Elon Musk: Boeing batteries “inherently unsafe”

http://www.chargedevs.com/content/news-wire/post/musk-boeing-batteries-“inherently-unsafe” / Tesla offered to help out beleaguered Boeing 787 Dreamliner has been grounded battery pack problems criticized the battery design as inherently unsafe in an email to aviation news source Flightglobal battery uses a grouping of eight large cells unlike Tesla’s batteries, which contain thousands of smaller cells large cells without enough space between them to isolate against the cell-to-cell thermal domino effect means it is simply a matter of time before there are more incidents of this nature,” Musk told Flightglobal. “Moreover, when thermal runaway occurs with a big cell, a proportionately larger amount of energy is released and it is very difficult to prevent that energy from then heating up the neighboring cells and causing a domino effect that results in the entire pack catching fire Tesla is a leader in lithium-ion technology SpaceX battery packs spacecraft Donald Sadoway professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology agreed with Musk entrepreneur entrepreneurial SpaceX competes with Boeing government contracts John Voelcker  Green Car Reports Tesla is the only major EV maker that builds its packs out of thousands of small lithium-ion cells 18650s made by Panasonic competitors use hundreds of large-format cells large format battery design is a highly complex field battery cells within the lithium-ion family very different chemistries different properties. Differences in the way the cells are aggregated into a pack, and the type of thermal conditioning, which keeps a pack within an acceptable temperature range, can also mean huge differences in performance. Boeing’s battery packs are not directly comparable with the packs used in any of today’s production plug-in vehicles /