That's not a battery, it's a fuel cell. As demonstrated, it doesn't seem to last too long and recycling the alumina that's created will require lots of electricity.
So as a large-scale solution, this may not be practical without further breakthroughs.

I think this technology has a lot of promise and could - potentially - give electric vehicles a big boost when it comes to range. It would be nice to see it used sooner than 2017.

I understand this is a concept, but it's essentially a car that runs on aluminium, which takes incredible amounts of energy to refine from its ore, and requiring an additional industrial process to recycle it after it's spent. Most likely taxing the environment even more than gasoline.

Works for me! Little wasted energy, recyclable aluminium, just add electricity, makes longer distances possible, now for a three moving piece or at worst CV transmission, always following the SMART and KISS rules, Less is more engineering, and the ultimate in energy storage, aluminium pallets can be exploited. Fantastic for military situations, perhaps good for light planes too? Medium sized trucks? Abundance of Aluminium expected from China's new found Pebble Bed Gas and Thorium LFTR styled reactors, will drop Al prices world wide - even allowing this form of energy storage to compete with dirty, flammable and polluting Oil and coal - after all not even CO2 produced to store electricity in Aluminium and it is a very common ore, not rare by any means? large northern Hydro could be commissioned to produce Aluminium, reducing transmission losses? Definitely part of the solution.

"Range anxiety" because saying electric cars are catastrophically short ranged is bad press.

I have heard of this technology before. From what I remember of previous articles, the energy required to "recycle" the used up aluminum which I presume is basically bauxite is about the same as the energy you get back out of the fuel cell as electric power. I'm not sure what the overall efficiency would be but charging any battery is not 100% efficient.
I hope they get the details worked out because this would be a lot safer and compact than hydrogen fuel cells.
However, as Rudolf Diesel once said "The birth of an idea is that happy moment when all things seem possible and reality has not yet entered the picture".

Hum, I spoke to the IBM lithium-air team last year around the same time and theirs was also ready, the only problem was de-humidification system that was bullet proof enough to be driven anywhere. They estimated they were about 7 years away from mass production.

So the "battery" has to be replaced every 1,000 miles or so. If it's cheaper than buying 30 gallons of gasoline, it will work. If it's significantly more, it won't be economic, and will be cheaper to keep my Buick.

Since ambient air is being used in these systems, will they, like the internal combustion engines, suffer performance deficits at altitude?

anything that is a step in the right direction...i like it... building blocks.