from Hacker News

GM, LG to Spend $2.3B on Venture to Make Electric-Car Batteries

by KFC_Manager on 12/6/19, 5:01 PM with 52 comments

  • by csours on 12/6/19, 6:23 PM

    Disclaimer: I work for GM, any opinions are my own; I have no special knowledge of this deal.

    Vehicle launches are generally prepared starting 5 years out with defined components. This creates a special challenge when interfacing with quickly changing technology.

    I don't have a publicly available source for this, so take it with a grain of salt, but I've heard that for every new battery pack released, there have been serious, funded plans for 2 or 3 other pack, battery form factor, or chemistry updates. The technology for each simply moves too fast to integrate at the pack level, much less the vehicle level.

    As an example: the Model Year 2017 Bolt EV released with 238 miles of range, and the 2020 bumped that to 259, without changing the module or pack form factor. It's an incremental advance to be sure, but ~10% without adding modules is pretty dang good.

  • by cowmix on 12/6/19, 5:41 PM

    Man, to think everyone in the industry said the Tesla gigafactory was a mistake or a waste.

  • by elihu on 12/6/19, 7:57 PM

    Good. They make some interesting batteries with unusual specs.

    Here's a 38 pound battery pack that can allegedly source 800 amps (briefly), with a nominal voltage of 60.8. That's crazy. You could run a car off of about three of these. It wouldn't go very far, but still. It's kind of the exact opposite of the Tesla approach, which is to use cells with low-ish power density, but to make up for it by using huge battery packs.

    https://www.evwest.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=4&prod...

  • by bryanlarsen on 12/6/19, 6:00 PM

    There are battery factories in China coming online in the next couple of years that make the Gigafactory look small. I expect that batteries will follow a boom/bust cycle like DRAM does.

  • by neonate on 12/6/19, 5:50 PM

  • by WhompingWindows on 12/6/19, 5:39 PM

    Does anyone know more details about what kind of batteries these are going to be?

  • by ianai on 12/6/19, 6:07 PM

    What are the current avenues for us regular people to invest in companies doing battery R&D? I found the lgclf stock, but that doesn’t seem right from my low knowledge level.

  • by madengr on 12/6/19, 6:09 PM

    Sorry, I don't believe it. I just sold my GM stock at 10% loss. I bought it thinking they were actually going to invest in EVs and self driving. Instead they have been pumping out trucks and SUV, while killing the Volt. Screw GM; the federal government should have let them sink.