The saga of the Zenn Motors and EEStor continues to wind on. For those that don't know, EEStor is a Texas-startup reportedly secretly building a powerful new energy storage medium that is far lighter, faster-charging, cheaper and longer-lived than lithium ion cells. Zenn is a Canadian company, and 10.7% owner, that is waiting for delivery of these batteries to allow it to manufacture ZENNergy drivetrains which they would sell to OEMs for placement in electric vehicles.
Despite a partnership since 2004, and work at EEStor for much longer, to date a functional EESU has never been publicly demonstrated or even known to exist.
There have been deadlines for delivery to Zenn before but all have passed unfulfilled.
The latest deadline being published comes from rare interviews and leaked audio with EEStor co-founder Dick Weir and VP Tom Weir, indicating the company intends to finally deliver functional units by the end of this year. They are reportedly in the last phase of building out high volume production lines in their Texas facility.
EEStor was expected to have had their EESU technology certified as achieving its stated functionality at working voltage, though were not required to publicly release these findings. I reached out to Professional Testing (EMI), Inc., the Texas company chosen to perform this testing, to see if it had been done.
"I wanted you to know we have very strict NDA’s with our clients and cannot discuss what they did / didn’t do," replied PTI director of sales Jace Curtis.
Just so there is no debate about this, I also reached out to Zenn spokesperson Catherine Scrigemore to see how definite the companies agree this deadline to be.
"EEStor has publicly indicated an objective of delivering functional technology to ZMC by the end of the calendar year. ZMC is confident in their ability to meet that objective."
Set your alarms for December 31 2009, it may be that 2010 is the year of the EESU.
