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... Electric cars had to have maintenance-free batteries, and with flooded lead acid that just wasn't possible.
There was an answer, but it hadn't been tried with electric cars, and remained in a fairly experimental stage. This was the gas recombinant battery. It was still lead acid, but instead of using a flooded liquid electrolyte, the electrolyte was absorbed into sponge like glass and fiber mats between its plates. The recombinant battery no longer required any space above the plates for the gas to vent and the liquid electrolyte to reform. That meant batteries could be more densely packed and take up less space. Brooks wanted 900 pounds of batteries to give the car the acceleration and speed he wanted; Bish ran some figures and saw he could only fit 843 pounds in the space allotted.
Bish still had no idea if recombinant batteries would *work* in an electric car, or if they did, whether they would work reliably over time. He did know that even in theory there was only one way to pack thirty-two batteries with enough power to get the car from 0-60 in eight seconds. Bish had to devise the densest lead battery the world had ever seen.
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This was a battery solution what was tried before the Ovonics battery came on the scene.