GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

Sure we’re saving our pennies to buy a Chevy Volt, the economy is sputtering, and GM just lost $3.3 billion this quarter.

But wouldn’t it be great to tap into that future $30 billion lithium-ion automotive battery market?

The news li-ion battery investors out there have been waiting for is starting to trickle in.

Watertown Massachusetts battery-maker A123 Systems, the GM Volt partner who we just discussed in the last post, is reportedly about to file for their IPO according to a blog post citing inside sources.

A123 has already raised over $132 million in venture funding and reportedly have “essentially completed” their IPO filing. We are told the S-1 should arrive at the SEC within a month, and that the “road show” may take place in September. Goldman, JPMorgan and Merrill have been chosen as the bankers.

Expected value $1 billion.

Could this be another Google? Your guess is as good as mine.

Source (Private Equity Hub ) and (Innovation Economy )

After Volt Nation, I received an email from Michael Granoff, who is a #1 investor with Project Better Place (PBP). It turns out he lives within a mile of where I work and we planned to meet up. We had a wide ranging discussion about Project Better Place, whether it could come to America, and how the Volt might fit in.

For those who are not familiar with it, Project Better Place is the highest funded greentech start-up in history, led by Shai Agassi formerly of SAP, the company aims to build a profitable electric car charging infrastructure. Plans are well underway in Israel, and Denmark also just signed on. They are partnering with Renault-Nissan to build the cars.

The concept is that charging ports and battery exchange station would be rolled out throughout a nation. Subscribers would own an electric car and be able to charge it anywhere they park it, using a vehicle- recognizing smart-charging architecture. For trips greater than the battery’s range, subscribers would simply pull into a battery exchange depot and have the spent battery rapidly replaced. One would never own (or have to pay for) the battery, it would be owned by PBP. The result, according to Michael, is that the vehicles would cost much less; the automaker wouldn’t have to fund or build the battery pack. Michael even suggests that for a reasonable monthly rate, subscribers could get the car for free, just like how cellphones are.

Michael admits that getting PBP to the U.S.  will be challenging, in particular, cars are taxed in Israel and Denmark, and EVs are not, creating public incentives. Overall, the California-based company would love to build the U.S. architecture too.

Michael was pleased GM has realized as Mr. Lutz has said , “the electrification of the automobile is inevitable” but is concerned about the Volt’s design. He feels adding a range extender and its control architecture is an unnecessary expense and complexity, for if PBP’s charging infrastructure was in place, none of it would be needed, and petroleum could be fully displaced.

I pointed out that if we wait for the architecture, though, it may be long after 2010 that we get our EVs here.

Michael agrees battery technology will advance to likely cover 300 or so mile range one day, but feels PBP could be to electric cars like what AOL was to the internet. Get the revolution underway, and then quietly ride off into the sunset.

To learn more about expected timing, location, and cadence of ramp-up for initial Chevy Volt production I turned to Jon Lauckner who is GM’s VP of global program management, considered a first deputy to Bob Lutz. Below are his answers to my questions.

When it comes to rolling out the car in the U.S., do you anticipate starting out with a small fleet and gaining information about how the car is functioning, like you are doing with the fuel cell Equinox, or are you just going to release it like you did the new non-hybrid Malibu?

First of all as part of the development program we typically have small amounts of a vehicle that we put out in the hands of people that drive them on a daily basis. Thats a part of our development program that occurs prior to production. We call that a “captured test fleet”. Captured, meaning we know where the cars are and we know who the drivers are, and test fleets because the cars aren’t in production yet but use the versions that we build at the tail end of the development cycle to really put them out there on a daily basis to get better understanding of whats going on with the vehicles.

We will be doing that with the Volt as well. We will have the typical development program that will result in a captured test fleet prior to starting production. And then once we reach production, then we will start ramping up. Again we haven’t decide exactly how we are going to do it, but I would anticipate that we will do it in a fairly measured way. And this is not unusual for us, we do this in Europe as well. In Europe its not unusual for Opel Vauxhall to start production in one market and then as they build volume in that market, they add additional ones down the line.

The point is it makes no sense if you’re ramping up production to have people frustrated because the car is in theory able to be sold in every area but they cant get their hands on one because the amount of volume is relatively small. So I’m sure that we’ll use a cadenced approach but typically we ramp up our plants reasonably quickly and beyond that its really way too early to talk about volumes and specific geographic areas.

Is the captured test fleet something that people would buy or will it be a leasing type of situation?

