[MadMax]

LiPo has been out for some time for R/C cars and before that even r/c airplanes.

I've been running LiPo in my P90 for quite some time now and have had very good results. I use Kokam cells which have been out for some time now. Extreme performance, but I'm not sure I'm willing to carry them until I see manufacturing techniques stabilize a bit more. I'm very leery of the new asian companies cropping up to push LiPo. It's possible that some of them are the ones with the real experience manufacturing LiPo and they've been supplying all the laptop and cellphone manufacturers all these years we've been carrying LiPo and Kokam is a bunch of amateurs serving the goofy small hobby market. Unfortunately I do not know enough to differentiate between all of the new asian companies jumping out with LiPo and my only experience is with Kokam.

I've just seen the direct results of shortcut taking in the manufacturing of mechanical products in China. While Chinese contractors are generally diligent, they sometimes cut corners where they don't appreciate the full ramifications of their economizing. With consumer mechanical stuff, you get creaky crappy flexy products which break. With LiPo you make nice little chembombs which occasionally rupture a separator (with a metal burr) and burn down. I'm just not ready to bring customers an exciting new product in an early phase of manufacturing/safety learning curve as nearly every battery technology we have to date has already passed through.

LiPo seems scary to us now because we're seeing a newish technology which performs extremely well compared to it's predecessors. The high performance of LiPo has forced competing consumer electronics designers to roll it out quickly to provide powerful compact electronics before.

NiCd has caused it's share of fires. Lead acid has caused some hydrogen related accidents. Then there was the good old molten liquid sodium batteries from the earlier days of electric car developments which caused some incredible fires in R&D labs.