 |
| General Motors plans an electric car with a range of 965 km |
General Motors is building a new 300,000-square-foot battery research center in Michigan to fulfill its mission to produce batteries for electric vehicles with longer life, faster charging speeds and better battery life.
With this new hub, the company is paving the way for breakthroughs in battery technology that will help it build electric cars that can travel 965 kilometers on a single charge, nearly double the range of most vehicles today. .
The new facility is named the Wallace Battery Center in honor of Bill Wallace, a General Motors battery engineer who died in 2018.
The center is located in Warren, Michigan, near the headquarters of the Southeast Michigan Automotive Industry Technology Center.
GM does not disclose how many engineers run the center plant or how much it paid. But it is expected to run into hundreds of millions of dollars.
The innovation center is the only innovation center in North America that can prototype large batteries one meter or more wide using electrodes, said Ken Morris, vice president of electric and self-driving vehicles.
Morris said the goal is to make batteries with an energy density of 1,200 watt-hours per liter, a number that some experts have questioned. "This means that you can easily own a car that can travel 965 kilometers on a single charge, creating a new reality for our customers," he added.
This is outside the scope of Ultium battery technology. According to the company, the permissible mileage is 650 kilometers or more.
General Motors establishes Wallace Center for Battery Innovation
When it was first announced. General Motors has stated that its Ultium battery is designed as a large pocket battery. Compared to the cylindrical batteries used by Tesla and other companies. This allows them to be stacked vertically or horizontally in the battery pack, whichever the automaker thinks is correct.
The first generation of Ultium batteries made their debut on Hummer electric trucks. Production is scheduled to start next year.
The Wallace Center is committed to developing a future version completely different from the current lithium-ion formulation.
Thanks to the internal combustion engine, General Motors became the largest automaker in North America. It must now ramp up production of electric vehicles to become a climate-neutral company by 2040. And achieve the goal of stopping the sale of light commercial vehicles by 2035.
Therefore, it is necessary to equip the battery power supply, and this is the main goal of General Motors in the future as well. The company has pledged to spend $27 billion developing and producing 30 new electric cars by 2025. It has even redesigned its logo to look like an electric socket.