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Interesting excerpt from an interview with Bob Lutz, GM VP in charge of the Volt. Of particular note is how it'll handle extreme cold, which is going to be tough for any electric vehicle.
Are you satisfied with the Chevrolet Volt’s development progress or would you like to see an accelerated pace?
Lutz: Well, I would have liked to have the Volt yesterday, but the point is that if anything, it’s well ahead of schedule. The one vexing thing we have with every single program that’s in the pipeline is that our material costs are rising as the steel companies, the plastic, rubber, paint companies, no matter what kind of supplier company they are, are passing on their higher energy costs to us, so this problem is endemic throughout the whole auto industry, domestic or foreign as the quadrupling of oil prices works its way through the entire economic system. We are going to get cost-plus inflation so every one of our future vehicle programs is having cost issues as suppliers come in their final quotes. That worries me for the Volt, but then I tell myself, why worry particularly about the Volt, it’s a worry for every single program that we have, and the world public is going to have to brace for the shock of much higher automobile prices.
We have tested the Volt batteries under extreme cold and hot weather conditions. We’ve tested them in hot weather conditions with the battery cooling systems off. We’ve cycled them in the lab where the computer causes the simulation of a road load so that the battery doesn’t know it’s not in a vehicle. We have had some mechanical failures where solder connections between cells and elements have failed but hey, that’s just prototype build and inadequate soldering. It could have been any type of battery and the solder had failed. But with the Lithium-Ion technology, everything is smooth sailing. It’s doing what we thought it would do, and what the supplier said it would do, and it has been an almost eerie, almost scary absence of problems with the battery.
One of the major challenges with the car is writing all the software codes for all of the zillions of possible interactions between driver, electric drive, battery, regeneration, when does the internal combustion engine come in, under what circumstances? For instance, and this is a huge, huge advantage over battery-only vehicles, say you are in North Dakota in the dead of winter at –40 centigrade or Fahrenheit and you’ve left the vehicle out overnight, no battery in the world is going to develop any energy at those temperatures, so if you had a purely electric vehicle, you’d have to find a way to heat the battery to get it up to temperature. In our case the computer will know that it has been sitting in the extreme cold, and will light you off on the internal combustion engine, which will run for a few minutes to warm up the battery so that the battery can take over.
Another neat feature we will have because the vehicle is OnStar-equipped, is it will have logic in its brain that knows how far away from home it is because it’s used to being charged at a certain place. If you have taken a circuitous route home and are running low on battery, the computer knows “wait a minute, the guy is only 10 miles from home, no point giving him a full charge. I’ll just run the piston engine enough to give him a ten-mile charge because he’s going want to plug in at home. There are a million things like that that need to be written into the software code, and it all needs to work together seamlessly with no bugs.
I get these emails from electric vehicle fanatics saying, “Hey, what’s your problem? What’s taking so long? Just throw a bunch of batteries, take out the internal combustion engine, put in an electric motor and away you go. What can be so difficult here?†Well you know, it’s extremely difficult, and we’re not just building one of them. And with this vehicle, we have to meet ALL safety requirements around the world because it’s going to be a global car.
Lutz: Well, I would have liked to have the Volt yesterday, but the point is that if anything, it’s well ahead of schedule. The one vexing thing we have with every single program that’s in the pipeline is that our material costs are rising as the steel companies, the plastic, rubber, paint companies, no matter what kind of supplier company they are, are passing on their higher energy costs to us, so this problem is endemic throughout the whole auto industry, domestic or foreign as the quadrupling of oil prices works its way through the entire economic system. We are going to get cost-plus inflation so every one of our future vehicle programs is having cost issues as suppliers come in their final quotes. That worries me for the Volt, but then I tell myself, why worry particularly about the Volt, it’s a worry for every single program that we have, and the world public is going to have to brace for the shock of much higher automobile prices.
We have tested the Volt batteries under extreme cold and hot weather conditions. We’ve tested them in hot weather conditions with the battery cooling systems off. We’ve cycled them in the lab where the computer causes the simulation of a road load so that the battery doesn’t know it’s not in a vehicle. We have had some mechanical failures where solder connections between cells and elements have failed but hey, that’s just prototype build and inadequate soldering. It could have been any type of battery and the solder had failed. But with the Lithium-Ion technology, everything is smooth sailing. It’s doing what we thought it would do, and what the supplier said it would do, and it has been an almost eerie, almost scary absence of problems with the battery.
One of the major challenges with the car is writing all the software codes for all of the zillions of possible interactions between driver, electric drive, battery, regeneration, when does the internal combustion engine come in, under what circumstances? For instance, and this is a huge, huge advantage over battery-only vehicles, say you are in North Dakota in the dead of winter at –40 centigrade or Fahrenheit and you’ve left the vehicle out overnight, no battery in the world is going to develop any energy at those temperatures, so if you had a purely electric vehicle, you’d have to find a way to heat the battery to get it up to temperature. In our case the computer will know that it has been sitting in the extreme cold, and will light you off on the internal combustion engine, which will run for a few minutes to warm up the battery so that the battery can take over.
Another neat feature we will have because the vehicle is OnStar-equipped, is it will have logic in its brain that knows how far away from home it is because it’s used to being charged at a certain place. If you have taken a circuitous route home and are running low on battery, the computer knows “wait a minute, the guy is only 10 miles from home, no point giving him a full charge. I’ll just run the piston engine enough to give him a ten-mile charge because he’s going want to plug in at home. There are a million things like that that need to be written into the software code, and it all needs to work together seamlessly with no bugs.
I get these emails from electric vehicle fanatics saying, “Hey, what’s your problem? What’s taking so long? Just throw a bunch of batteries, take out the internal combustion engine, put in an electric motor and away you go. What can be so difficult here?†Well you know, it’s extremely difficult, and we’re not just building one of them. And with this vehicle, we have to meet ALL safety requirements around the world because it’s going to be a global car.