I’d be interested to hear whether GMC is finding the campaign to be effective. I can’t imagine that it would be with the LOHAS or Naturalite segments. Perhaps you were consciously targeting the lighter green consumer? Even so …

Li/Ion is also much smaller than lead-acid. It wouldn’t really fit.

So this puts the VOLT battery pack at $8,000.

To go back to your post #117, you said the Volt Li-ion battery will have a capacity of 16 kWh (to achieve a 40-mile pure-electric range, which, since it will reduce by 80% consumption of oil ending up as car fuel, I consider should be a national goal). You further said the Li-ion battery weighs 400 lbs. and a 16 kWh lead acid battery will weigh 4X as much, or 1,600 lbs. Dragging an extra 1,200 lbs. around is obviously disadvantageous even tho the lead-acid battery can be presumed to cost as little as $2,000 (per Doug Korthof) compared to Lutz’s estimate of $10,000 for the Li-ion or the maker’s estimate of $8,000.

Question: is the extra load more of a disadvantage (in lower mpg when the auxiliary engine is being used) than the disadvantage of the massive increase in cost (of Li-ion over lead-acid), which, after being marked up for overhead and profit, may result in a vehicle selling price of $40,000 instead of $30,000? I doubt that it is. If GM charges $40,000, I feel there will only be a niche market. We need a mass market to solve all the problems of cash outflow for increasingly costly oil, pollution, global warming, etc, etc.

But the above question is not really the most important one. Because the life of a Li-ion battery is reduced by full charges and deep discharges, (and GM wants it to last at least 100,000 miles) GM has designed the software in the controls to reduce the battery capacity by close to half. This is the result of not charging to over 85% and not discharging below 30%. So the Li-ion effective capacity is not 16 but only 8.8 kWh. Now, what would the cost of an 8.8-kWh lead-acid battery be? About half the previous guessed-at $2,000, or $1,000? And only half the weight disadvantage compared with Li-ion?

Further to my argument for consideration of lead-acid instead of Li-ion, it seems to me my guessed-at $2,000 comes from remembering hearing that the excellent Panasonic lead-acid used in the EV-1 also cost $2,000 for 19.7 kWh of capacity. And that was supposed to yield a range of 55 to 95 miles. The EV-1 curb weight was 2,922 lbs, perhaps less than the Volt (which I cannot find anywhere–do you know it?) but, since the Volt range is only 40 miles, it would seem that there may be room for some additional savings in battery cost here.

Do you know what the actual cost of Panasonic stock 19.7 kWh lead-acid batteries (in, say, 1,000 lots) was?

I want very much for the Volt to succeed and it seems to me that initial cost is the single most important factor: $20,000 instead of $40,000 should do it.

Of course, there may be other trade-offs of which I am not aware, like having to de-rate the lead-acid battery as well, for reasons of greater life and reliability.

I feel the auxiliary engine-generator set will take care of the range-anxiety problem (for me, anyway) and so there is no need to seek greater range than 40 miles (which the GM engineers have wisely chosen to save 80% of national automobile fuel consumption). And, for individual owners, fear of $5 gasoline and long lines at filling stations. The key is affordable initial cost, which a switch to the lead-acid battery could solve. Is it practical?

“2. Capturing the residual value of the battery. At 10 years these batteries should still have 75% of their original energy storage capacity. There will need to be a market to buy those used packs.”
One big problem with Lithium is that they have no recycle value, due to the energy required to process Lithium. With a high Internal Resistence, and odd form factor, they will still have no value for other applications, whereas NiMH and lead-acid EV batteries do have a recycle value as well as reuse as battery backup.

Why my concern about oil changes? A local man died near my home a few years age when the car fell off whatever he used to jack it up for an oil change. The worst part – he didn’t die from being crushed – he died from asphyxiation. The weight of the car prevented him from breathing in, and he died.

Changing your own oil is exhausting, dirty, dangerous when you’re under the car, and much harder to do in winter than in summer. (Those with the luxury of garages can keep your smugness to yourselves).

So not changing oil is VERY attractive to me. But the BEV manufacturers will have to overcome A LOT of range anxiety to sell outside the lush green confines of California.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/analysis_publications/oil_market_basics/dem_image_us_cons_sector.htm