Creating the heart of Volt

GM's battery requirements meant creating new state-of-the-art in-vehicle energy storage-and doing it in less than four years. Top GM and supplier engineers reveal how they did it.

The lack of a suitable battery made electric vehicles niche players for most of the last century. For General Motors' Volt team, finding a battery with the energy capacity, performance, durability, reliability, and package density needed for use in a high-volume passenger car with the range-extender powertrain presented a significant challenge.

“In April 2007 when GM put out its solicitation and requirements for Volt, nobody had a battery that would meet the requirements-including us,” said Prabhakar Patil, CEO of Compact Power Inc. (CPI), which supplies Volt's battery cells.