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By now many people will have heard of the Chevy Volt, slated to be released for retail sometime in 2012. Its actually a new kind of hybrid that runs completely on an electric motor but after about 40 miles, a gas powered generator based on a small internal combustion engine kicks in and feeds electricity to the motor. Its a nice idea, and using this approach many people will be able to get away without using gas at all since the average commute is a bit less than 40 miles a day. The 6-7 gallons of gas in the generator than gives you about another 640 miles for longer trips. Great efficiency especially considering the current gas crunch.

The problem with releasing these cars earlier seems to be that GM does not feel that the battery technology is where it needs to be to really make this vehicle work. They plan on using lithium ion batteries, which are the type in most modern laptops and cell phones, as opposed to the lead acid and nickel cadmium batteries that were used in the older model electrics produced by GM, Toyota and Honda back in the late 90’s. But for a lot of reasons, the current method of stacking lithium ion cells still doesn’t quite do the trick. Indeed, now as it was then, the battery tech seems to be what is holding us back from having a solid, commuter appropriate electric vehicle.

It is not so much that the batteries don’t exist. If one is willing to spend enough, they can have a great electric car in their driveway today. Companies like Tesla have come up with some pretty good solutions for high end or niche vehicles that perform very well in the $100,000 range. But unfortunately, for the normal middle class consumer, the limitations of battery tech has been the ev dream killer.

All of that is to say that as I continue to develop this blog, one of the topics will be an examination of where we are on electric cars, and a lot of that is really a discussion of where we are on high performance batteries. There does seem to be some promise out there and I will try to mark it from time to time.

Update:

I didn’t want to get too much into the dispute in this post as to whether NiMH battery technology is really obsolete and inappropriate or whether it is actually being suppressed by oil companies (Chevron mostly) who managed to buy up all the patents for the tech. Like I said in my first post, I don’t want to hold myself out as any sort of expert on these matters and while I am sure NiMH technology is getting something of a “bum rap” in discussions of the present and future of EV cars, there are definitely some good reasons to start thinking in terms of lithium ion. Here is a good article I read a while back on the topic

Tags:   battery technology · Electric Cars · ev · gm volt · rav4 ev 4No Comments