• News
• Green Light Blog
• Cleantech Investing Blog
• Events
• Research

• Subscribe to RSS feed
• More articles

By Michael Kanellos

Zenn Motors (ZNNMF.PK), the Canadian company that specializes in electric economy cars, said it will invest $2 million to $5 million more in ultracapacitor maker EEStor, boosting its share of the company to over 10 percent.

That's good news for EEStor fans. More money never hurt anyone. EEStor is one of the more controversial companies in electric cars. It is said to be working on ultracapacitors that could let cars run for a few hundred miles before conking out and could be recharged in a few minutes. Short driving distances and long charge times have been two of the major stumbling blocks for electric cars.

Critics – and there are a number of them – have alleged that EESTor has been evasive and not verified its claims. "In all these years it has demonstrated no physical prototype to anyone's knowledge. In fact, a colleague of mine visited the company's offices in Cedar Park, Texas years ago and his request to see anything physical was angrily rebuffed," wrote Daryl Siry on these here pages.

The company has faced a number of delays. EEStor was originally supposed to have its parts out in late 2007. The public hasn't seen them yet.

Zenn also said that it examined the results of permittivity, but the importance of these has been debated and, personally, I've never worked up the energy to look deeper into the issue. I just want to see the ultracapacitors.

On the other hand, other companies seem well on their way to putting ultracapacitors in gas or electric cars to supplement the overall performance. Vendors working on these projects include Freescale and Maxwell Technologies.