Typically we put these in the hands of GM folks, when we do it prior to the start of production , employees, people in the technical community, people who work in the plants, manufacturing. The idea is to put those with a small group of peole where you can get rapid feedback on what’s going on. Now thats the way we’ve done it for our regular production programs. What we do for the Volt could be a variation of that. There’s nothign to say that we couldn’t do a program much like project driveway.

Yesterday A123 Systems, one of the two companies awarded Chevy Volt contracts announced that they were awarded a key patent for their proprietary nanophosphate lithium-ion battery cathode.  their system is widely acclaimed for its thermal stability as well as energy and power density, and getting this patent is critical for the companies future success.  Per A123 CEO David Vieau “The award of this patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is recognition of the leading-edge innovation on which our batteries are based.”

Source (sys-con)

I recently caught up with Ric Fulop, the VP of marketing of A123Systems. It was the first opportunity I had to speak with him since GM received the first prototype pack from A123/Continental in late January.

We had a rather wide-ranging discussion on everything from how li-ion cells are made to politics to financial issues. No transcript is available this time.

We discussed how lithium-ion cells are made. The basic structure is called an electrode stack. On one side is a thin aluminum metal foil, with a thin coating that includes the cathode material, binders and additives, in the center is the separator and the electrolyte solution containing the lithium ion salt. The other half of the structure is a thin copper film coated with the anode material, binders and more additives. These electrodes are stacked together into what is known as a “jelly roll” which composes the main bulk of the cell. The cell contains a variable number of electrodes depending on the total energy and power the cell requires for its intended operation. Ric tells me amusingly that these terms such as “prismatic” for square-shaped” and jelly roll are generally derived from the broken English translations occurring when they were first invented. Reminds me of the famous “all your base are belong to us”.

A123 has completed the design of the cell specific for the Volt and its cells appear in the first Continental pack GM received on January 31st.

I sat down for a brief Q and A with Frank Weber. He is the vehicle line executive for the Chevy Volt and all of E-Flex systems for GM. He knows a lot about what’s going on and is very forthright and forthcoming.

What was GMs motivation to build the Volt?

Societal challenge. Look at the future what you see is that not the industry nor any individual OEM can afford not to believe that this is next big step. Because it is the only technology currently available that can make a fundamental difference. People say “yes but you do hybrids”, but this is there to improve fuel economy above regular fuel-consuming vehicles. Then you look at the data that we currently have on the Volt, and we did intensive work. What we did was in Southern California there are data released from the regional traffic survey, over 600 people had data recorders in their vehicles to see “how long did they drive”, “how demanding was their driving”, lots of data, and we looked at it and we said “What difference would the Volt make in that context relative to hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and conventional vehicles?” The data is just amazing. They had engines starting ten times, we’d have it starting one time, reducing emissions by 70%. When you look at the fuel economy in the end and you saw how many percent versus conventional, you would be at twenty percent of fuel consumed for those drivers, and by the way, those were regular drivers, and SUVs and everything, so this was not a special group.

With the Volt what you see is this is the only way to produce (the energy) independence that we were looking for, and the 40 miles, and this is what made us so comfortable that the concept was right, will really be for a majority of drivers, because the only thing that counts is what will be the reality when you drive this vehicle, is the guy able to say the week has seven days and I will be able to drive six of those without burning any fuel. This is whats going to happen.

If you think this concept through its not about whether you have then once a week the engine will start and burn fuel, this is fine and give people the security that they can do everything with this vehicle that they are used to, but what really counts is what will happen with daily driving in a real world environment. There many people have not even understood how significant the changes are that that this concept will introduce.

The Volt development program is unique because it is parallel in that you are developing the pack at the same time as the rest of the car instead of in serial order?

(Normally) What you would do with the propulsion train and the battery side is you would have a what we call a decoupled or pre-development of that activity, only the moment you know that this is all working and you have tested it then you would start the actual vehicle program.

What we have done is we said to save time, (considering) our confidence with the battery technology and the propulsion technology is so high that we will start the vehicle and the propulsion/battery at the same time, except that this is introducing a higher risk to the development process. What we are doing with this is that we will have the tests of batteries in cars available in early 2008. I’d be surprised if things occur that were not foreseen, although this might happen. We still think it is still the better way to accept risk and build up hardware for the real production vehicle. It speeds up things dramatically.

Beside the battery packs, do you already have all the rest of the hardware for the vehicle functional, for these development mules, i.e the motor control systems, and generator, etc?

