Bill Pugliano/Getty Images A General Motors employee loads a battery into a Chevrolet Volt at G.M.’s Detroit-Hamtramck plant.From our colleagues at Green:
As I wrote in a recent Times article on electric car batteries, scientists are expecting big breakthroughs in battery technology over the next five years that will increase the range of electric cars while reducing their cost. But even with these advances, researchers acknowledge that any rechargeable battery will gradually lose its capacity to store energy after repeated cycles of charging and discharging.
Once storage capacity falls below a certain level, the battery can no longer provide the range that electric car owners will expect, according to Micky Bly, the executive director of global battery, electric vehicle and hybrid engineering at General Motors. For its new Chevrolet Volt, G.M. expects that level to be around 60 to 65 percent of the battery’s original capacity, he said in a telephone interview.
At the same time, with most of a battery’s useful life still intact, automakers anticipate that it could serve other, less demanding purposes than powering a few thousand pounds of car.
Read more here.
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