about 3-4x less efficient than storing energy in batteries. You can think of Fuel Cells as inefficient batteries.