Every five years, the Battery Council International Technical Subcommittee conducts a study to determine the failure modes of batteries removed from service. Failure modes have been collected by the Technical Committee since 1962 and have been reported every five years since 1990. Robert Flicker, chairman of the Technical Committee, gave a preliminary report on the 2005 survey on April 19, 2005, in New Orleans at the Battery Council International 117th Convention. As in pervious surveys, several battery manufacturing companies selected junk batteries without regard to brand or condition, except those obviously broken after removal. Samples were limited to 12-volt automotive passenger car batteries. Batteries not meeting this description were removed from the sample data. This survey depends on the voluntary and discreet work of each participating battery manufacturer to sample the batteries, determine their failure modes and report their findings for compilation. The four manufacturers that participated in this survey were: Douglas Manufacturing Co., East Penn Manufacturing Co., Exide Technologies, and Johnson Controls Inc. A total of 2,769 batteries were sampled in five locations in the United States between September 2003 and December 2004. Of these, 2,681 batteries had both failure mode and battery date information reported. The 2005 survey did not include batteries from Mexico, as did the 2000 survey.
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