The "Device" does appear to be an Ultracap.
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2006/01/eestor_ultracap.html
The important info is:
The product weighs 400 pounds and delivers 52 kilowatt-hours.
This gives a specific energy of 286 Wh/kg. This basically corresponds to how far it can go between charges.
For comparison a lead-acid battery is about 35 and the best Li-ion currently available is about 200. Devices with 250 Wh/kg may reach the market in a few years.
Most ultracaps are no where near this value, I would say less than 10 Wh/kg typically. They have never been able to compete with a battery on energy density. This claims to be a factor of 28 better than that and better than the best rechargeable batteries.
Ultracaps have always had good power density, i.e. the property related to how fast you can accelerate and also how fast you can recharge them, the problem with them has always been energy density.
If they can actually do this for the stated cost it is a pretty significant break through.
I question the electric vehicle market strategy though. If it is really that good they should go after the portable electronics market first. That is a real market and they would get rich a lot fast that way. It is a lot easier and a lot faster to market to make an energy storage device for a cell phone or a computer and you can sell it for a lot more money per unit energy. Then you go after the other markets such as hybrids, pure EVs, portable tools, etc.
When California (late 80s ealy 90 ?) mandated clean air vehicles everyone doing energy storage/conversion R/D talked a lot about electric vehicles. That was mostly BS. Nobody in the commerical world gave a s*** about EVs unless it was out of pure idealism because they knew that it was not going to happen or a least not happen on the mandated time scale. (Hybrids were a different story.) The whole idea was to suck up gov R/D funding and leverage that to get into a business where you could actually make money.
I have seen claims like this before that never materialized. Hopefully this will be different.
I will admit that the situation is a bit different now because of the price of oil and the success of hybrids.
MB