General Motors, led by Mary Barra, has the lofty ambition to unseat the king of EVs in
the next few years.
While many people may think Barra is punching above her weight,
GM has a secret weapon that shocks the entire car industry; the new Ultium battery!
What does this brand-new battery offer?
How is GM banking on it to rise in the ranks of
EV makers?
If you want to rule the world of EVs, your battery game must be strong!
This is because there is a Goliath in the room that you must
conquer; Tesla!
Apart from being so good at designing EVs, the company is also known for
breakthroughs in EV batteries!
However, Mary Barra has thrown down the challenge;
her General Motors would unseat Tesla at the top of the EV industry!
Barra is banking on her company's new EV battery, known as Ultium.
However, a GM vying for the EV top spot is a very different
GM from the one car owners used to know.
Founded in 1908, GM sells millions of cars yearly, with most of them being internal
combustion engines.
Last year alone, the Detroit-based company produced 6.3 million
vehicles.
Its peak in recent times was in 2016 when it produced more than 10 million
cars!
Interestingly, in its decades of existence, GM has controlled more than 40 brands,
including Buick, the longest lived brand, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, etc.
Many other brands have come and go, and the old timers
here can remember Bedford, Oldsmobile, etc.
That is not to say GM never tried its hands at electric cars until recently.
More than 25 years ago, even before the world knew about
Tesla, GM inaugurated the modern electric car.
Even though the two-seater EV ended as a disaster and an embarrassing
footnote in the company's history, people and knowledge from the EV1 program have
influenced nearly every startup's and automaker's development of electric vehicles.
The EV was a pioneer in many ways, including being
purposely built as an EV, unlike Ford and Toyota, who were busy converting internal
combustion engines to electric cars.
One of the things that doomed the EV1 was the atrocious range, which was due to the
lead acid battery.
EV1 came with 26 of them and weighed quite a lot, which forced GM
to use aluminum and composites for the body!
If you drove the car with intensity, you may get about 50 miles on a single charge!
However, with GM planning to make lots of electric vehicles, it needed to find the
winning formula for the EV battery, which it has just done with the Ultium battery!
GM has committed to making 30 new global electric
vehicles by 2025.
The company has positioned itself to design, engineer, and
produce EVs for every style and price point.
To achieve this feat, it is rapidly building
up its competitive advantage in batteries, software,
vehicle integration, manufacturing, and customer experience.
By 2025, GM will spend a whopping 35 billion dollars, which is a 75 percent step from
the figure it announced before!
The goal is to be producing more than 1 million electric
vehicles per annum by 2025!
These will include models like the Silverado EV truck, the
Cadillac Lyriq; the Hummer EV brought back from the dead, electric vans under the
BrightDrop brand, etc.
The secret sauce to all these EVs is the new Ultium battery, which GM has been
working on for years but has just revealed!
Why is the Ultium battery so special?
The first selling point is the cost per kWh.
GM was able to bring it down to about 100 dollars per kWh at the battery pack level.
Tesla has not been able to achieve this even with its new battery.
This price point is very crucial because the battery determines the
price of an EV.
At 100 dollars per kWh, EVs can start to be priced at about the same as
gas cars.
Interesting, the cost of the new Ultium battery is about ten times less than the
battery put in the Volt in 2010!
Compared to more recent EVs, the Ultium battery pack
costs about 40 percent lower than those in the Chevrolet Bolt EV.
And it gets better going forward because GM promises that second-generation
Ultium packs will cost nearly 60 percent less than the batteries
used today!
GM also improved the cell design of the Ultium battery to increase the range.
Tesla did something similar with its own 4680 battery.
However, instead of cylindrical cells used by Tesla, GM is using pouch-style cells.
These cells are quite large, measuring 23 by 4
by 0.4 inches.
These pouch cells package energy more densely than cylinders can.
They weigh about 3 pounds each, hold 0.37 kWh of energy, can be arranged vertically
or horizontally to suit space requirements, and are typically bundled into 24-cell
modules.
The arrangement is such a way that the Ultium battery is easier to recycle and
reuse.
It also makes it easier for engineers to optimize the vehicle layout.
In terms of chemistry, the Ultium battery uses Nickel-manganese-cobalt-aluminum to
cut cobalt use by 70 percent relative to the Bolt EV's NMC formula.
The aluminum also strengthens the electrodes and helps prevent
lithium spike formation during fast charging, which can cause problems by short-circuiting
a battery.
This means the battery has a longer useful life compared
to other batteries.
You don't even have to worry about whether frequently charging with
rapid DC chargers would destroy your battery.