battery pack
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Unless your name is Brinks, you rarely hear the words "armor" and "car" mentioned in the same sentence. But two recent widely-publicized fires in the Tesla Model S electric car have put the spotlight on how its battery pack is protected from severe impacts underneath the car. MORE: Tesla Fires: What We Know, And What We Need To Find Out Both fires were caused by high-speed collisions with road debris, which apparently struck the underside of the cars, where the battery is located under the floorpan. (A third fire in Mexico came after such a violent collision that a gasoline car may well have...
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What's Next For Chinese-Owned Battery Maker A123?
When battery maker A123 Systems went bankrupt, it seemed to be just one in a long line of failed energy startups--albeit one with some high-profile customers. Stalled battery production after A123's bankruptcy is considered one of the main catalyst's for Fisker's litany of struggles, while...
Antony Ingram -
Tesla Earnings Call: Lithium-Ion Cell 'Giga-Plant' Needed For Future Production
Tesla held its third-quarter earnings call yesterday evening, and CEO Elon Musk stayed pretty much on message. He reiterated that Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] continues to produce its Model S electric luxury sedan, at a current rate of 550 cars per week, and that it is working steadily to reduce the...
John Voelcker -
Ford To Partner With University Of Michigan On Electric-Car Battery Lab
To launch its Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car, General Motors chose to build and expand its very own battery lab. Crosstown rival Ford is taking a different route. According to the Detroit News, it will partner with the University of Michigan by helping to fund a laboratory where car...
John Voelcker -
First Tesla Model S Fire Caused By Collision With Road Debris
It had to happen sooner or later: a fire in a Tesla Model S. And indeed, as first covered by Jalopnik, Tuesday's fire in one example of the luxury electric sedan outside Seattle, Washington, generated a remarkable amount of media coverage. Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] issued a statement on the accident...
John Voelcker -
Mentioning Moore's Law For Electric Cars: Sign Of Ignorance
You see and hear it all the time, sometimes from people who really ought to know better. It's the notion that electric cars are going to improve incredibly, amazingly, unimaginably fast ... "because of Moore's Law." If you see or hear that statement, folks, you should view the entire report with...
John Voelcker -
Electronic sensors don't occupy a huge amount of space in electric car battery packs, but conversely, making sensors smaller could make the packs themselves much more compact. According to the MIT Technology Review, the U.S. government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E) says smaller sensors monitoring individual cells in a battery pack could reduce pack size by 20-30 percent. It's all about monitoring. Tiny sensors could be used to assess the state of every cell, relaying more detailed data to the car's control systems. As a result of this, automakers could safely...
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Nissan Tests New Heat-Resistant Battery For Leaf Electric Car
Nissan is testing a revised lithium-ion cell chemistry for its Leaf electric car that the company says appears to be as durable in sustained extreme heat as its current battery is under normal conditions. If tests confirm that the new cells degrade at no more than the standard rate, even at high...
John Voelcker -
2008 Ford Escape Hybrid: 500K Miles, Still In Patrol Service
If you ever had any doubt that hybrids were durable--and many people do--here's a case study to set your mind at ease. A white base-model 2008 Ford Escape Hybrid has just crossed 500,000 miles, which possibly makes it the highest-mileage Escape Hybrid on the road. That's much higher than the Escape...
John Voelcker -
Tesla Shows 90-Second Battery Swapping For Model S, Details Rollout Plans
As predicted last month, and tweeted and teased by CEO Elon Musk, Tesla Motors showed off battery swapping for its Model S electric car at a press event last night. Held at Tesla's design studio in Hawthorne, California, the demonstration itself was simple: A Tesla Model S drove onto the stage and...
John Voelcker -
Nissan To Offer Leaf Battery Replacement Plan: $100 A Month
To allay fears about loss of capacity in its Leaf electric-car battery packs, Nissan announced today that it would offer what amounts to a battery leasing program after the pack goes out of warranty. The cost of ensuring minimum capacity will be $100 a month. The company now warranties the Leaf...
John Voelcker -
UPDATE: Musk Posts Photo Of Tesla Model S Battery Swap Video
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk confirmed that a press event to be held this Thursday evening will demonstrate battery-swapping for the Tesla Model S. The mode of communication was his favorite medium: a tweet. "Seeing is believing," wrote Musk, saying that the company will do a live demonstration of...
