How the Volt Battery Is Changing Product Development
Unless you live on another planet or have been living in a cave for the past several years, chances are you are familiar with the fact that before the year is out, the 2011 Chevrolet Volt is going to be made available to the public. While initial production is going to be limited, and so the number of people who have Volts isn’t going to be even whelming, it does mark a transition in the development of automotive transportation.
That’s because the Volt, a seemingly ordinary front-wheel-drive, four-passenger sedan with styling straight out of a dealership near you (c’mon, GM Design, you really could have gone more NCC-1701 with the design and probably grabbed more people than you’d alienate), is a hybrid vehicle, but not like a Prius. Whereas a Prius typically runs on a small internal combustion engine and uses the batteries and electric motors (mainly) as a supplemental power source, the Chevy Volt has an internal combustion engine, too, but the engine is used as a generator to charge the 16-kWh lithium-ion battery that powers the electric drive unit that makes the front wheels turn. The beauty of this setup is the potential of driving up to 40 miles on pure electric power without using an ounce of gasoline (assuming, of course, that you plugged the car into a charging device before starting out on your drive). Then, when those 40 miles are up, you’ve got about another 300 before you need to refuel.
Now, you may be wondering: “Isn’t this supposed to be the Time Compression e-newsletter, not the one for Automotive Design & Production? What’s all this talk about the Volt for?”
Well, it’s because of this. On September 21,
Realize that GM is going to be playing it safe with the Volt’s battery, so there could be as much as 70% of its life still left in it after it has been extracted from the chassis.
What they are looking at for the batteries are stationary applications, like renewable energy storage (what do you do when you have that windmill in your backyard and don’t need the energy at the moment?); storage by utilities of electricity generated in off-peak hours to manage the load on the grid; back-up power supplies for neighborhoods; and more.
Again, you might be thinking, “Huh?”
It’s this: While the goal of the designers and engineers who were and are working on the battery system for the Volt was to come up with a bullet-proof battery for the rigors of surviving in an automotive environment, that’s not enough. Products need to be designed so that something useful and reasonable can be done with them after they’ve served their primary purposes. While for years the landfill may have been the unspoken but recognized resting place for products past their prime, for a variety of reasons—and not just environmental—that’s no longer the case, no longer the default option.
Consider the case of the Volt batteries. If GM and ABB are able to come up with a business case for the usefulness of the batteries, then there is greater inherent value in the batteries such that the cost of the very expensive battery pack could be lowered if the Volt customer indicates that the battery will be turned in at a specific point in time, or the customer could have greater residual value in the Volt when she’s ready for a new car.
Initial use is important. But designing and engineering for the future is going to be a game changer right now, but the entire game in the not-too-distant future.
