7/19/12 By Charles Murray, Senior Technical Editor, Design News In the midst of the Tesla Model S rollout at the company's California manufacturing plant recently, Tesla CEO Elon Musk made a startling prediction: "In 20 years more than half of new cars manufactured will be fully electric," he said, according to a Reuters article. "I actually feel quite safe in

Fourth in the Teardown series By John Scott-Thomas The Chevrolet Volt is a tour de force of complex systems engineering, requiring advanced control electronics. Reliable and efficient coordination of the onboard lithium-ion battery pack and 1.4L gasoline engine require dedicated microprocessors and firmware; in previous articles we’ve analyzed the battery pack made by LG-Chem/Compact Power (Volt Battery Teardown) and the

By John Donovan, Low-Power Design, for Drive for Innovation While electric vehicles have been around since the late 19th century, they only became practical with the development of energy storage systems that sport a lot better horsepower-to-weight ratio than bulky lead acid batteries. By the mid-90’s automakers had pretty much given up on being able to go very far on

MARLTON, N.J.–We've been slowly peeling back the onion on the Chevy Volt and EV technology on this site. (We'll be tearing down a Volt next year and analyzing it to cap off this adventure). John Donovan has been looking under the hood at the Volt, such as interfacing the motor with the engine and electric driving and Henry Muyshondt examined "Making the ‘MOST’ of

By John Donovan, Low-Power Design, for Drive for Innovation When you step on the gas in an ordinary car, most of us have a pretty good idea what happens, having driven them since we were teenagers. But what happens when you depress the accelerator in a Volt? A lot more than you might expect. The Volt has three power sources:

By John Donovan, Low-Power Design, for Drive For Innovation Last week we took a high-level look at the Chevy Volt’s drivetrain, which turned out to be one area where engineering and marketing weren’t quite in sync. This time let’s take a deeper dive into just how the motor and engine actually do sync up. The Volt is based on GM’s

(Odometer: 389 miles) SCHAUMBERG, Ill.–DesignNews senior technical editor Chuck Murray has been chronicling the rapid evolution of automotive electronics for the better part of a quarter-century. One thing he's written about extensively (check out his Captain Hybrid blog) that hasn't changed a lot in that time is battery technology. Despite the quickening move into electric-hybrid and all-electric vehicles, battery designers