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The Detroit Free Press' Justin Hyde has a new article out about just how reliant the Big Three are on other countries for all of their new-fangled high-tech parts, especially batteries for hybrid vehicles. We know that the U.S. government is funding hydrogen fuel cell and biofuel research to the hilt, but the dollars for PHEVs and their batteries simply don't match up. Hyde writes about the advantage that Asian countries have in making rechargeable batteries thanks to strong government support there for decades.

The thing is, I'm not sure how this reliance on other countreis for batteries will really be any different from many other aspects of the auto industry. I mean, haven't the past two or three (or more?) decades really been about moving production and sourcing to each and every corner of the world? Or take computer chips - of which how many are in each new car? How many of these are produced in the U.S.? It's the reality of the business/corporate world today, and hybrid vehicles certainly are no exception. Not sure what the surprise is here.

[Source: Seattle Times]

Click the Saturn Vue Hybrid for a high res gallery.

The other day, we found out that GM was having problems with the Cobasys batteries in the automaker's mild hybrid vehicles. The hybrid versions of the Chevrolet Malibu, Saturn Vue and Saturn Aura are affected and around 9,000 batteries were recalled and replaced. At least, that's how GM explained it. According to a post over on HybridCars, Cobasys revealed that "a lot" of the information in the way GM told the battery problem story "it is not correct." According to HybridCars, the Cobasys executive "declined to elaborate further." Even so, we have our own questions in to GM and Cobasys to get their responses. Stay tuned.

[Source: HybridCars]

Click the Saturn Vue Hybrid for a high res gallery

It's no secret that General Motors' hybrid sales are nothing to brag about, especially when compared to cross-town rival Ford and, especially, cross-ocean rival Toyota. While the overall sales direction is positive, sales were most certainly negatively impacted by a problem with battery packs manufactured by Cobasys which were intended for installation in mild hybrid versions of the Chevrolet Malibu, Saturn Vue and Saturn Aura. According to reports, some nine-thousand batteries had to be recalled and replaced due to an internal leak which made the entire pack inoperable. Although the vehicles themselves would still operate, the hybrid system would not.

GM spokesman Tom Wilkinson put it well when he said, "I don't know how many hybrids we could have sold, but we would have had at least 9,000 more batteries for the pipeline." There appears to be light at the end of the tunnel, though, as Cobasys claims to have resolved the problem and Chevrolet reports that production of the 2009 Malibu hybrid is on target for June 23.

[Source: Automotive News - sub. req'd]

Rendering of the Chevy Volt battery pack

As hybrid models such as the original Toyota Prius and Honda Insight get older, consumers are beginning to wonder how much it will cost them if the battery eventually fails. It's a reasonable concern as those batteries can be quite expensive to replace. According to an article on Newsweek, though, that once astronomical price is going down. Honda, for example, will be lowering the cost for its hybrid batteries on June 1 from $3,400 to $1,968 for the Insight. The Accord hybrid could still be as much as $2,440. Similarly, Toyota's Prius battery is down to $3,000 from $5,500.

The good news, though, is that the chances of needing to replace the battery in your hybrid is low, even after the warranty coverage is up. Honda says that less than 200 of its hybrid batteries have failed post-warranty, despite over 100,000 vehicles on the road. How about Toyota? Its post-warranty battery replacement rate sits at just 0.003 percent.

Modern hybrid vehicles are designed to minimize the strain on their high-power batteries. Battery management systems have been programmed to only allow a certain amount of the battery's available charge to dissipate, which greatly extends the life of the unit. So, when considering a hybrid vehicle, perhaps the battery shouldn't be too much of a deterrent. Thanks for the tip, Joseph!

[Source: Newsweek]

General Motors has apparently placed Cobasys on their list of distressed suppliers, a move that could be very bad news for some of GM's hybrid programs. Cobasys is the battery company jointly owned by Energy Conversion Devices and Chevron Technology Ventures. Cobasys supplies the nickel metal hydride batteries used in GM's mild hybrid system in the Saturn Aura and Vue and the Chevy Malibu. They are also one of two supplier teams with development contracts to provide lithium ion battery packs for the PHEV Saturn Vue that was shown at the Detroit Auto Show. Cobasys is doing the pack integration for cells provided by A123 systems for that program.

Apparently Cobasys lost $76 million in 2007 and expects the amount to widen to $82 million this year. ECD and Chevron are apparently at odds about funding the battery supplier and coming up with a spending plan for this year. When GM declares a supplier distressed they start watching them much more closely and the chances of a supplier on that list winning new business are slim. GM's full-size hybrid trucks, such as the Tahoe/Yukon, utilize batteries produced by Panasonic while the plug-in lithium battery programs all use multiple suppliers, so they should be ok unless another supplier stumbles. GM has not announced the name of the supplier for the Vue Two-mode hybrid that is due to launch this fall.

[Source: The Car Connection]

Sanyo knows a thing or two about making batteries for vehicles. The company's batteries are in the 2008 Ford Escape hybrid and the Honda Accord hybrid, for example. The Asia Pulse reports this week that the company announced that it will spend over three billion dollars over the next three years on new rechargeable battery technology (as well as solar cells and other electronic parts). The money the company will spend in the next three years is 40 percent more than similar investments in the preceding three years.

The billions will be spent on 1,000 engineers and to reach Sanyo's goal of mass producing "lithium ion batteries for hybrid vehicles by fiscal 2009 or fiscal 2010," the Asia Pulse writes (sorry, the article is behind a Lexis-Nexis wall and can't be linked to).

[Source: Asia Pulse]