battery pack

  • Renault Connected Energy charging station powered by second-life batteries

    Renault hasn't tackled the home-energy storage market to the degree its alliance partner Nissan has, but it has found another use for "second-life" batteries. The French brand has worked with UK-based Connected Energy to install two electric-car DC fast-charging stations powered by second-life batteries. Once the energy capacity of lithium-ion batteries has fallen to a point that they are no longer suitable to power vehicles, they still retain considerable capacity for use as energy storage. DON'T MISS: Nissan home energy-storage battery: another front against Tesla? The electric-car charging...

  • 2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV, road test, California coastline, Sep 2016
    2017 Chevy Bolt EV battery may fail due to faulty cell; new pack needed for a few GM electric cars (updated)

    General Motors has informed "a few hundred" owners of 2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV electric cars that their cars could suffer from a problem with the lithium-ion battery pack that could cause it to fail without warning. The cars were among the very earliest Bolt EVs produced for public sale, so are...

  • Tour of Tesla battery gigafactory for invited owners, Reno, Nevada, July 2016
    Tesla Model 3 battery cells will turn a profit for Panasonic by next year

    Relatively few people focus on it, but the huge Japanese electronics company Panasonic is a minority shareholder in electric-car maker Tesla. The deal dates all the way back to November 2010, the same year that Tesla completed its initial public offering after Toyota took a stake in the company and...

  • Tesla Motors - Model S lithium-ion battery pack
    Better alkaline batteries, made rechargeable, to power electric cars?

    Alkaline batteries have been a staple energy source for decades, but their potential has been capped by their chemical properties. Notably, alkaline batteries cannot be recharged, which means their application is often limited to single uses in small devices such as flashlights and remote controls...

  • Tesla Motors - Model S lithium-ion battery pack
    Electric-car battery progress: incremental improvements, not revolutionary leaps

    The report that Toyota is planning an electric car with a solid-state battery for 2022 has led some fans and advocates to suggest huge new leaps in electric cars are imminent. The 2011 Nissan Leaf had an EPA-rated range of 75 miles combined; the comparable figure for a 2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV is 238...

  • Teaser for Fisker EMotion debuting on August 17, 2017
    Fisker: about those graphene electric-car batteries? Never mind

    Fisker's promise to bring advanced, solid-state graphene cells to the battery pack of its upcoming Emotion electric car is officially dead. Automotive-grade graphene batteries have yet to be perfected, but Fisker was poised to become the first company to utilize the technology. The batteries...

  • Rick and Linda SantAngelo with the 2011 Nissan Leaf at 96,000 miles

    The 2018 Nissan Leaf will likely be revealed within the next three months, but more than 100,000 older Leaf electric cars are still silently in use on U.S. roads. Some of them, especially the lowest-range cars from the two earliest model years (2011 and 2012), have started to see significant battery capacity degradation. That was the case with Rick and Linda SantAngelos' 2011 Nissan Leaf after 90,000 miles: it had only 30 to 35 miles of range left on a battery originally EPA-rated at 73 miles of range. DON'T MISS: Lessons learned from early electric car: 2011 Nissan Leaf at 90,000 miles That...

  • 2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV
    How much is a replacement Chevy Bolt EV electric-car battery?

    It's one of the most common questions among electric-car buyers: what happens if the battery fails? The answer is that all electric-car batteries are warranted against failure for either 8 years/100,000 miles or 10 years/150,000 miles, depending on which state you live in. The followup is often...

  • 2017 Renault Zoe
    Renault plans huge energy storage plant using old Zoe electric-car battery packs

    With more plug-in electric vehicles on the road today than ever, automakers are working to solve an impending issue: what to do with used lithium-ion batteries. Once the batteries are no longer suitable to power vehicles, automakers must recycle or repurpose them. Now, through a partnership with...

  • A123 Systems manufacturing facility, Livonia, Michigan
    Battery maker A123 quietly became a half-billion-dollar company

    Ten years ago, lithium-ion cell maker A123 Systems was a hot startup and a much-publicized company. This author, in fact, profiled the company for IEEE Spectrum in the technology magazine's September 2007 issue. The six years that followed proved enormously painful for the Massachusetts company...

  • 2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV pre-production vehicles at Orion Township Assembly Plant, March 2016
    Chevy Bolt EV costs $28,700 to build, Tesla Model 3 a bit higher: analysis

    The costs and prices of electric cars are endlessly debated, not only among owners and advocates but within the industry itself. The cost per kilowatt-hour of electric-car batteries is closely held, with a few notable exceptions. One of those was the statement by GM product chief Mark Reuss that...

  • StoreDot shows fast-charging battery cell, Cube Tech Fair, Berlin [via Periscope: Gruendermetropole]
    Israeli firm StoreDot claims battery with 5-minute charging time

    It's one of the Holy Grails for battery researchers and electric-car advocates alike: a battery that could recharge in the same amount of time as it takes to stop for gasoline. Some of that can be provided by charging at higher rates, as Porsche's proposed 800-volt system for 15-minute fast...

