“The automotive industry as a whole has evolved towards having separate contractors design and supply many different components (e.g. Delphi, Valeo, Bosch, BorgWarner, Getrag). So the article’s assumption that GM would be building the batteries from scratch all by itself is rather striking in its fundamental ignorance of how the industry operates – and also ignorant of months-old developments in the Volt story.”

The is true of almost ANY manufacturer of complexity. If you were talking about a Caterpillar Bulldozer, many of the parts on that Dozer would be made by outside contractors, this is but one example, but it goes w/o saying.

That’s why that article that quoted, of all people, a University professor, who obviously has no idea what he’s talking about caused such controversy.

We have a large ship builder near where I live that builds our Nuclear aircraft carriers. In fact the only facility in the U.S. that builds them. When they were having difficulty in the 90’s the local news interviewed an Economics professor from a local university that suggested they start building merchant marine ships.

The local paper ran an article about his comments, and interviewed many shipbuilding experts from around the nation who could not believe his comments, and outlined why that would not be the thing to do, and suggested he really didn’t know what he was talking about. Turns out he didn’t.

A few contractual changes, including contract work on repairing navy vessels and 3 new carrier contracts and the shipyard was back on it’s feet.

Just a case in point.

Regarding who should get (be allowed to buy) the first Volts off the line… a good PR move would be to give 1st option to those who had leased EV1’s (http://ev1.org/) and GM had to pry the keys out of their hands. If you can win those EV1 drivers back it will go a long way.

Both.

They partner with NASDAQ traded CBAK and have their own facilities. The current new investment is to bring more of their own facilities on-line but clearly large volume will use their partner as well. The bottom line as demand goes up no doubt will be the bottom line: will it be cheaper to sub it out or to build it themselves? Without doubt their partner is put on notice that they have to price competitively enough if they are to get that business. CBAK for their sake is also in the business of other Li ion batteries and has a letter of intent with HP that may take up some of their current excess capacity if it goes through. They have also planned on developing in-China EV markets but so far other Chinese battery companies have cut those deals (GBT – publicly traded as well, Lishen, and BYD who is building their own brand of EVs)

Disclosure: personally long CBAK, GBT, GM, and a bunch of the battery players and other firms that I believe will benefit from what I see as the dawning of an EV transportion system.