What we are doing is we are leveraging, we have a powertrain portfolio because of the strong hybrid and 2-mode hybrid, there is a lot of electric drive experience, and we have the Equinox fuel cell vehicle which is electric, and what we are now doing for the Volt is we are combining those efforts and are not developing everywhere, especially in places where it is not necessarily unique, developing everywhere new components, so the regenerative brakes are just another generation of what we are doing on the two-modes, so we are combining everywhere now pulling together this portfolio of fairly reliable components where we have some background.

Is the electric motor for the Volt the same as what you already have in the 2-modes or fuel cell Equinox or new and different?

It is a different motor specifically designed for the performance needs of the Volt. We will have the first prototypes soon, but as a physical part it is currently not available. We are talking about 115 kW of peak power and this is not something we have around. The hybrid motors don’t need this power. It is a different configuration.

Are you considering different options for generator configuration, for example a parallel design when in charge-sustaining mode?

What we always said is clearly, we have a simplified gasoline or biofuel engine on-board that is only there to generate electricity, and we don’t want to introduce more complexity to the design. Many discussions around the engines itself have been had whether it is diesel or not, but in the end I said I really don’t care because it is an engine that is only there to generate electricity and we will do everything to simplify wherever we can.

If the engine is only there to generate electricity why don’t you use a turbine or a Stirling engine?

What you will see is midterm and longterm there might be other solutions for how you generate electricity but since we said time is important and being fast is important, and also commercial viability is important you will leverage what you currently have in your portfolio, picking up “family zero” small displacement gasoline engines. By leveraging existing powertrain components means for us limiting engineering risk, being fast in execution, and being at a cost point where all those, what you’ve described, advanced solutions that are currently not available, would not be affordable. In the end, these don’t make much of a difference, because we dont want to burn gasoline to generate electricity, this is not the idea of the vehicle. So there will be alternative solutions in the future but for the time being I think we are more comfortable in taking something that we have.

Have you chosen the exact engine that you want to use?

The one that you saw in the show car last year is a “family zero” engine. We are currently working to optimize the specific setup for it, but we will be working off that specific engine.

The Cadillac Provoq is GM’s latest E-Flex concept car, a luxury crossover with all wheel drive and fuel cell range-extender. Nick Zielinski who used to be the ICE Volt’s chief engineer is now the chief engineer of the hydrogen Volt and Provoq, as well as the fuel cell Equinox. I had a few moments to speak with Nick at the Provoq Detroit unveiling (see post).

What brought about the Provoq design?

We’ve been intrigued with trying doing something with Cadillac, its our high line vehicle, our technology leader, taking our most advanced technology propulsion system and marrying that with Cadillac made a lot of sense.

When you figure fuel cells as we introduce them are going to be low volume and they’re going to be more expensive than traditional propulsion systems. So it made sense from a marketing standpoint to link up with a high line vehicle. It was just a nice marriage between the image of Cadillac and the technology of our most advanced propulsion system. So my role in that one was around the propulsion system of E-flex, since I’m doing the E-Flex fuel cell off the Chevy Volt, we also did the Provoq.

Are you actually in the production pipeline, moving towards a hydrogen fuel cell Volt?

Were working on an E-Flex version of the fuel cell as opposed to the generator set, and were working in the same way were working the regular E-Flex for the Volt. We are moving towards production. We are not making any commitments on production timing. We’ve got a number of issues. We are working on our fifth generation fuel cell stack. Similar to the battery, the readiness of that fuel cell is going to take whether we introduce it and when we introduce it.

Is the fifth generation lighter or smaller or more efficient that the fourth generation?

There are a number of drivers. One of the big things we are doing for the fifth generation is physically making the stack part of it smaller. In our Equinox program the fuel cell stack is pretty tall and what we want to do is get that system smaller. That way we can pack it into a broader range of vehicles. Because of the height of the current stack there were some limitations on the vehicles you could put them into. So the next generation will have much broader application, also some new technologies to address durability which is an issue we continue to need to work on in our fuel cell systems.

What do you mean by durability? Are they fragile and not handle road vibrations well?

No. Thats not really an issue. The way a fuel cell works is they like to be what we call a steady-state device. They like to produce power at a certain operating level and stay that way. A car is a dynamic device. You have to increase the amount and oxygen and hydrogen to get more voltage to make a car accelerate. What happens in a fuel cell is those transients take a little bit of the life out of the stack. So we have to make sure we understand the materials and the chemistries and the membrane that does the conversion to electricity. Things like starting it and stopping it affect that durability. So a lot of work to pull all that stuff together.