Mike Tinskey, manager of Ford's sustainability activities, outlined what Ford sees as essential (controllable success factors) for electric vehicles and supporting infrastructure, during a presentation at the Plug-in 2009 conference in Long Beach this past week. During his talk, he suggested that migrating to battery commonality would be a huge win for the industry simply because it would support a more rapid achievement of the higher production volumes required to bring prices down. According to Tinskey, The biggest issue with batteries now is not necessarily the technology, it's the volume.  If the battery manufacturers could get north of 100,000 packs, annually prices come down drastically.