The dark cloud hanging over electric vehicles in the wake of recent Chevy Volt fires may not lift, no matter how much engineers to do improve EV safety. That's because they're up against the gating factor of battery pack cost.
Experts say rising concerns over safety are going to make it tougher for engineers to dramatically cut the costs of lithium-ion battery packs. Already, General Motors is reportedly considering a redesign of its lithium-ion battery pack to help prevent damage during a collision.
"We just don't know how much lower we can go in terms of price," says Donald Sadoway, a battery expert and the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's not as if we can stand on the shoulders of all the work that's been done on cellphone and laptop batteries up to now. Laptop batteries don't have to be crashworthy."
The Chevy Volt battery pack caught fire three weeks after a crash test damaged it.
Photo courtesy of GM.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said one Volt fire occurred after a side crash test was performed on it in May. During the test, the vehicle's battery was damaged, and a coolant line was ruptured. The fire occurred three weeks later. Three similar tests in November did not result in fires, though one damaged battery did emit sparks and smoke, the agency said.
Experts are confident that current cooling systems, coupled with improved crashworthiness, will keep electric cars safe. "We will learn how to better deal with the safety issues," says Elton Cairns, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of California-Berkeley and a designer of fuel cells for the Gemini spacecraft program during the 1960s. "After all, any battery that can fit on a vehicle stores much less energy than a tank of gas."
Still, the concern is that lithium-ion batteries are already too costly, and that new safety measures will prevent them from dropping significantly in cost, even as economies of scale kick in. Today about half of the cost of an EV battery pack lies in its "non-cell" portion, according to the National Research Council, and that number could go up if crashworthiness becomes a big issue.
There's no doubt that the word "hydrogen" has a fear factor associated with it. But experts have pointed to additional issues with hydrogen fuel cells. At a recent UBM-sponsored panel discussion at the Embedded Systems Conference, experts cited three issues with fuel cells: outgassing, storage and infrastructure. But I think much of the problem comes down to this: In a sense, we've all been spoiled. Gasoline-burning cars are marvelous machines and they've raised our expectations so high that it's difficult for any new technology to come in and match up. Automakers are now tasked with satisfying incredibly high consumer expectations. If they don't build reliable machines, they'll be rightfully flooded with complaints from people who've invested $30K or $40K in their shiny new vehicles.
The plethora of ongoing engineering challenges with electric vehicles -- specifically, the cost of batteries (as discussed in this article) and their apparent vulnerability to fires) -- makes me wonder why fuel-cell vehicles are completely off the table. Only two years ago, Honda and several other automakers demoed hydrogen fuel-cell cars at major auto shows. These are ready to go; the big impediment is a complete lack of infrastructure. I still don't get why these vehicles have been ignored. It's a workable, safe technology. Maybe the word "hydrogen" scares people.
Kind of a sobering post, Chuck, but very enlightening. Based on what you outlined, it seems likely that refining Li-ion batteries and cooling system designs are likely only to deliver incremental benefits in terms of lowering costs--not nearly enough to move the bar in terms of sparking sales. As far as developing alternatives to Li-ion batteries, that seems like a long way off. It would be a shame to lose ground given how far we've come in the last five years in terms of wannabe acceptance of the EV as a mainstream vehicle.
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