GM's Eight-Year Volt Battery Warranty is Good Business
General Motors' announcement Wednesday that it would offer an eight-year, 100,000-mile warranty on the battery pack for the Chevrolet Volt "range extender" was a very good idea. It should go a long way toward alleviating the battery anxiety that first surfaced in hybrid cars and shows signs of ramping up further with battery-dependent electric vehicles.
And GM may not be sticking its neck out that far -- not only is the Volt program low-volume, but the company may be able to sell used EV packs to utilities for use as backup power (in part necessary because of the added EV load). Chevrolet has also put the Volt and its pack through an extremely rigorous test program, and it doesn't seem to be worried about a blizzard of claims.
Although hybrid cars have proven remarkably durable -- Toyota's Prius is a perennial at the top of Consumer Reports' annual reliability ratings -- people frequently express concern about its battery packs, in terms of longevity, replacement cost and end-of-life disposal.
Given that history, the company knew it had to go beyond its standard operating procedure, which is to cover components for five years or that same 100,000 miles. "The classic number one concern with electric cars is range anxiety," Don Sherman, technical editor at Automobile magazine, told me. "But number two is how long the battery pack will last, and number three how much it will cost to replace. GM is ticking off all three of those issues."
Pamela Fletcher, chief engineer for the Volt, told me that the pack was tested in both extreme cold and, at its proving grounds in Yuma, Arizona, extreme heat. Fletcher also directs a separate program to develop a plug-in hybrid, and that car is undergoing weather testing now. The next step for the Volt, she said, is a training program for dealers and service managers, who must learn the car's unique safety and service protocols.
Jeff Bennett, an associate professor of automotive marketing at Northwood University, said in an interview that GM's warranty is a vote of confidence on its part that the Volt's powertrain technology is stable, and that failures have been forecast to be infrequent. "I doubt that GM would extend the warranty if it represented a significant financial risk," Bennett said. "The risk is limited because of the low number of the Volt's initial production [10,000 units in 2011, 30,000 in 2012] and the possibility of GM being able to make improvements to the products as it is being phased in to the market."
EV battery packs will probably have two thirds or more of their original power when "retired," so there may be several possible uses for them. Resale to the utility market would certainly prove satisfying to environmentalists, because "reuse" is one of the three Rs. In a process called "Vehicle to Grid," or V2G, cars can even return power to the grid even with their batteries in place.
Utilities are all talking about battery backup, and some are acting on it. The Detroit-area DTE Energy has already created a one-megawatt, tractor-trailer-based mobile unit that can deliver emergency lithium-ion battery power to stressed sectors of the grid. Future units could be made of linked EV packs. Heat waves are one reason we'll need battery backups, but EV "clustering" in certain more affluent neighborhoods is another.
For utilities, the latter concept is a "load leveling" challenge. And without the smart grid, they're remarkably ill-equipped to deal with it. According to Larsh Johnson, chief technology officer at at eMeter, a smart grid management software company, utilities read electric meters only once a month. And they don't read them all the meters in the same neighborhood at the same time, so they're basically working in the dark as to the load in a particular neighborhood. They know when something blows.
Johnson said his software can help utilities "know the total load on a circuit." But just knowing that isn't enough. The utilities will need to either strategically beef up transformers or prepare backup units.
Even if utilities find something better than used car batteries to back up the grid, the lengthy battery warranty is necessary to get the Volt plugged in and over the hump of consumer confidence. In practice, GM probably won't have to take many of them back.
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Photo: General Motors