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Race to Make Electric Cars
Stalled by Battery Problems
GM, Toyota Seek Ways
To Snuff Out Fire Risk;
Start-Ups See Opening
By NORIHIKO SHIROUZU
January 11, 2008; Page A1

DETROIT -- When the car world gathers here Sunday for the annual North American International Auto Show, the industry will be buzzing about electric power. Auto makers from General Motors Corp. to Toyota Motor Corp. will be displaying a new breed of cars that run mainly on electricity.

But there is one thing the car people won't be charged up about: batteries. For all the hoopla, nobody yet has figured out how to make a small enough battery that will hold a big enough charge for these new cars -- and not be a risk to burst into flames.

The limits of electric-car technology are achingly clear in one of the most-heralded cars on the drawing board: GM's Chevy Volt. GM executives mention the prototype, which the Detroit auto maker aims to put into production in three years, nearly every time they discuss their vision for "gas free" cars. But GM still hasn't solved the battery problem.
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I watched Lance run the pack through an entire US06 cycle, which represents a fairly aggressive driving pattern, and includes a spike of >100 kW of power. The pack flawlessly handled this 600 second electrical obstacle course without a hiccup, using only a fraction of it’s stored power.

Lance also said the pack, the first from LG Chem/CPI, dubbed “MRD 1A”, had already gone through more than 100 such cycles. He told me that within 2 weeks of it’s arrival there last Halloween, he already had enough data to know the pack had met all of his expectations and he expressed rock-solid confidence that the pack could handle the needs of the car.

I also learned an important fact about the pack’s thermal performance. This pack, although containing a fully functional cooling system, which could be seen as a series of small rubber tubes weaving throughout the modules, has handled all of its 100 plus cycles with the cooling system turned off. Lance told me that was because he wanted to understand the behavior of the pack in its native state without the possibility of corrupting the data due to the cooling system.

Despite the fact the cooling system has not been used, the pack has performed exceptionally well at room temperature, within a very tight temperature range, and has shown no signs at all of overheating. I saw the temperature curves right on the monitor myself folks - overheating rumors are rubbish, despite what the Wall Street Journal may say!!

I got to hold a single prismatic cell which was a less than a half inch thick square, about five inches in diameter, and weighing in a bit under a pound. In the pack, which really wasn’t that big, I could see the cells were segregated into 16 or so chambers each called modules, connected by wiring, circuit boards, and cooling tubing.

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