Ashlee Vance tours GM's battery testing facilities and traces the evolution from the EV1's lead-acid packs to today's LMR cells, which deliver over 400 miles of range for trucks. Battery costs have dropped roughly tenfold over two decades.
Each battery pack that we design will ultimately end up in this battery pack being tested. Okay. We can push it above and below what you can do on the surface of planet Earth for temperatures. And then humidity, we can take from as dry as the desert to, you know, as wet as the rainforest. We have battery packs big and small. This is the battery pack that you'll find in the Corvette E-Ray. Okay. So this is a hot and humid test chamber. You can imagine it living in Miami during the hottest most wet week of the summertime. Yeah. This looks like a very nice torture chamber. This is a table where we can show you a bunch of different cells and cell technology evolution over time. We're going all the way back to EV1 here. So the EV1 in the late '90s started off with lead acid batteries, had less than 100 miles of all-electric range. And then around the late '90s, early 2000s, nickel metal hydride started to be used in hybrids. This is what you would find in a Prius. Ah! In a hybrid, the battery is just there to help you use the gasoline fuel more efficiently, right? But you're not plugging it in for any of your range. That's where you get into that first generation of lithium-ion cells in vehicles like the Chevrolet Volt. So back in 2008, we launched with, I think, 38 miles of electric range. And then this cell today, which is my new favorite cell, our LMR cell— my new favorite cell. Oh yeah. We can use LMR in our trucks to get more than 400 miles of range. Along that path, we also dropped the cost of batteries by a factor of about 10, as measured in dollars per kilowatt-hour.
