The more affordable Tesla 4 door sedan is to materialize in 2011. The electric sports car with the body/suspension by Lotus is being produced but costs over $US100,000 new nifty interior and all.

This new Li-ion battery should be available by then and would easily extend the car's range from San Francisco to Los Angeles and a bit - a major plus for practicality in California and electric cars in general including the sports car. I hope Tesla is on top of this development though I don't know who their battery supplier is.

Inventing the future is a lot better than just surviving in it.....

There are atleast dozen mind blowing battery projects running cheating/copying one other, tweaking fundamentals or evolutionary move towards nano-tech. Google battery powered Humvees. 16,800mah phone battery (lion king battery) and 2000$ 20 kilowatt-hours battery powering a house for full day. http://www.popularmechanics.com/home_journal/home_improvement/4326258.html?link=emb&dom=msn_re&src=syn&con=art&mag=pop

"That translates to five or more hours of work-time from a laptop battery the size of one that lasts four hours using current Li-ion designs. "

Call me a cynic, but I can't help but think they'll use this to make batteries smaller to cut costs (and weight) while keeping the same run time.

So with this and the nano coated cathode in development offering another 50% improvement and then with improved Lithium sulphide batteries.

We could be easily getting 24 hour batteries for our laptops and gadgets.

for a moment there I almost thought we were gonna stall on li-ion for, like, ever. Yey!!!

As an American I'll give you all a cheer.

Sadly, the likes of Sony will be the ones making the big profits, while the Brits get a few dollars worth of licensing fees... which they will then spend on Japanese cars and Japanese TVs and Christmas presents made in China. Plus you'll have to pay more than the rest of the world. Hardly seems fair.

Remember, the Brits patented the tin can (clever chaps) and three years an American patented a tin can opener. :) Two heads (of state) can be better than one. Maybe together we can find out how to get the cash back into Western hands, and we'll be 'real' geniuses!

Good on them! What's the chance of something that's as game changing as this not being mentioned in the mainstream press? Little bit of good news goes a long way....

Now stick that in an ARM netbook and you've got 12 hours of British ingenuity

This is good news, and good indication of the future of electrical devices.

Thinking specifically of the electric car, presently we're enjoying something like a 150mile range, which is okay, but still doesn't make for a replacement fossil fuel. 200 to 250 miles, and we're making tracks.