VIEWS on BATTERY NEWS: Murata lays out a path for it's newly acquired battery business. University of Michigan's battery lab is booked solid. Fisker lives!

Murata bought Sony's rechargeable battery business and they plan to use it in the automotive market. Sony did not have a strong position in that sector and was not keen on trying to wrestle it from Panasonic and the South Koreans.

But Murata is watching the Chinese, who are also breaking hard into automotive and feel the time is right to jump in. They even use fighting language in calling the Sony battery arm a "weapon."

"I believe batteries will be a powerful weapon," said Murata, one of the sons of the founder of the Kyoto-based firm.

The University of Michigan opened their battery lab a little bit ago. I covered the plans for the lab in a previous blog and at the time felt it was a way for some of the big players, like Ford, to catch up in the battery sector. And that's the way it seems to be playing out. Look for good things to come out of the Ann Arbor lab.


Fisker, the electric car company that was supposed to compete with Tesla but went bankrupt instead, is now named "Fisker Inc." Yeah, I know, that was its name before too. Odd they would do that.

The assets of the bankrupt car company, including the name, were bought by a Chinese company and they changed it right away to Karma. Now, Karma was the badge of the car Fisker produced - but I think shifting the way they did the company renewed from bankruptcy will be able to keep the look of the Fisker Karma. And Karma will put the nameplate, Revero, on their version of the hybrid.

But back to the new Fisker car company. To make things clearer let's take a look at what happened to Fisker when it drowned the first time. The US government set up Fisker to receive hundreds of millions of dollars through a "Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing" program. Fisker should have been able to make the car he did with the kind of money he had to play with, but he played with it instead.

The car got bad reviews because it was bad. The electronic and software problems were inexcusable. And a poor choice in where the exhaust came out - right behind the driver's side front tire - made customers furrow their brow. And with just a few on the road, the ones that burst into flames were too many. Please note, it was the engine side that burst into flames, not the battery. After spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer monies as part of over a billion dollars invested to make the thing. AND each buyer had to pay $100k dollars for each car; One would hope that fit and finish would seem like the builders cared about their work. Apparently, they didn't.

And yet, here we are. Fisker, by naming themselves "Fisker" is unashamedly coming back with a new electric car. Will they ever pay back the $139 million dollars that the taxpayers lost the first time? The answer to that one is "assuredly NO." Will they get more taxpayer money to make another sub-standard car? The answer to that one, I'm betting, is "yes."