Chevrolet Volt’s first battery pack produced

By Matt Brogan | January 08th, 2010

GM today produced its first advanced lithium-ion battery pack for its new Chevrolet Volt plug-in electric hybrid vehicle.

The announcement comes exactly three years to the day since the Volt concept made its debut.

Last August, GM invested US$43 million in preparing a plant to produce the lithium-ion battery packs for the Volt and other electric-vehicles with range extending capabilities.

GM said that it will start shipping batteries for Volt assembly early in the second-quarter of this year.

AAA

Toyota has been making hybrid cars for more than 10yrs and they are staying away from Li-ion batteries and sticking with Ni-mh batteries for now. May be they know a thing or two about reliability.

lazybones

Toyota is already testing a Lith-Ion Prius, not sure of its delivery date. I think it was supposed to be this year.

Often wondered why they were so slow to adopt Lith-Ion. It might be the fact they have the whole recycling of the current technology sorted and they are just not ready for Lith-Ion, or maybe they have something better up their sleeve and want to leapfrog the technology.
Tinman

Lithium ion power packs suffer from thermal runaway under heavy discharge or charge, which requires cooling for the power pack along with accurate temperature monitoring of individual cells.
The R&D is very expensive and the resource of lithium is scarce.

Mike

…..or maybe Toyota didn’t know what they were doing and couldn’t get it right?

Tim

I’m sure Toyota have a better idea of what they are doing than GM. LOL

Reckless1

Spoken by a true Toyota sandwich muncher.
Gary

With all decisions at Toyota made at top level, it probably took 10 years for the go ahead to be given . Toyota cars are not boringly conservative for no reason.

Safety First

Two things came to mind here,
First Hold me down, I swear i felt the earth shake!!!!!!! Since the Comaro has been released the Volt now takes the mantle of the longest gestation period of any motor vehicle… Form when it was first announced, to when it will be finally produced, the vehicle will be at the end of it’s original life cycle and be due for a model upgrade..
Secondly, Haven’t you people learnt already that Toyota doesn’t invent anything, and only becomes the first to offer something if it can get sufficient marketing milage out of it….
john

You still can’t tow anything with it so you will still need a petrol or desiel that can.

Antoni

Towing with an electric car technically shouldn’t be a problem.

Electric motors have much more torque than a petrol engine. Also cars like the Volt & Prius are small to mid size cars.

How many people do you know that tow a boat or caravan with an equivalently sized petrol powered car?

john

This is true but if you ask or look at the cars specs for any of the type of cars they all say that you cannot fit a towbar to it and it was not designed to do it in the first place. So why not do it and make a car that is a plug in and can tow something. It can’t be that hard we have been down this road before surely someone has tried it in the past.

Antoni

Li-ion batteries are more expensive to produce than Ni-mh batteries although the gap is starting to narrow now.

Toyota was simply looking to save money with the Ni-mh batteries.

Tinman

There are not enough reserves of lithium to convert the current global fleet to lithium ion powered.
I think yhe largest reserves are in Argentina, which would then make it the next Saudi Arabia.
Very political this energy thing.

Tinman

I find it interesting, that at the turn of the 20th century, there were more electric cars on the road than petrol ones.
Here we are a hundred years later, revisiting this technology none the wiser.
I wonder what patents are being held by the petrochemical companies?
Robin Graves

I can see it now “GM recalls volt due to 45 people being incinerated after Li-ion batteries go into meltdown. GM buried its head in the sand at first and blamed the consumers for not utilising the vehicle properly, but they had to come to the party when a legal challenge was likely to win”

Tinman

Don’t laugh Robin.It happened with laptops years ago. Now they have energy management systems built in.
Roasted nuts syndrome was the name of it.