Electric News
by Eric Richard
There have been several previous postings on this blog about the GM Volt.
Up until now, the Volt has been described as a “concept car” and no one from GM had ever crossed the line into saying that the Volt would ever go into production.
It looks like that is starting to change. According to an article in the Detroit Free Press GM is continuing to work on the battery technology problem and is hoping to have batteries ready for road testing by next spring on the way to bringing the Volt to market by the end of 2010.
I thought there was one very interesting comment in the article that speaks to some of the “out of the box” thinking that is going on about how to get an electric vehicle to market. Specifically:
GM is exploring the possibility of selling its electrically propelled vehicles but leasing its batteries, the idea being to get people to think of the batteries as a fuel source and pay for them as they go, the way they do for gasoline and diesel.
I wonder whether other vendors will look to do the same thing until the battery technology is all the way there.
Going along the lines as a previous thread, my hope is that this just continues to advance the battery technology forward to the point that hybrid electrics can be made by several vendors.
Of course, the Volt isn’t the only game in town. The high end Tesla Roadster will be rolling off production lines later this year. Of course, they solved the problem the “hard way” by using something like 2,000 laptop batteries in each car. Not exactly a cheap solution, but I guess that’s why they charge $98,000 / car whereas the Volt is intended to “come in at the price of a conventional mid-market car.”
on August 10th, 2007 at 6:33 pm
Interesting… You see out of the box thinking to overcome the shortcomings of the battery technology. I see a way for GM to continue to own a critical component of my car so that they can recall it at their leisure.
After what they did with the EV1, I am less likely to trust GM.
on August 10th, 2007 at 7:09 pm
Speaking of the EV1, why is there no talk about bringing it back? It seems that there has been enough discussion about it being “recalled”, but no talk of bringing it back.
on February 21st, 2008 at 3:45 am
Yah, going along with Vicky, I think there’s a general rule we can abstract here:
The words GM and “thinking innovatively” will never be connected except by a construction that means “is not,” as in
“GM ain’t thinking innovatively.”
The two links provide some evidence for that claim–gossipy, not exhaustive, to be sure, but nonetheless persuasive.