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Yes, brand does make a difference, but I have been out of batteries too many years to know who has what nowadays. In case it interests you, and from my days working in a battery factory (Anderson, Indiana), here is a little study on batteries. There are four things that make a difference in battery quality. One is the size of the plates in sqaure inches. The more surface area you have the more cold cranking amps you can get. Some manufactures use short plates in standard sized boxes so they will fit your car but they won't last long. I have seen some that only reached half way down into the box. Unfortunately, when you are buying you can't tell how deep they are. Your best option there is to buy the ones with the most CCAs and assume they couldn't get that many amps without enough plate surface area. However, they can add more plates and reduce the thickness of each one and that will affect the second concern you have. How long you can grind on a battery and have it still come up with "juice" depends on how much compound is in the plates. Plates are grids that are pressed full of a "mud" compound and then dried before assembly into the battery. It is this compound that does the electron swap with the acid to give you electricity. The thicker the plates, the more compound you have, the deeper the charge and, generally speaking, the longer the battery will last. As you might well expect, how good the compound was that went into the battery is the third element, because that will affect how long the battery lasts. Some of it begins to disintregrate over time and each battery box has a gap below the plates that allows this loose compound to settle out without shorting out the bottoms of the plates. The fourth issue is the type of plate separaters used. Each cell has numerous plates (depending on battery quality) and each plate is separated from the ones next to it by a separater. They can be made of paper (that's the truth!) or they can be complicated compounds with reinforcement ribbing or they can be anything in between. When you lose a cell on a battery, chances are good that a separater has failed and the plates are shorted out. So what is my advice on buying a battery? I agree with John T that it pays to buy the best one you can get for the money you can afford to spend. However, if you can find an outlet, buying seconds or reconditioned batteries also works. I am not sure how they do the reconditioning on sealed batteries, but we used to open batteries up and determine the quality of the construction before deciding whether they were worth reconditioning. If that is still done, the brand becomes less important once somebody has looked inside to see if the battery is worth rebuilding. One other battery item that many people do not understand. It takes a LONG time to drive the acid out of the plates on a fully discharged battery. In the factory, we used to do a 36 hour slow charge on them. Very often we had batteries, either our own brand or somebody else's, that were traded in simply because they were fully discharged and had not been given long enough on a charger to fully rebuild the charge in them. Once the tests determined that the cells were all good, a 36 hour charge made them ready for service again.
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