GM's Competence in Understanding Battery Technology Must Be Seriously Questioned Over Its Choice Of Functionally and Technologically Bankrupt Cobasys To Test The Lithium Batteries For The Volt.

Implications: GM doesn't seem to understand battery technologies at all. Toyota's supplier of nickel metal hydride batteries has so far delivered more than 1 1/2 million of them for the Toyota hybrid fleet. Cobasys a joint venture between Chevron and Ovonic Materials-a spinoff of Energy Conversion Devices, which invented the nickel metal hydride battery-supplied GM's first hybrid models offered initially in the 2007 model year with batteries so poorly made that GM is recalling 100% of them. Cobasys took more than 5 years to achieve its level of complete incompetence and an investment of nearly $400 million dollars was totally wasted.   Astoundingly GM is now believed to be ready to buy out Chevron and Ovonic from the failed j/v and, even more incredibly, to award a contract to test lithium batteries for the Chevrolet Volt to the dolts at Cobasys. But, to give GM credit, such a buyout would allow it to cover up this monumental failure of lost opportunities.

Analysis: It is going to be impossible to believe from now on that GM has any idea of how to assess non lead-acid battery technologies.

GM has consistently failed to monitor the level of quality and technology at failed Cobasys even as other car makers have had great success with their suppliers of nickel metal hydride batteries. GM was Cobasys only customer and Cobasys was kept going with promises of volume orders in a future that was canceled when GM decided to pretend that it had mastered the technology for lithium batteries and for plug-in hybrids so as to try to steal, on the cheap, some green-ness from arch-rival Toyota by jumping right over the nickel metal hydride battery technology that GM hoped no one would notice that it had not mastered.

Now, we are supposed to believe that Cobasys life can be strung along even more with a promise to be a quality control auditor for fantasy lithium batteries sourced by GM. How many of Cobasys' current employees will it take to look at the two lithium batteries so far delivered for the Volt?

No one but GM ever seems to have bought a Cobasys battery a second time, and even Chevron has now gotten tired of pumping money into this dead turkey. If GM doesn't buy Cobasys and use the hulk to fix or bury its disaster with nickel metal hydride powered hybrids-GM can't make them work while everyone else can and it turns out that, to paraphrase James Carville, "It's the battery, stupid."-then GM's credibility in electric car technology will be less than zero.

GM needs a technical and purchasing management housecleaning in the worst way. It should start from the top, because that's usually where one finds the brain, or in GM's case the sawdust.

Would anyone buy a used Cobasys nickel metal hydride battery?