Prabhakar Patil: Charging Ahead on Chevy Volt Battery
By John O'Dell April 28, 2008
By Dale Buss, Contributor
Prabhakar Patil is used to taking the battery and running with it.
The company he heads, Compact Power, is one of two suppliers of the lithium-ion batteries General Motors is testing to outfit its hypercritical Volt plug-in hybrid project. But the high-pressure task before him only reminds Patil of a decade ago, when he was Employee One in Ford’s crash initiative to develop the Escape Hybrid.
"At the time, I was manager of electrical and electronics for Ford production vehicles," recalls Patil.
"Alex Trotman was [Ford] CEO, and Toyota had just introduced Prius. I got my assignment in the backseat of a Prius when he and I were being driven around, and [Trotman] said, 'Develop a hybrid for Ford.'"
Patil began immediately to build his Escape Hybrid team. He had a crew of about a half-dozen within a month and the team peaked at an enterprise of about 300 people before Ford introduced the vehicle in 2004 as the first hybrid SUV on the American market.
Patil came to Compact Power, a unit of the Korean chaebol LG Group, in late 2005, again as Employee One of what promised to be an ambitious enterprise to produce a market-leading lithium-ion battery and powertrain for the burgeoning U.S. hybrid market. "This is something that I have personally believed in," said the Indian-born Patil, 58, who earned a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan and then spent 27 years with Ford.
"When I was doing the Escape Hybrid, I came to realize that the battery was the key enabler or disabler of these projects. So when the opportunity came to do something about that, I came to this company."
Troy, Michigan-based Compact Power begins with the huge advantage over other companies in this derby: LG's existing, high-volume operation for manufacturing lithium-ion batteries in Korea. The company uses a manganese-oxide chemistry
Patil believes that was one key in GM's selection of Compact Power as one of two finalists for supplying batteries for the Volt, which GM has said will debut in 2010.
That's an aggressive schedule, dependent on battery development as well as GM's ability to successfully handle all the other challenges of developing what would be the world's first high-volume extended range plug-in hybrid car.
While Patil is sure his company can do the battery work, GM is taking no chances and has contracted with a joint venture of A123 Systems and Continental Automotive to develop another battery system using its nanophosphate chemistry.
If both teams succeed, it is likely that GM will use both, meaning some Volts will use one type of battery, and some will use the other.
Compact Power also is negotiating development pacts with other automakers.
In addition to leading the team developing the Volt battery pack in the U.S., Patil also supervises a team at LG in Korea that is helping develop the individual battery cells.
"The miraculous part of doing this battery in the required time period was that, at first, we didn't even have a cell" of the proper size, Patil said.
"There was a great degree of difficulty: We literally had to double the energy capability of the cell that we had developed for hybrids prior to Volt." Compact Power’s work on the Volt system "is by no means a slam dunk – we’ve had our challenges."
At the same time, Patil said, "There is no 'show stopper' that we're aware of that would make us take a step back. There are engineering challenges, but so far we have been working through them. And the packs we've delivered to GM have worked very well – line on line with how we said they'd perform."
Compact Power, which now has about 55 employees in Troy and is on the way to 100 by year's end, didn’t get its contract from GM until a year ago and only really kicked off the Volt project last June. But it delivered the first batch of test batteries to GM in October.
"It doesn’t matter what it says on the calendar – we’ve been working. We’ve had meetings at 6 a.m. with some of the GM folks. It's a marathon being run at a sprint pace," Patil said.
He insists, though, that he and his charges at Compact Power are up to the enormous challenge.
"What keeps people going is that they relate to this not just as a job, but it has become a cause bigger than themselves," he said.
"They’re doing something specific for the country and for our technological reputation, as well as for the environment. And rarely do you get a chance to be associated with something that is literally a game changer in the auto industry."
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