New 'Juice' for Chevy Volt Development
By Michelle Krebs October 24, 2008By Bill Visnic
General Motors Corp. reportedly has settled an important matter in the development of its Chevrolet Volt extended-range electric vehicle: the company is said to have decided on the supplier for the critical lithium-ion batteries necessary for the Volt to travel as far as 40 miles on a single charge.
GM reportedly will award the high-profile contract to Michigan-based Compact Power Inc., an arm of South Korea's LG Chemical. The company has been in competition for the Volt battery contract with a different, competing lithium-ion chemistry developed by Massachusetts-based A123 Systems and its systems integrator, Continental Automotive Systems.
It had been rumored for some months that the Compact Power/LG Chem battery chemistry had emerged as a front-runner. The reports that LG Chem was the winner first emerged on the GM-Volt.com fan site, which has members through the Facebook social network. Reuters news agency then reported the story. Edmunds Green Car Advisor provides more detail on the technology in its story.
Because the technology is so vital to the Volt's design goal, GM had structured a competition between the two battery suppliers in order to determine which of the competing lithium-ion chemistries would prove best-suited for the Volt's performance parameters. But another serious development aspect was addressing concern regarding the safety of lithium-ion chemistry in such a high-power application; overheating lithium-ion batteries had been the cause of several highly publicized fires in small consumer electronic devices - mainly laptop computers.
But a GM source told AutoObserver several months ago the Compact Power cells were demonstrating outstanding resistance to overheating and the dangerous "thermal runaway" that can cause lithium-ion batteries to ignite. Even under high-load testing conditions, the source said, the Compact Power/LG Chem batteries for the Volt remained so unexpectedly stable the supplemental cooling system typically was not needed.
The production Volt nonetheless is slated to have a dedicated heating/cooling circuit to keep the batteries in their optimum temperature range.
The Reuters report said GM is expected to officially announce the Volt battery supplier sometime next month. Although LG Chem is based in Korea, GM product-development boss Bob Lutz has stressed GM wants the Volt's batteries to be made in North America.
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