GM's new Ultium battery could be the V8 of EV batteries, and get gearheads amped up. It should also make Tesla very worried.
- GM showcased its Ultium battery technology for investors, the media, and dealers at its Technical Center near Detroit.
- Ultium is the first brand-name to be associated with an electric-propulsion system in a big way.
- Tesla, by contrast, provides limited detail to customers about the tech that powers its vehicles.
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Tesla makes great cars, but their innards are for most owners completely incomprehensible.
Take the Model 3, the company's bestselling vehicle. If you order a fully-tricked out version of the car, you'll spend about $67,000 but have no inkling from Tesla's online configurator of what makes up the drivetrain. You really have to dig a bit to find out that the largest battery pack is 75 kilowatt-hours, that it uses thousands of 2170 lithium-ion cells, and that it can be configured with two electric motors. As for the motors themselves, forget about finding the specs on those without donning your sleuthing cap.
Mind you, people who buy gas-powered cars often don't know if they have a turbocharger or not, or whether their transmission is a seven-speed, ten-speed, or no-speed CVT. But there's a sizable community that does, and eventually, the number of consumers who want to know what - and how- everything inside their EV will only grow.
At an EV day for the media, investors, and dealers held last week, General Motors took a big step toward making those folks happy.
The Age of Ultium
The company chose its Technical Center near Detroit to showcase a new battery design, called "Ultium," that uses a "pouch" rather the cylindrical cell design. By its engineering specs, Ultium could both deliver more power and range than Tesla's packs - up to 200 kilowatt-hours for the GM design, compared to Tesla's 75 kilowatt-hours - and bring costs below $100 per kWh, thanks to eliminating materials such as cobalt.
The Ultium design is flexible and scalable; it could power everything from a small hatchback to a Hummer pickup. It would be combined with a family of just three electric motors.
The technology was compelling, but what most excited me was the name. Ultium! It's simultaneously futuristic and throwback-y.
Gearheads delight
I asked GM's chief marketing officer, Deborah Wahl, about the moniker, and she explained that apart from the obvious allusions to concepts such as "ultimate" and "ultra," GM landed on the name because it "represented next-generation technology" and sounded both energetic and grounded.
In practice, the name means is that owners of all-electric Cadillacs, Buicks, Chevys, and GMC Hummers will be able to declare that their vehicles have Ultium under the hood.
They'll also be more likely to see their choice of a GM vehicle as based on the differentiation that Ultium enables. It has, according to GM, easier-to-cool pouches and requires a less idiosyncratic arrangement than the many-cells approach that Tesla has been using for over a decade.
You buy the Cadillac EV, prospectively, rather than the Tesla because you think the Ultium powertrain is superior - sort of in the same way that you might favor a Chevy V8 engine over a Ford V8 motor on a pickup truck.
GM is quite good at this kind of thing, while Tesla doesn't care much about it. Like Apple, Tesla doesn't want customers to have to spend much time thinking about how the products actually work. (CEO Elon Musk is the notable exception: he LOVES to talk about Tesla tech and its perhaps the most expert CEO in the world when it comes to his company's systems.)
GM is making a bit of bet here - that customers will buy both electric cars and the technology that powers them. It remains to be seen if it drives sales, but it should make all the petrol-heads who are slowly losing their favorite hobby something to be glad about.
