New battery pack is stacked atop standard Prius battery to show size difference.

By John O'Dell, Senior Editor

Building a better battery is no easy chore -- witness the scramble going on right now to prefect  batteries for plug-in hybrids and extended range electric vehicles such as the upcoming Chevrolet Volt.

There are a host of issues to tackle including weight, safety, power and energy density,  and, of course cost.

So there ought to be a maket for a hybrid vehicle battery that's lighter, cheaper and safer than the kind presently in use. 

Squiler says his Southern California company has one.

A World's-First

It's a nickel zinc battery, NiZn for short and not to be confused with NiMH, for nickel metal-hydride,  the standard today for hybrid-electric vehicles while the auto and battery industries are hard at work perfecting lithium ion batteries to replace them.

But lithium ion batteries, while lighter and more powerful, is a lot more expensive than nickel metal hydride, and that has given Squiller's compnay  a wedge it  hopes will make it a big player in the battery biz.

PowerGenix, an 8-year-old San Diego company that started selling its first batteries – for cordless power tools – just last month, says it has developed the world's first rechargeable nickel-zinc batteries suitable for hybrid-electric vehicle application.

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Big news on the Volt front.

GM's Bob Lutz has told Edmunds.com's Michelle Krebs that on-street testing of the series hybrid powertrain for the much-anticipated Chevrolet Volt has finally begun and that the Volt team is now aiming at a November, 2010, launch for the game-changing vehicle.

Lutz also said that in the test mule – a modified Chevy Malibu – the gas-electric plug-in powertrain is hitting GM's goal of providing 40 miles of all-electric travel before the gasoline-burning internal combustion engine kicks in to do its job of generating more electricity to keep the Volt running at full power.

The Volt, first introduced as a concept at the 2007 Detroit Auto Show, will use a lithium ion battery pack to store and provide juice for the electric drive motor. The gas engine is there only to generate electricity when the initial battery charge – obtained by plugging-in to the commercial electrical grid overnight – is depleted. 

There still are challenges to overcome, many of them linked to integrating the battery and gas generator for the smoothest and most sensible operating profile.

But Lutz said that despite concerns rival Toyota Motor Corp. and others in the industry have voiced about the reliability and safety of lithium ion batteries in automotive use, GM's engineers have overcome thermal issues. Now, he said, "I can almost say that the battery is the least of our concerns."

He wouldn't tell Michelle which of the battery systems being developed for the Volt by various contractors is being used in the test mule that took to the pubic streets Tuesday around GM's Milford proving grounds.

But his assurances that most battery issues have been resolved are good news in the global hunt for alternatives to cars and trucks that require fossil fuels.

You can read her exclusive interview with Lutz, GM's vice chairman and global product guru, at Edmunds AutoObserver.

John O'Dell, Senior Editor

LAS VEGAS, Nevada --A speaker on a panel discussing electric drive developments at the Alternative Fuels and Vehicles national conference here this morning lead off his talk  by projecting a big slide headlined "It's the Batteries, Stupid!"

That's the short way of saying that automakers, big and small, have pretty much got a handle on the electric drive hardware and the power electronics that control the flow of juice through the batteries and to the motor.

What's left is the challenge of developing a lightweight, powerful, reliable, long-lived, cheap, non-toxic, fast-charging and easy-to-recycle battery that doesn't create all kinds of environmental damage when its constituent parts are mined or manufactured.

That's no easy task, but there are dozens of companies working on it.

The latest bit of news, courtesy an unconfirmed report in Japan's Nikkei daily newspaper, is that Nissan and its battery development partner, NEC, are about to begin mass production of lithium ion batteries for the electric cars Nissan plans to launch next year.

That follows by just a few days another report that Volkswagen and its Audi unit plan to collaborate with Sanyo Electric to develop a new lithium ion battery for use in hybrid and battery-electric vehicle s in 2012 and beyond.

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Audi reportedly has inked a deal to work with Japan's Sanyo on development of high performance batteries for a pilot hybrid project for the Volkswagen Group, Audi's owner.

The alliance could lead to Sanyo batteries and other electronic components being used in future Volkswagen group models, British on-line automotive journal just-auto.com suggests.

Volkswagen's own hybrid development program has been scaled down dramatically by chief executive Martin Winterkorn, who thinks the 2,000 euro ($3,092) additional cost to hybridize a vehicle is too steep.

At Audi, there are plans for a hybrid Touareg SUV and a hybrid Q7 crossover. The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which initially reported  the Sanyo deal, said the partnership could lead to hybrid technologies being used in Audi's passenger cars as well.

John O'Dell, Senior Editor

Audi sees "great opportunities" in electric vehicles and will offer battery-electric automobiles with no exhaust emissions within ten years, its top executive told a German weekly.
 
Chairman Rupert Stadler, in an interview with Welt am Sonntag published Sunday, said he expects diesel and battery technology to be a dominate force the automotive market in five to ten years.

