GM's Ultium batteries will use wireless tech to cut weight, boost range

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The General is moving faster than ever to turn itself into an electric-vehicle powerhouse. Fresh on the heels of its Ultium announcements — basically five interchangeable drive units and three separate motors to power a variety of vehicles — General Motors today said that when its ultimate battery/electric motor combination is revealed, it will have a range of 724 kilometres.

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That’s mainly because it’s reduced the weight of its batteries by some 25 per cent and reduced their volume by a commensurate amount. And as Fiona Meyer-Teruel, the Ultium division’s battery electronics and communications systems lead, says, the improvements “extend charging range by creating lighter vehicles overall and opening extra room for more batteries.”

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That’s the result, says Meyer-Teruel, of the company’s industry-first Wireless Battery Management System (wBMS) that lets the onboard controller communicate with individual battery cells — monitoring their condition and temperature, etc. in real time — wirelessly rather than through the heavy wiring used for conventional batteries. Reducing the wiring within its Ultium batteries by up to 90 per cent not only results in that dramatic weight reduction, says the Stanford engineering graduate, but also makes over-the-air updates even easier.

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GM promises that, over time, the entire system could even be upgraded via smartphone-like updates. As well, because each of the battery modules is connected wirelessly, sizing batteries for future use — even one large enough for use in locomotives — is much easier.

Thinking even further down the road, Pablo Valencia Jr., senior manager of battery life cycle and charging infrastructure, says that 100 per cent of all the materials — including cobalt, nickel, lithium, graphite, copper, manganese and aluminum – can be recycled, and that an incredible 95 per cent can eventually be reused in future batteries (the recycled cobalt, lithium and nickel go directly into the new battery build process, while the copper and aluminum go into a general recycling process). GM also says that its hydrometallurgical process also emits 30 per cent less greenhouse gasses than conventional recycling.

Even the vaunted wireless system plays a part in the recycling process: each module will have its battery chemistry coded into its brain, so future recyclers will be very aware of the materials contained in the individual cells, an important marker considering that current batteries may not be recycled for 15 or 20 years. GM also announced that it has plans for up to four battery plants in North America, each capable of producing 30 gigawatt-hours of batteries. That will be a lot of batteries needing recycling.