Ed Garsten is a metro Detroit-based reporter who covers autos and mobility. He’s covered the standup strikes against the Detroit Three automakers by the UAW, urban air mobility and rise of autonomous trucking. Previously he led auto coverage at CNN as its Detroit Bureau Chief 1989-2001 and headed Fiat Chrysler’s digital communications 2005-2016.
On the massive convention center floor hundreds of thousands descend each year to view, gawk, shop and consider the newest cars and trucks, mainly powered by internal combustion engines, at the Detroit Auto Show, But for three days this week, many thousands of industry engineers and experts filled the Huntington Place floor to gawk, shop and consider the latest technologies related to what powers cars and trucks energized by one thing—batteries.
Not a gas-powered engine in sight.outgrew its long-time suburban Detroit venue to move downtown for the first time as electric and hybrid vehicles represent more of the eventual future of the auto industry.“That speaks to that pace of change, speaks to the necessity and the urgency with which everyone who's relying on those batteries for their product platforms needs to gain around just learning, evaluating, iterating as fast as they can,” observed Eli Leland, co-founder of exhibitor, Hurricane Milton Live Updates: More Than 3 Million Without Power—But DeSantis Says Storm ‘Not The Worst Case Scenario’“There's so much research and so much new technology in this area that's going to benefit not only EVs, but then everything— our cell phones, everything that we use, every single day,” added Don Wright, vice president of engineering at battery technology companyA long day on the floor attempting to understand the breadth of how the industry is growing led us to learning about the technologies Wright and Leland’s companies have developed, robots that help build, transport and inspect batteries, support for auto dealers in their transition to servicing EV and a company that’s come up with more effective battery chemistries., cobots. That’s the term for what Fanuc calls a collaborative robot—that’s a robot that works in conjunction with humans, can be taught tasks, be moved around the factory floor and will even stop if it comes in contact with a flesh and blood co-worker, according to Fanuc’s Tyler Beistline. He demonstrated one such cobot called the CRX-20iA/L which generally dispenses adhesives to a battery cell frame that adheres to a cover—something, he said, is difficult for a human to do because the process is so precise. “You're also keeping a human away from dangerous, toxic adhesives, which is good. It's being used now in production,” Beistline explained. Fanuc also displayed another cobot that inspects batteries using a mounted iRVision 2D camera and a more traditional robot that transports heavy batteries.Pamela Fletcher was a key executive at General Motors Co. behind its hybrid Chevrolet Volt and Chevrolet Bolt EV, but in July she moved on to the top job at Tucson, Arizona-basedHer new company doesn’t make full batteries, but rather battery packs that, she says, provide incrementally more power due to a discovery, leading to a breakthrough in battery chemistry. The breakthrough, she explained is the discovery of the root cause for the number one failure mode of the technology is the formation of something called dendrites, which cause battery performance to deteriorate over time. Sion’s solution revolves around the use of lithium metal solution with a proprietary anode and eletrolytes called licerion.“Once that problem was solved, you could unlock all of the goodness of lithium atom, which is 2x the energy density of today's lithium ion,” Fletcher said. “We also see fast charge that are in line with today's average gas station stop, which is a huge jackpot.”Unico’s Don Wright held up what looked like a big circuit board, but it’s really the company’s latest innovation for vastly speeding up the time it takes to add a charge to a battery in production. It’s called the BAT350, which, he said, both shrinks the time it takes to produce a battery while lengthening its life.“There was a recent study that came out that said that if we could do this process faster with higher currents, that you can not only dramatically shorten the time it takes to make the cells, but they're finding that it actually adds about 50% more life to the battery. So instead of your EV lasting 12 years, it might last 18 years with that battery pack,” Wright said. A pilot program to use the BAT350 is underway with one automaker, which Wright wasn’t at liberty to reveal.It’s no secret auto dealers are facing both financial and human challenges as the industry makes its way towards an electrified future.“What that means is we do a lot of tough stuff. We do storage of batteries, we do logistics management, we do diagnostics and de-hazarding. We do certified repair, remanufacturing and we do battery pre-treatment recycling,” said Lea Malloy, EV Battery Solutions associate vice president. In practice a battery is shipped to the company which conducts extensive diagnostics and repairs and either repairs the battery or sends back a replacement, Malloy explained. If a dealer needs a forklift to move a heavy battery from a delivery truck into a service bay, the company will provide that too, she said. Being part of the extensive Cox Automotive family also provides an additional opportunity for EV Battery Solutions, which, Malloy pointed out, includes support at the company’s Manheim wholesale auctions. “We innovated with a specialized container that's fire resistant, air conditioned, so we maintain the right climate control and the right fire protections, and we've installed these module cleaners at Manheim auctions, so that we have a storage point closer to the consumer,” Malloy explained. “That limits both the miles traveled and also the cost of moving just one battery at a time, at a time to an aggregation point.”Eli Leland and his co-founder created Voltaiq in 2012 to fill a need in the battery industry, he says, just didn’t exist—enterprise software specific to what he describes as the battery ecosystem. That sort of brings the issue back to the what the crowd of attendees at The Battery Show furiously seek—the magic bullets, the technologies, the innovations that will energize their ability to compete, especially against the blistering speed and growth of their counterparts in China. Leland couldn’t be plainer in concluding, You're no longer in a world where you can qualify a supplier in a design or vehicle platform and then use it for the next 10 years with batteries, the tech, the underlying technology, the supply base. It's all just changing too rapidly.”Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.Insults, profanity, incoherent, obscene or inflammatory language or threats of any kindContinuous attempts to re-post comments that have been previously moderated/rejectedAttempts or tactics that put the site security at riskProtect your community.
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