  • Tesla Model S lithium-ion battery pack in rolling chassis   [photo: Martin Gillet via Flickr]

    Perhaps the biggest question in buyers' minds over electric cars is how long the batteries will last. Most new-car buyers have mobile phones whose batteries have only lasted a couple of years, perhaps less. Even as electric-car battery packs are warranted against outright failure for eight or 10 years, how much degradation should owners anticipate? DON'T MISS: Electric car battery warranties compared The question has surfaced again as a few of the earliest Nissan Leafs now appear to have lost up to half their battery capacity, with drivers finding their range has fallen below 50 miles of...

  • 2011 Nissan Leaf electric car after battery-pack replacement  [by owner Tim Jacobsen, Concord, CA]
    How to negotiate for a new Nissan Leaf battery pack: electric-car owner advises

    In designing, testing, and producing the Nissan Leaf, the first modern electric car sold in volume, Nissan made a design decision that some other companies didn't. It chose not to build an active thermal-conditioning system (otherwise known as cooling) into its battery pack. Instead, it relies on...

  • Tesla Motors - Model S lithium-ion battery pack
    Northvolt: $4 billion electric-car battery plant planned for Sweden by former Tesla execs

    Tesla is currently ramping up lithium-ion battery cell production at its U.S. "Gigafactory" near Reno, Nevada. But the automaker has discussed plans for at least one additional Gigafactory, presumably to meet demand for battery cells related to large-scale electric-car production outside the U.S...

  • Tesla Model S battery pack teardown: frame from YouTube video by JehuGarcia, Feb 2017
    Tearing down the Tesla Model S battery pack (video)

    The lithium-ion battery pack is at the heart of any electric car. Its cost, energy density, and safety features do as much as any other feature of an electric car to determine its success. And battery packs from Tesla Motors differ from those built by virtually any other electric-car maker in at...

  • Lithium-ion cell and battery pack assembly for Nissan Leaf electric car in Sunderland, U.K., plant
    Electric-car batteries: $100 per kwh before 2020, $80 soon after?

    Modern electric cars have developed to the point where range itself may become less of an issue than the cost of providing it. Automakers can create longer-range electric cars simply by installing larger battery packs, but that adds significant cost to the car's single priciest component. Just ask...

  • 2017 Tesla Model S
    New Tesla Model S 100D version rated at 335 miles of electric range

    If anything, the pace of new Tesla model changes seem to have increased of late. Over the last year, a 60-kilowatt-hour battery option has reappeared, a new 100-kwh battery was launched, followed by a sequence of software updates to make it faster, and all Autopilot sensors were replaced with new...

  • Volkswagen plant

    It takes people to make cars: to lift and install parts, check quality, test-drive them after assembly, and so forth. Automation has eliminated many of the jobs performed by humans a century ago on the Ford Model T line, and made the rest much less physically punishing for line workers. But electric cars pose a new threat: they will require even fewer workers to build. DON'T MISS: Electric cars will require 10,000-plus job cuts at VW, says HR chief And that has auto-worker unions and automaker executives more than a little worried. Here's the math: a battery-electric car has fewer than 200...

  • 2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV
    Electric car battery warranties compared

    It's one of the most frequently asked questions by anyone hearing about a modern electric car: do I have to replace the battery? With 15 years of experience in mobile phones and more than that with laptop computers, most buyers know that lithium-ion batteries lose capacity over time. Replacing...

  • 2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV
    2017 Chevy Bolt EV 10 to 40 percent battery-capacity loss: possible, but unlikely?

    When's the last time you sat down and read large parts of an owner's manual for a car? If it's been a few years—or a few decades—you may be surprised how frustrating they are if you're actually searching for specific information. By and large, their indexes are atrocious (often using...

  • 2017 Hyundai Ioniq (European spec), 2016 Geneva Motor Show
    Hyundai Ioniq Electric car to get 200 miles of range 'soon'

    The Hyundai Ioniq Electric will get a range increase to keep pace with competition.

  • 2017 Toyota Prius Prime Premium
    Now Toyota can make electric cars: it's tamed lithium-ion batteries, it says

    Toyota is one of the world's three largest carmakers, along with General Motors and Volkswagen Group. Having placed its bets for the future of zero-emission transport on hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, it's by far the most resistant of the three to the notion of battery-electric cars. But a recent...

  • 2017 Smart ForTwo Electric Drive
    Smart Electric Drive has a little Renault-Nissan underneath

    One of several new electric cars and concepts at last week's Paris Motor Show was the electric version of the second-generation Smart minicar. As Smart pointed out, it's the only maker that offers the option of gasoline or electric powertrains in every model it makes. Those are the ForTwo two-seat...

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