"GM Provides A Few More Details About Chevy Volt Lithium-Ion Battery " Green Car Advisor

GM Provides A Few More Details About Chevy Volt Lithium-Ion Battery

We hope GM doesn't release the Chevy Volt to dealers as slowly as it is dribbling out information about it.

The latest teaser, from GM battery guru Denise Gray, is that the lithium-ion battery pack for the extended range electric car (also called a plug-in hybrid, and both terms are correct) will weigh-in at about 400 pounds, have fewer than 300 cells and pack 16 kilowatt hours of energy.

Gray, director of hybrid energy systems for General Motors Corp., divulged the info during last weeks Management Briefing Seminars sessions in Traverse City, Mich.

She said the T-shaped pack will take six or seven hours to fully charge and is being designed so it can fit into a number of different compact models that GM offers worldwide.

In other Chevrolet Volt news, GM says that tweaks to the car's aerodynamics (it was a all angles and sharp edges in its concept phase, looking quick but delivering the aerodynamics of a refrigerator box) have added almost 7 miles to the distance it can travel on battery power alone.

The company has promised a car that can deliver 40 miles of all-electric driving before the on-board internal combustion generator kicks on.

GM also has promised to have the Volt introduced to the market by the end of 2010 and executives continue to insist that the company is on schedule to deliver.

The car that does hit showrooms will be more conventional-looking than the concept, and is likely to be priced closer to $45,000 than to the $30,000 GM originally was aiming for, but there apparently are many thousand of eager would-be buyers according to a report from an independent Volt site that had logged 33,000 "hand-raisers" as of last week.

We hope they all get one - heck, we want one too.

But more than that (pardon the apple pie and motherhood here) we hope the vehicle works as advertised and that the system is adapted for other vehicles in the GM fleet, and sooner rather than later.

John O'Dell, Senior Editor