Book:The Car That Could [making the EV-1]

[cfg83]

Hello -

I am going to be posting blurbs from this book :

The Car That Could:
The Inside Story of GM's Revolutionary Electric Vehicle
By Michael Shnayerson
Hardcover edition published in 1996

This is a cross-thread to aerohead's :

http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...tion-6566.html

I am just picking out paragraphs that catch my eye.

Page 9

As far as Runkle could see, Baker had no choice. Thought the concept electric car could be changed and improved upon, its basic dilemma was fixed. It had 843 pounds of lead acid batteries instead of a gas tank; each of those pounds contained about 16 watt hours of energy. The energy density of gasoline when used in cars was 5,000 watt hours per pound [after taking into account driveline losses]. Put another way, those batteries packed the energy equivalent of a bit more than a gallon of gasoline. Perhaps better batteries would come along, but Baker shouldn't count on it. He had to make the EV energy efficient to a degree that no car had ever been made before. The skunkworks team claimed it's one-of-a-kind car had a range of 120 miles, but this was a car with none of the amenities a real car would need. It wasn't even crashworthy. Somehow, Baker would have to make it so, and make it saleable, while preserving, if not increasing, its range.

CarloSW2

[cfg83]

Page 12

Inventors had tinkered with battery-run cars since the 1840s, but the golden era, and the struggle for dominance between gas- and electric-powered cars, had begun in earnest on June 11, 1895. That was when twenty-two horseless carriages set off from Versailles along France's poplar-bordered Route Nationale, headed from Paris to Bordeaux and back, for a widely publicized round-trip race of more than 700 miles. Most were fuled by gasoline, a few by steam, two by lead-acid batteries. Charles Jeantaud, a Parisian carriage maker, drove an electric powered surrey all the way to Bordeaux, exchanging battery packs along the way at prearranged stops; had he not suffered a hot rear bearing, he might have finished the course. Camille Jentzy's bullet-shaped "La Jamais Contente" took an early lead at 65 miles per hour, but discharged its batteries in less than an hour ... the winning car, gasoline fueled, rolled to the finish line in 48 hours and 48 minutes, having traveled at an average speed of 14.4 miles per hour.

[Clev]

Make sure you post the parts where General Motors was strongarmed by Delphi and Delco to allow them to make custom one-off motors, controllers and even batteries rather than using proven off-the-shelf parts from other manufacturers, and where the entire cost of designing the EV1 (including the custom motor/controller/battery, and even the cost of building the state-of-the-art assembly line) was about $1 billion. Incidentally, this was the approximate cost of the Ford Explorer's facelift in 2002.

[cfg83]

Page 19

... [Baker] told them the day he took a GM vice president for a test ride in an Electrovette prototype. "Transmission got stuck", Baker said, wincing at the memory. "I had to walk a mile and a half back to the office with this VP cussing me out the whole time". He didn't miss EVs at all.
Still, Baker understood how critical recent advances in electronics might be, and offered to serve as an informal advisor. He told the California [AeroVironment] engineers why they should design their car with a tunnel of batteries down the middle, rather than packaging them in the rear. He explained why front wheel drive would let them do more with regen braking than rear wheel drive. ...
Baker and Runkle agreed that Brooks was right to go with lead-acid batteries. If the point of this project was to prove that EVs were feasible, lead acid was still the only practical, producible battery pairing around [in 1998].

[cfg83]

Page 21

... Electric cars had to have maintenance-free batteries, and with flooded lead acid that just wasn't possible.
There was an answer, but it hadn't been tried with electric cars, and remained in a fairly experimental stage. This was the gas recombinant battery. It was still lead acid, but instead of using a flooded liquid electrolyte, the electrolyte was absorbed into sponge like glass and fiber mats between its plates. The recombinant battery no longer required any space above the plates for the gas to vent and the liquid electrolyte to reform. That meant batteries could be more densely packed and take up less space. Brooks wanted 900 pounds of batteries to give the car the acceleration and speed he wanted; Bish ran some figures and saw he could only fit 843 pounds in the space allotted.
Bish still had no idea if recombinant batteries would *work* in an electric car, or if they did, whether they would work reliably over time. He did know that even in theory there was only one way to pack thirty-two batteries with enough power to get the car from 0-60 in eight seconds. Bish had to devise the densest lead battery the world had ever seen.

This was a battery solution what was tried before the Ovonics battery came on the scene.

[gone-ot]

...the arte of optimization = compromising the compromises!

[cfg83]

Page 24

Wally Rippel, a longtime EV advocate and friend of the AeroVironment team, worked freelance with a local motor house to design the induction motor and gears. At Delco Remy, Bish and a partner, Terry Poorman, froze battery cases and plates to 0 degrees Fahrenheit, then chilled electrolyte mats down to 40 degrees before sliding them between the plates(*). The car that AeroVironment called Santana was coming together, but its schedule of creation had slipped precipitously. In July 1989, Brooks reported to Runkle that he would need more than five months to finish the job. He was in for a surprise. Roger Smith, the car's greatest skeptic, had grown so excited by its progress reports that he'd decided to unveil it at the L.A. auto show in early January.

(*) By chilling the acid, Bish and Poorman could slow its reactions and slide the mats into the narrow spaces between the plates before the mats could expand. The narrower the spaces between the plates, the denser the battery, the more the power it contained; the more power it contained, the more speed and acceleration it would provide.

I picked this in relation to post #5 because it explains the degree (ha ha) to which they were willing to go to improve the battery design.

This also reminds me of what Christ was telling us about the battery modules he found on ebay, aka that they need to be encased to keep from expanding and getting ruined.

[gone-ot]

...Ford uses really expensive-grade Sheetmetal Botox!

[cfg83]

Clev -

Originally Posted by Clev

Make sure you post the parts where General Motors was strongarmed by Delphi and Delco to allow them to make custom one-off motors, controllers and even batteries rather than using proven off-the-shelf parts from other manufacturers, and where the entire cost of designing the EV1 (including the custom motor/controller/battery, and even the cost of building the state-of-the-art assembly line) was about $1 billion. Incidentally, this was the approximate cost of the Ford Explorer's facelift in 2002.

From what I have been reading, it wasn't an "off-the-shelf" battle, it was a battle between Delco and Hughes for any and all electronic components in the system. Sometimes Delco would win, and sometimes Hughes would win, and each would feel angry/bitter when they lost.

If you have the book, feel free to find the page and add the quote to the thread. I don't know if I ear-marked that or not. I am just going to post what I have already "post-it-ted".

CarloSW2

[Clev]

I'll reborrow it from the library and reread. It's been a few years. :-)