John Voelcker -
Reporters interview CEOs all the time, but it's rare for those CEOs to end interviews abruptly. Which is what makes an article in Barron's about Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] and its current high stock price so entertaining. In "Recharge Now!", author Bill Alpert opens with a comparison between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Iron Man comic-book hero Tony Stark. He summarizes the rave reviews received by the Tesla Model S all-electric luxury sport sedan and notes, accurately, that Tesla stock was propelled to its current heights on the basis of one profitable quarter and a classic short squeeze. In a...
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Mitsubishi Issues Second Recall For Outlander Plug-In Hybrid In Japan
Mitsubishi has recalled 4,313 of its Outlander Plug-In Hybrids in Japan to fix a potential defect that it identified last month. The company resumed production of the plug-in hybrid Outlander after discovering the cause of a fire in one lithium-ion battery pack at a dealership in Japan. The first...
John Voelcker -
All-New 2016 Toyota Prius: What We Know So Far
The next-generation Toyota Prius hybrid may retain the same shape as its predecessors, but it's likely to be different in several important ways. With spy shots of 2016 Prius prototypes now emerging, it's time to follow up on a piece we did six months ago. So, let's look at all the confirmed facts...
John Voelcker -
How Are Electric-Car Batteries Made? Photos From Nissan's New Plant
Making a battery for an electric car is more like assembling microelectronics than the kind of auto-plant scenes we think of, involving huge steel stamping presses and battalions of automated welding robots. Last month, in addition to driving a 2013 Nissan Leaf through the Tennessee countryside, we...
John Voelcker -
Will Future Tesla Electric Cars Use Metal-Air Batteries?
Most advocates and industry analysts expect lithium-ion batteries to dominate electric-car energy storage for the rest of this decade. But is Silicon Valley startup carmaker Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] planning to add a new type of battery to increase the range of its electric cars? The high-end 2013...
John Voelcker -
U.S.-Built Electric Cars To Get U.S.-Made Battery Cells Too
While the number of plug-in electric cars built in the U.S. is steadily increasing, the lithium-ion cells in their batteries have mostly come from overseas. But this turns out to be the year that cell production largely moves onshore as well. The 2013 Nissan Leaf, now coming off the assembly line...
John Voelcker -
Did your parents ever tell you, "Slow and steady wins the race"? It can be annoying to hear as a child, but often it's true--and in the case of electric car batteries, it's how they'll get less expensive. As a new posting from the Washington Post's Wonkblog points out, there is no Moore's Law for batteries. That's the law underlying the rapid improvement of consumer electronics like mobile phones and computers, which says the number of transistors in a microelectronic device roughly doubles every 18 months. Run that rate over many years, and you get order-of-magnitude improvements in...
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Boeing 787 Battery Safety Updates: What Changes Were Made?
People take air safety pretty seriously, so when smoke filled the cabin of a new Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft a few months back, the entire fleet was quickly grounded. It turned out to be an issue with the aircraft's lithium-ion batteries, used to power some secondary functions reducing load on...
Antony Ingram -
Life With 2013 Tesla Model S: 'Vampire' Thirst For Electricity At Night?
A couple of weeks ago, shortly after I took delivery of my 2013 Tesla Model S, I noticed that my home electric meter seemed to be running a bit faster than normal. I keep a close eye on my meter, but that seemed odd. After all, the long-awaited new luxury sport sedan delivered to my house in...
David Noland -
Nissan Leaf Electric Car Reports Own Battery-Cell Failure Via Carwings
Wouldn't it be nice if your car could tell you not just that something was wrong, but that something might be about to go wrong? A Nissan Leaf in Washington state did just that, and owner Rob Greenlee only found out when he got a call from his local dealership asking him to bring it in for a...
John Voelcker -
Honda Civic Hybrid: Battery Unreliable, Consumer Reports Says
Automaker Honda used to be the darling of Consumer Reports, with its models perpetually scoring better than average in CR testing. The 2012 Honda Civic dampened the publication’s enthusiasm for the Honda brand; it was the first Honda Civic we can recall that wasn’t recommended by CR...
Kurt Ernst -
Honda Recycles Hybrid Battery Packs Into Rare-Earth Metals For New Ones
A popular myth among detractors of hybrid and electric vehicles is that the energy and materials that go into making batteries far outweighs any good they do under ownership. Batteries aren't as damaging as many suspect though, since so many of a battery's components can be recycled. Honda is doing...
Antony Ingram