"By then we will offer cars without exhaust emissions," Stadler said.

Asked if Audi was trailing domestic rivals Mercedes-Benz and BMW in the development of  batteries to power electric vehicles,  Stadler replied that he wasn't worried, that Audi's research capabilities are larger than those of its competitors.

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 After a speech Thursday at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club, General Motors Chairman Rick Wagoner was asked if the Chevrolet Volt -- still two-plus years away but already starring in the automaker's TV ads -- would be GM's Prius.

The high-mileage, gas-electric car from Toyota Motor Corp. still dominates hybrid sales nearly a decade after it first went on sale in the U.S.

 "We think it could be a big game-changer.," said Wagoner, an executive not prone to over-statement.

"When we get it to the market, we'll see. If we deliver on what we have on the drawing board, I think it's going to show a lot of people that we've got great technology at GM and we can compete with anybody in that field."

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By Dale Buss, Contributor

Prabhakar Patil is used to taking the battery and running with it.

The company he heads, Compact Power, is one of two suppliers of the lithium-ion batteries General Motors is testing to outfit its hypercritical Volt plug-in hybrid project. But the high-pressure task before him only reminds Patil of a decade ago, when he was Employee One in Ford’s crash initiative to develop the Escape Hybrid.

"At the time, I was manager of electrical and electronics for Ford production vehicles," recalls Patil.

"Alex Trotman was [Ford] CEO, and Toyota had just introduced Prius. I got my assignment in the backseat of a Prius when he and I were being driven around, and [Trotman] said, 'Develop a hybrid for Ford.'"

Patil began immediately to build his Escape Hybrid team. He had a crew of about a half-dozen within a month and the team peaked at an enterprise of about 300 people before Ford introduced the vehicle in 2004 as the first hybrid SUV on the American market.

Patil came to Compact Power, a unit of the Korean chaebol LG Group, in late 2005, again as Employee One of what promised to be an ambitious enterprise to produce a market-leading lithium-ion battery and powertrain for the burgeoning U.S. hybrid market.

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A Skoda Fabia with hybrid conversion system attained a claimed 64 mpg,

A plugless plug-in hybrid??!!

So said the press release we received today from British automotive designers MIRA.

The company announced that it has developed a hybrid-conversion system it calls H4V (for Hybrid 4-wheel-drive Vehicle) that, in a technology demonstration vehicle, showed a 61 percent increase in fuel economy and a substantial decrease in tailpipe emissions.

The system uses a battery pack of three lithium ion "cassettes," each of which can be removed separately for recharging. MIRA suggests this would be especially handy for people who can't park near an outlet.

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By John O'Dell, Senior Editor

A lithium battery pack that will cost less than the current batteries in a Toyota Prius while providing twice the energy and  power has been developed by battery-maker EnerDel.

The company says the battery's performance has been validated in independent tests by the Argonne National Laboratory's Center for Transportation Research.

EnerDel is making the formal announcement this morning at its production facility in Indianapolis.

In a statement provided to Green Car Advisor, the company, co-owned by Ener1 Inc. and Delphi Corp., said the 1,000 watt-hour pack's lithium-titanate chemistry enables it to operate, sans external cooling system, without the heat build-up that can cause conventional lithium ion batteries to overheat and, in extreme circumstances, catch fire.  Eliminating the cooling system makes the battery system smaller, lighter and less expensive.

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Fuel cell hybrid truck uses batteries and hydrogen with quick-change fuel tanks.

By Scott Doggett and John O'Dell

French automaker PSA Peugeot Citroën and British fuel-cell developer Intelligent Energy have built a battery-electric delivery truck outfitted with a hydrogen-powered fuel cell stack to significantly extend the vehicle's range between battery charges.

Sounds good, but the companies' announcement this week has simply stirred up more debate over the efficiency of hydrogen as an automotive fuel.

One key element of the system's design – easily swappable pressurized hydrogen fuel tanks – is aimed at answering concerns about the lack of a hydrogen fuel infrastructure to support widespread use of fuel cells.

But fuel cell and auto industry specialists interviewed by Green Car Advisor raised questions about financial feasibility and public safety.

Some also question whether an extended range electric vehicle that relies on compressed hydrogen fuel is better for the environment than a battery-electric vehicle that relies on electricity from the commercial power grid

Like a Volt, But Bigger
The French-British partnership's H2Origin Partner vehicle is an electric-drive delivery truck that uses a 10-kilowatt fuel cell system fueled by hydrogen gas stored in 10,000-psi fuel tanks to produce electricity for the drive system.

Essentiallly, it is a truck version of GM's E-Flex and Ford's HySeries electric car concepts,  using a fuel cell instead of a gasoline or diesel generator  to produce electricity on board the vehicle.

The developers say it can travel up to 186 miles before the hydrogen is depleted – triple the 62 miles the battery-only version gets between charges.

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