"Can you sense the nervousness?" asks Frank Weber, chief engineer on the General Motors extended-range battery car, the Volt. "There's a new sense of the future together with a slight panic." Weber thinks that the next 10 years in the automobile industry are going to be simultaneously exciting and very unpredictable. Why? Electricity, that's why. Continuing to build fossil-fuelled vehicles for 98 per cent of our road transport needs "is not a sustainable option", says Weber, but the options for incorporating electrical power are myriad – and that's where the problems begin. "If you are talking about hybridising a vehicle you'd better make sure you know a lot about batteries," says GM's chief financial officer Fritz Henderson. GM contends that while individual cell development is best left to specialist firms such as LG Chem, from which it is buying the Volt's 16kWh battery, the car industry cannot merely subcontract understanding the science of electrical storage and particularly how it impacts in the super-harsh requirements of road transportation. "We will have to understand and learn to judge what is real and what is not," says Weber, referring to some of the more outrageous claims made for petrol/electric hybrids and pure battery cars, particularly when it comes to range and longevity. It's often stated that there are no bad cars any more, but that's about to change. Weber admits that in a new world of nascent electrical transport, there are going to be some absolute lemons. It's not just car makers which will have to learn about batteries, but politicians, legislators, motoring journalists and the car-buying public will have to begin to understand the battery science as well. The alternative might involve being stuck at the side of the road waiting for a breakdown van and out of the loop of the technological revolution. GM says that the battery chemistry and types are changing so fast that it doesn't want to be a leader in the field of cell research, but it does want to be in the vanguard of automotive application research. The knowledge it wants to accrue out of the Volt programme is how to evaluate the latest battery technology, how to package it, make it ultra-reliable and long-lasting. As a result of several years of rigorous testing, the Volt's battery pack is guaranteed to propel the Astra-sized hatchback for 40 miles, rain, shine or snow, for 10 years. "I call it the law of large numbers," says Jon Lauckner, GM's vice-president of global programme management. "Those batteries have to be 99.9999 per cent good [or damn-near perfect] because we are planning on producing an awful lot of them and any sort of waste rate at all is going to be very, very expensive." The Volt goes on sale in the US in November next year priced at $40,000, with a European version called the Vauxhall (Opel in the rest of Europe) Ampera following in 2011. GM wants to be producing millions of cells eventually and claims to be already working of versions two and three of the Volt. It has recently commissioned a massive battery research laboratory in Warren, Michigan. I've been there but can't tell you much about it except that it's massive and smells of paint. Weber says that the Mark III Volt might even have a different sort of battery chemistry to the Mark I version. While Cadillac showed a concept called the Converj, based on Volt extended-range technology, at the recent Detroit motor show, Weber won't be drawn on whether follow-up vehicles will be bigger or smaller than the current Astra-sized Volt, that there aren't linear scale gains in downsizing the technology. In other words, the gains in a smaller, lighter car are not as big as you might expect. "In a Corsa the battery-only range would only become about 44 miles from the Volt's 40 miles, because smaller cars are not as good aerodynamically," he says. "This is not the search for the coolest tech, or the lowest price," says Lauckner, "it's about defect-free manufacturing."
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