First Chevy Volt battery comes off the assembly line!

It may not sound exciting, but if you’re a fan of GM, electric vehicles or cars in general, you’ll like this milestone: GM has produced the first production Volt battery pack in its Brownstown Battery Pack Assembly Plant.

The Volt has been mentioned here before in passing, both good and bad, but the gist of it is that it will be an electric vehicle with a “range extender” engine, which runs on conventional gasoline, giving drivers an electric-only range of up to 40 miles and a gas-assisted range of around 300 miles, without requiring the driver to do anything special.  Drivers can plug in their Volt when at home, or run on gasoline when traveling further than the car’s batteries will go.

This is the first lithium-ion battery pack produced in the U.S. by an automotive manufacturer.  It also shows that GM has gotten the Volt close enough to production, and is on schedule to start delivering Volts to showrooms and customers this year.

While these are the first production-ready battery packs, they won’t be installed in vehicles.  Instead, they will be shipped to GM’s Global Battery Systems lab in Warren, Michigan, where they will be tested by GM’s engineers, presumably to ensure the quality of the over 200 battery cells per pack, as well as overall battery pack performance.

Definitely good signs for GM, as the Volt is one of, if not the most important new vehicle coming to market for the General.

by John Suit

Source: General Motors

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