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In recent months the lithium ion battery issue continues to take off. There was an interesting article we would like to share. Then we want to walk through some of the stuff in the tesla manual and add some things that we know.Let's first walk a little down the road of why there are so many issues with these batteries.First off Batteries hold energy. In chemistry energy is used and transferred during a chemical reaction. The more energy that is released in a chemical reaction the more energy potential that reaction has. Right so Potential,,,, let's break this down a bit more. There are 2 types of energy that we are talking about when we deal with batteries. Actual physics of things in general but for this we are going to focus on potential energy and kinetic energy. Potential energy is simply just the energy that a system has stored in it. It is not used but it is there. Potential energy can be thought of in the physics world in many different ways. So let's unpack a few of these ideas.First let's remember this first rule of physics. The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed - only converted from one form of energy to another. What does this mean. It means that I can't just magically create energy. It has to come from somewhere. Like putting gas in my car. Energies can be added to systems and taken away but that energy has to come from somewhere.Let's use this classic physics example of potential energy. I have  a ball laying on the ground. The ball is not in motion compared to the ground and therefore has zero potential energy. There is nothing this ball is going to do on its own but sit there.But now we take that ball and raise it up. As we pick the ball up and bring it away from the ground its potential energy is increased. Just the act of me lifting the ball in the air is me adding energy to the system. By working against gravity I am making it so the ball will end up dropping further in the air and therefore going faster.By the time I bring the ball up to the highest position before I drop it, I have added as much energy into the system that I can. The potential energy is at its max. Now let's talk about kinetic energy. Kinetic energy which a body possesses by virtue of being in motion. So as that ball starts to drop the motion gets greater and greater, so therefore the kinetic energy gets greater and greater. The more motion the more kinetic energy. The ball will be at its max kinetic energy just before it hits the floor. Then all that energy gets transwed to the floor and the ball again comes to a stop. While the kinetic energy is increasing, the potential energy is now decreasing. The two are inverse protioniate to each other. Since kinetic energy is the energy of things in motion, it is this energy that can do damage. Replace the ball with a brick, and the ground with a person's head. The higher i bring the brick, (the more potential energy i put into the system, the more damage that brick can do, the higher its kinetic energy just before impact therefore transferring more energy to the person's head, doing more damage.We see this relationship in all systems. Including chemistry. The only difference is the complexity of getting the energy ...