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As a man thinks, so he is. Some people are never.

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Turn off the nav system, crumple up that MapQuest printout, and let's find out where the next random turn may take us!

Sep 15, 2007 - Chill Out

Wait a minute chum! The Commissioner has some important news!Holy lithium-ion Batman! Will anyone ever come up with a breakthrough to make batteries more practical for hybrids and electric vehicles?

In a piece on the brand new Green Car Advisor, Edmund Senior Editor John O'Dell reports that GM's line director for the E-flex electric vehicle platform told Green Car Advisor that they've found a way to ease overheating in the big arrays of lithium-ion batteries that will propel the Volt and other models.

It's a brute force solution that involves running liquid coolant lines through the battery packs. GM says that they're still on schedule to have Volts on the market by 2010.

This isn't exactly the leap in battery technology that's going to put an electric chicken in every pot in my view. My gut is telling me that the breakthrough in batteries is going to be something we're really not even contemplating right now. After the EV-1, this may be GM's last shot at this.

Will the added expense and weight of a cooling system be outweighed by the benefits of battery packs that don't overheat? Can liquid cooling of the battery packs do enough to make electric vehicles a practical reality? Will Mr. Freeze actually turn out to be a good guy?

Chill out until the next episode. Same Bat time. Same Bat channel.

Practical EV's
Clean, green, and quick to charge up
Can they make it go?

3:13 am | Categories: electric vehicles, green car advisor, john o'dell
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Comments
pf_flyer - Sep 16, 2007 3:55 pm
The battery overheating would seem to be a pretty big concern this close to a 2010 launch date.
michael2003 - Sep 16, 2007 3:59 am
I don't understand why all of a sudden GM has a concern over battery overheating. I have been reading that the A123 batteries they were planning to use did not have a overheating problem. What's up?
mrboww - Sep 15, 2007 5:46 am
I'm not sure it's laziness. I just think it's a lack of creativity. If you're a Star Trek fan and go watch a shuttle launch, you'll be surprised at the overall brute force rather than any kind of sexy technological propulsion. As much as we think there should be, the technology hasn't caught up to the imagination yet.
carlitos92 - Sep 15, 2007 4:22 am
I totally agree that GM's liquid cooling is not going to be the solution to the Li-ion battery heat problem. I really think it's rather disappointing, actually. Instead of market-leading engines (Corvettes notwithstanding), GM buyers got variable timing added to PUSHROD engines. Instead of REAL hybrids, they got an electric motor/generator that was thrown into the serpentine accessory belt of the Vue Green Line. Cooling systems might be the future for hybrid batteries, but circulating liquid around them seems like a bad idea to begin with. I'm not anti-American, but all of these "solutions" smack as half-baked, stop-gap, or last-ditch, depending on your point of view. Sometimes, perhaps "ingenuity" really is just laziness.
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