GREEN DEETS: Bob Lutz Reveals Chevy Volt First Continental Battery Pack at New York Auto Show

I'll admit to being confused about the reference to a "continental battery pack"- what, I mused, could this be the breakthrough of all breakthroughs? A vehicle battery with energy enough to span a continent?? Or at least go a couple of hundred miles???

Alas, it just isn't so -
It is a new prototype lithium-ion battery pack from the A123 Systems (battery cell maker)/ Continental Automotive Inc (pack integrator). A shame the story didn't define this a tad better.

The pack is one of several competing units, so that is good news anyway.

Still made with horribly polluting Lithium Ion technology though - the winner as yet not been decided.

Why? Because its greatly useful as marketing hype.

Car companies are going to have to start taking a clue from the likes of Apple etc. to push sales in the rough economy and high gas price. Pretending to be "green" is going to be one "guerilla marketing" effort by them to get younger buyers to move towards GM since that segment usually goes for cheap foreign cars. Since they have conceded to losing the small car battle with Asian car makers, GM will have to go the opposite route and push hype of the Volt a long way. With Toyota and Honda both coming out with a line (3 cars each) of hybrid-specific cars in 2010 (the same year the Volt is supposed to launch), GM is in an uphill battle to stay looking modern. The chances of them appearing behind the curve will be happening as soon as the hybrid lines of other auto-makers begin to catch on.

Best of luck - they are going to need it! I expect a bailout which will make GM a private company in the hands of an investment firm (like Chrysler), oh about 2011, after the Volt fails to materialize due to high production errors and false starts...

We have a couple of years before the rubber literally meets the road, but the Volt will definitely happen. And when it does, it won't just "sip" gas like the parallel hybrids - it abstains.

dan: Given that the Volt like many new techs is likely to be problematic to get to production you have a small point, but attributing the downfall or not of GM to one car that you yourself are saying is in large part a marketing effort is a little off base imho.

GM's failure will be brought about by their devotion to oil and big cars and abhorrence of actually developing new techs that doesn't go towards luxury or speed/power.

Dan Rossini said:

"Pretending to be "green" is going to be one "guerilla marketing" effort by them to get younger buyers to move towards GM since that segment usually goes for cheap foreign cars."

I realize that big companies are utterly illogical in every way imaginable, but that makes as much sense as hen's teeth. See, the reason that younger buyers buy cheap foreign cars has less to do with fuel consumption and more to do with what's in their bank account. And selling a car for $35K like the Volt is forecast, isn't any way to break into that market, even if it performs miracles and/or walks on water every Sunday. It's all for the same reason you can't squeeze blood from a stone.

Lutz is a klutz, and this is just grand standing for the media. Lutz, chief of EV product development? Gimme a break! This is a man who knows nothing about electric drive drains... What's really going on here, is that Chevron-owned Cobasys which spent 6 years pursuing Panasonic in the courts to stop them from making state-of-the-art Nickel Metal hydride battery packs for Toyota... and sadly, won... has now sunk its teeth into a123 batteries by investing into the company to make sure a123 would NOT improve its liquid gel li-ion chemistry into an easily scalable full solid-state chemistry, with twice the density, that the original designer of the current a123 chemistry, Dr. Donald Sadoway at MIT, still has sitting in his lab waiting for an investor to licence. Volt, is just a kneejerk PR reaction by a bunch of oil pros to steal the fire from Tesla... but it's not working anymore. This pitiful display of snake oil salesmanship, is just another nail in GM's coffin! GM won't be able to stop the EV revolution, it's too late.

Very interesting information from RemyC - but I don't understand this (long) sentence:

".. Chevron-owned Cobasys .....has now sunk its teeth into a123 batteries by investing into the company to make sure a123 would NOT improve its liquid gel li-ion chemistry into an easily scalable full solid-state chemistry, with twice the density, that the original designer of the current a123 chemistry, Dr. Donald Sadoway at MIT, still has sitting in his lab waiting for an investor to licence."

Could you please develop this a bit?

dan,

continental battery is the name of the company that made it, there is a good chance there is a continental battery in your car right now, they have been around for years.

"Still made with horribly polluting Lithium Ion technology though - the winner as yet not been decided."

Actually, lithium iron phosphate is the most environmentally friendly battery chemistry viable for electric vehicles. The other options are nickel metal hydride (which has a shorter life span and poor recyclable, and requires large quanities of stee, cobalt and lanthanum), nickel cadmium (which requires lots of cadmium, which is very bad), and lead-acid chemistries, which have the obvious lead and sulfuric acid problem, along with very short cycle life and high weight.

There are several families of lithium based battery chemistries. Most lithium ion batteries used in electronics these days use cobalt cathodes, which is not environmentally good. Lithium iron phosphate batteries do not use cobalt, and have a much much longer cycle life than any other chemistry. Over their life cycle lithium iron phosphate, which the Chevy Volt gets from A123, use the least energy and have the best material requirement, so it is the best option environmentally.

I'm a mechanical engineer working on electric vehicle systems. There's quite a lot published on this. If interested, the papers published from the Chalmers University of Technology in Goteborg is a good place to start.

" ".. Chevron-owned Cobasys .....has now sunk its teeth into a123 batteries by investing into the company to make sure a123 would NOT improve its liquid gel li-ion chemistry into an easily scalable full solid-state chemistry, with twice the density, that the original designer of the current a123 chemistry, Dr. Donald Sadoway at MIT, still has sitting in his lab waiting for an investor to licence."

Could you please develop this a bit? "

Don't worry, there's a lot of really great development happening elsewhere. China's producing lots of lithium iron phosphate batteries (LiFePO4), and there are several other companies in the United States with cells that have a superior energy density to A123.