GM Announces new Battery Testing Facility & More Volt Details

GM announced today they had built a 33,000 sq ft battery testing facility, while a few more Volt details slipped out of the interactive online portion of the event.

GM’s new battery development and testing facility in Michigan is over four times larger than their previous facility, provides 64 battery cyclers and 42 climate controlled rooms as well. These facilities to give both individual cells and full battery packs the testing they’ll need to survive the real world environment.

Speaking of the environment, the facility is designed in such a way as to not just waste all that electricity after a battery has been charged and discharged, but to put up to 90% of that power back on the grid or for other uses at the plant.

Half of the space is designed to test the fully built battery packs that will end up in vehicles. This is where the rubber meets the road as far as the battery packs go..

For example, we are able duplicate real-world driving patterns and compress a decade of battery calendar life into 24 months of simulations. The lab also contains a thermal shaker table for structural integrity testing, and a battery tear down area for competitor benchmarking.

This is the type of facility GM will need to eventually develop their own batteries and to test third party cells and packs.

The automotive industry has not only the largest possible demand for batteries over the next 10 years, but is also number one customer in terms of performance demands – batteries that last in all sorts of weather conditions over the course of 10 years and almost 2,000 complete charge/discharge cycles, with enough discharge power to move around a 2,000lb vehicle and its occupants.

The end goal is to secure GM as a leader in battery development and applications. Its also a possible source of revenue – as GM develops chemistries that allow cars to go further with smaller packs, the application of that same battery technology could be used in renewable energy, as well as portable computers and other electronics. So while they make battery packs lighter and more efficient, they also can monetize this technology in other ways, creating cells for laptops, phones and other yet to be invented devices and form factors.

The GM Live Blogging of the event this morning also included videos and some little or previously unknown Volt facts and figures:

• A fleet of 80 Volts (pre-production but both Volt body and chassis together) will be ready within the next few months. Work on the first unit has already started.
• If you’re starting the Volt in a cold conditions (winter in the nothern US) without being plugged in, the engine might be the initial source of energy until the batteries are sufficently warm.
• The engine state (on or off) will have no effect on the performance of the vehicle (so it wont rely on the engine and battery to climb hills as long as the battery has a high enough state of charge)
• The engine will run at a few different RPM levels depending on the car’s electrical load – one single RPM could use more fuel than is necessary if you’re sitting in traffic with little electrical load.
• Gen II Volt should have the same specs (40 miles electric only, 300 miles or more total range), but at a much cheaper cost. Including a bigger depth of discharge range.
• The Volt’s battery could be charged in 15 minutes, however it would require a different infrastructure – the ability to source large amounts of power not typically available at your residence (9.2kWh in 15 minutes is 220V/170A – most homes could at the very most source 220V/70A for a single appliance, or about 40% of what would be needed).
• GM claims that the cost of the battery is well below the $1,000/kWh figure often used.
• GM is on its fifth design iteration of the Volt battery pack, it is comprised of 155 different parts of which GM themselves designed 147 of them.