One place where Lithium may work better over Lead is for instant/auto start/stop applications.
Ben Goren via EV wrote:
I would think that such systems will have a relatively short life in the design studios. If you've got an hybrid of any flavor, the electric traction motor is going to be far more effective at starting the ICE motor than any electric starter motor.
Airplanes, tractors, and many industrial vehicles and golf carts have had combined starter-generators for at least 50 years. My first EV in 1974 used an aircraft starter-generator as its motor. It was not only powerful enough to start an engine; it could drive my Datsun pickup down the road at 60 mph. :-)
Harley-Davidson has been making ICE golf carts with them for a very long time, and uses it for start/stop operation. Take your foot of the throttle, and it stops. Step on the throttle, and it starts and goes.
Starting a cold ICE is much harder than starting one that is already warmed up and well lubricated. So start/stop operation is easy, as long as you upgrade the usual super-cheap starter motor with at least a halfway decent motor with real bearings and brushes. (ICE starters usually have pot-metal bearings, and solid metal brushes.)
I've thought about practical ways of doing something similar when my '64 1/2 Mustang gets the plugin hybrid treatment...but I don't think it'll be worth it. Most of the miles will be all electric, and any scenario with enough stop-and-go for that sort of thing to make sense will make even more sense all electric. The rare case where I'm doing some sort of stop-and-go and don't have enough left in the batteries for all electric...won't be worth engineering for.
It's been done successfully many times. Replace the starter with a cog-belt-driven aircraft starter/generator. It serves as the starter to get the ICE started, and generator once it is running.
This is the old-tech version; right in keeping with a 64 Mustang. :-) But you can obviously use a modern AC motor/alternator with a high-tech inverter just as well.
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