D.C. Monitor citizen initiatives for state and national issues

 

Current NiMH Battery Patent Initiative

Appeal to the Obama Administration to exercise Eminent Domain and/or Compulsory Licensing over NiMH battery patents for electric cars currently owned by Chevron Corporation.

Summary

In 1997, Toyota began manufacturing the RAV4-EV (a 100% Electric Vehicle) using the standard RAV4 sport utility vehicle frame and design. The vehicles are powered by the U.S. invented and patented Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) battery. These cars are still on the road today (2009), driven by everyday Americans and utilized by American companies.

General Motors (GM) and Chevron saw the production of these vehicles as a huge threat to the gas-powered internal combustion engine (ICE) economy that they had worked for so long to perfect. That’s why in 2001, GM and Chevron sued Toyota and Panasonic to stop using patented NiMH batteries. This lawsuit effectively shut down production of the RAV4-EV and all other 100% electric vehicles utilizing this technology. These vehicles will free the U.S.A. from dependence on foreign oil.

NiMH batteries are the most powerful and advanced traction batteries in the world, used in electric vehicles. Originally owned by GM and now by Chevron they are not being used today in 100% electric vehicles with long driving range per charge. Only small capacity versions are being used in hybrids.

Presently, Big Oil and the Big Three Automakers are working feverishly to move us toward a hydrogen-based transportation system by 2015. This target date for converting to a hydrogen-based economy is not a coincidence. According to SEC filings, ECD Ovonics and Cobasys (now part of Chevron) hold approximately 125 U.S. patents related to NiMH battery technology. Thirteen of the patents, considered particularly important, are due to expire by 2014 – 2015.They will then become public good available for manufacturing by any U.S. company. If Big Oil and the Big Three succeed in transitioning the oil internal combustion engine transportation system into a hydrogen-based system by 2015, it will be too late to implement the NiMH technology and move our country toward a clean, cost-effective electric fuel economy. By 2015, the entire added infrastructure for the hydrogen-based economy will be in place and it will be too difficult and expensive to revert to an electric car economy.

Background

The battery technology that enables electricity to be used in electric motor vehicles took an enormous leap forward when Stanford R. Ovshinsky, co-founder of Energy Conversion Devices, Ltd., developed a high energy-storage, environmentally friendly, maintenance-free, rechargeable battery. Compared with previous EV batteries, made of nickel-cadmium and lead-acid, Ovshinsky’s NiMH battery is twice as powerful and did not have the fatigue and discharge problems those batteries experienced. These batteries have exceeded performance expectations including ranges between 80-200 miles per charge and still running after over 100,000 miles. They have been and continue to be driven by hundreds of Americans.


NiMH Battery packs.

A Cobasys battery report clearly demonstrates that NiMH batteries are superior to all other battery types (including lithium).

A version of an NiMH battery developed by Panasonic and Toyota (reportedly improving upon the original Ovonics design, but still controlled by its patent) actually still runs the several hundred  RAV4-EVs that were bought from Toyota between 1999 and 2001. Unlike what GM did to GM EV1s, Toyota did not force these revolutionary batteries off the road and crush them. This was a fortunate turn of events, since we now have the benefit of more than ten years of real-world testing of the NiMH batteries in the RAV4-EVs and still have real time examples of 100% electric SUV's.

The U.S. government, Big Oil, and the Big Three automakers formed a collaborative known as FreedomCAR in 2004. This collaborative was designed to examine alternative fuels and vehicles for future use by Americans. However, this collaboration was really a conspiracy to bury the battery technology already available to convert to 100% electric cars. FreedomCAR is the mechanism these industries, with government collusion, are using to convert the U.S. to a “hydrogen economy.” This hydrogen economy is already going forward and was designed to serve the economic interests of Big Oil and the Big three Automakers, not the general public. 

A war is on between a dangerous, yet to be developed, hydrogen economy and a safe, inexpensive, available and proven electrical technology.

See link tab for more background on this urgent issue.

Please join fellow Americans in appealing to President Obama to exercise Eminent Domain and /or Compulsory Licensing over NiMH battery patents for electric cars for the sake of our economy, our environment, our safety, our national security, and most of all for the future of our children.

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For more information visit: www.twocentspermile.com