Has The Chevrolet Volt Program Been Short Circuited By Economic And Engineering Reality?

Implications: Has General Motors oversold itself, and the public, on the Chevrolet Volt lithium battery plug-in hybrid program? If so, why? And, also, if so, is GM going to wake up and cancel it before the program's cost escalate further?

Analysis: Looking at the enormous upfront cost of GM's poster-car development program for the Chevrolet Volt it is obvious that the program was intended for the purpose of overcoming and covering over GM's decision to abandon the 'electric car' market to Toyota when, in 1999, GM canceled the EV1, battery powered electric car program, and left it to Toyota to introduce the first hybrid.

Today it is clear that GM has so far spent or allocated more than one billion dollars just on its electric car development center on the site of the former Pontiac Motors complex in Pontiac, Michigan. GM has just this model year finally introduced its own in-house developed hybrid power train on a select few models such as the Saturn Aura 'Hybrid,' which uses the tried and true nickel metal hydride battery pack, which, ironically, was developed for mass production by a joint venture between its inventor, Energy Conversion Devices, Inc., of Troy, Michigan, just down the road from Pontiac, Michigan, and GM, itself.

When GM decided that the range and top speed of the EV1 even with nickel metal hydride batteries substituted for lead-acid ones wasn't enough for the intended market the EV1 was withdrawn from the market and literally scrapped. This left Toyota to go ahead on its own and bring the nickel metal hydride battery using hybrid Prius to the market without competition where it remained until just now. 

Toyota was aware by the mid-2000s that GM was planning to develop its own hybrid, so, like GM, it looked for an latched onto the same idea; it, like GM, would announce that it was going to use an 'advanced' battery pack in, what for Toyota, would actually be the 'next generation' of hybrid car. The engineering management of both companies accepted the breathless hype of various college professors that a lithium-ion system, which college freshman in chemistry learn can make a higher power density battery, theoretically, could be rapidly developed.

The college professors, eager to make their fortune, and the engineering managers at the car companies, eager for promotion and bonuses, convinced the financial managers who had taken control of the car companies that the development of the batteries and their engineering validation, which normally take the projected lifetime of the device, could be rapidly done with a high confidence level. This silliness, all of the engineers knew better, became gospel and the great race to outspend the other was on, at least between Toyota and GM. 

GM's financial analysts had wondered from the beginning whether or not Toyota was making any money on hybrids; they suspected not. The Asian driven commodity boom of the twenty-first century convinced most auto industry outsiders that Toyota could not be making money on the Prius; it was obvious that the materials critically needed to make a nickel metal hydride battery pack large enough for the Prius had skyrocketed in cost from around $1000 in 1999 to more than $6000 in 2007, and they were still going up.

Meanwhile no one has yet built a full scale factory-Johnson Controls and SAFT have announced a little tiny factory test site-to make full size lithium technology batteries for vehicles. Even though the theoretical lithium-ion batteries now being touted use less expensive raw materials than a current, actually much improved over the original, nickel metal hydride battery, the costs of lithium-ion technology battery packs are completely unknown, because no technology has yet been chosen for genuine mass production, and, in any case, factories to handle large quantities of extremely reactive lithium will not be low cost to build or operate.

Since the final lithium technology has not been chosen there is no way to cost out the batteries. In addition until the final technology is chosen it is not possible to even begin life, reliability, and safety validation studies.

There is not even today a recycling technology in place either for nickel metal hydride batteries or for any of the myriad of lithium-ion types 'in development.' No car company with rational management will deliver a component made from hazardous materials without a disposal or recycling plan in place; neither yet exists. This represents more and long term liabilities and costs.

Between one and two million hybrid vehicles have so far been built with safe, reliable, long-lived nickel metal hydride batteries giving cars with ranges and performances that the buying public clearly likes.

So why don't GM and Toyota just continue on that path?

It is because each is waiting for the other to blink, and if they don't reeducate themselves and the public soon then both companies will have wasted billions of dollars building the right car all along while chasing a chimera for no good reason.

GM and Toyota should pull the plug on lithium batteries and keep running on nickel metal hydride; neither of them can afford this 'next generation' circus indefinitely.