The scale of the worldwide battery market is remarkable. Take the automotive sector (see Figure 6.3) alone, which represents a demand of the order of G units (109).
The fact that most individuals buy a car less often than a consumer product, and that the latter often have a shorter usable life, explains why the consumer electronic market (of which IPV products are part) represents much larger volumes (e. g. 1.6 G-units for the portable sector for Germany alone in 1996) [101]. It is predicted that the sales of secondary batteries for the consumer sector will exceed those in the automotive sector in at least one European country – Germany – in 2003 [101].
