Comments on: Chevrolet Volt’s first battery pack produced

By: Robin Graves

Robin Graves — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 06:36:50 +0000

Yeah I’ve seen the videos of the Dell laptops self-destructing

By: john

john — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 04:12:18 +0000

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.

By: Gary

Gary — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 03:24:05 +0000

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.

By: Tinman

Tinman — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:52:39 +0000

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.

By: Robin Graves

Robin Graves — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:46:28 +0000

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”

By: Tinman

Tinman — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:43:06 +0000

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?

By: Tinman

Tinman — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:34:27 +0000

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.

By: Tinman

Tinman — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:20:43 +0000

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.

By: Antoni

Antoni — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 01:58:19 +0000

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?

By: Antoni

Antoni — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 01:52:52 +0000

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.