March 28, 2024

GS Yuasa Discovers Problems With Its Car Battery

Mitsubishi Motors said Wednesday that a lithium-ion battery for its i-MiEV electric car caught fire at an assembly plant on March 18. Three days later, a battery in a plug-in hybrid Outlander car overheated and showed signs of melting.

No one was injured in either incident, Mitsubishi Motors said. It did not issue any recalls but said it would halt production and sales of the two models while it investigated the battery troubles. It also advised owners of the Outlander plug-in hybrid to drive only on gasoline mode for the time being.

“First we need to clarify the cause,” Ryugo Nakao, the head of product and strategy development at Mitsubishi Motors, said at a news conference in Tokyo.

Mr. Nakao stressed that the plane and auto batteries were “structurally different.”

And Marc Birtel, a Boeing spokesman, said in a statement that the aircraft maker had been assured “that the battery in question is fundamentally different from the 787 battery both in its construction processes, design, and chemistry.”

GS Yuasa, one of Japan’s biggest battery manufacturers, makes hybrid and electric vehicle batteries with Mitsubishi at a factory in Shiga in central Japan. The batteries GS Yuasa supplies to Boeing are manufactured at a different plant in neighboring Kyoto, where the battery maker has its headquarters.

While both the car and plane batteries use lithium-ion technology, their structures and composite materials are different. The GS Yuasa batteries aboard the 787 use lithium cobalt oxide, an older technology. The batteries in Mitsubishi Motors’ electric and hybrid vehicles use lithium manganese oxide.

On March 18, a battery aboard an electric vehicle, the iMiEV, being assembled at a Mitsubishi Motors plant in western Japan overheated and its casing caught fire, the automaker said. Workers had been conducting charging test on the vehicle, it said.

Three days later, a representative at a dealer just outside Tokyo charged a plug-in hybrid Outlander but the car would not start, Mitsubishi Motors said. The representative then detected a strange smell, checked under the hood and found that part of the battery casing had melted.

The battery problems come as a blow to Mitsubishi, whose sales of electric and hybrid vehicles have been disappointing. Since iMiEV’s debut in 2009, Mitsubishi has shipped about 30,000 of the bubble-shaped electric vehicles worldwide. The model is known as the Mitsubishi I overseas. Mitsubishi has sold about 4,000 Outlanders, predominantly in Japan.

The fresh incidents of overheating could be an even bigger blow to GS Yuasa. Its batteries have come under scrutiny by both American and Japanese air safety regulators in January after one caught fire on a parked 787 in Boston, while another overheated during a flight over western Japan.

Boeing is in the midst of testing a redesigned battery system. It is hoping to complete those tests within the next week, a step toward persuading regulators to allow the planes back in the air. Still, neither the company nor regulators have pinned down the cause of the overheating in the 787 batteries.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/business/gs-yuasa-discovers-problems-with-its-car-battery.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

G.M. Aims the Volt at China, but Chinese Want Its Secrets

But as G.M. prepares to start selling them here by the end of this year, the Chinese government is putting heavy pressure on the company to share some of the car’s core technology.

The Chinese government is refusing to let the Volt qualify for subsidies totaling up to $19,300 a car unless G.M. agrees to transfer the engineering secrets for one of the Volt’s three main technologies to a joint venture in China with a Chinese automaker, G.M. officials said. Some international trade experts said China would risk violating World Trade Organization rules if it imposed that requirement.

The government’s demand is the latest example of China’s willingness to use the leverage of Western access to the vast Chinese market to extract concessions on advanced technologies. Policies to force technology transfers from non-Chinese companies have already helped this nation build big industries in areas like wind turbines, high-speed trains and water purification.

Western companies have complained that the tactics create an uneven playing field for business ventures trying to compete with domestic Chinese industries.

The dispute over the Volt threatens to lead to another trade dispute with the West and could affect the dynamics of a visit to China this month by the American energy secretary, Steven Chu.

The consumer subsidies in question are considered crucial for helping electric and hybrid vehicles catch on in China, which became the world’s largest car market in 2009. The government has made a priority of moving beyond cars that burn fossil fuels and emit polluting exhaust. At an industry conference here in this port city near Beijing over the weekend, government officials called for Chinese automakers to put new emphasis on producing more fuel-efficient and technologically advanced models, including gasoline-electric hybrids and all-electric cars.

Right now, the subsidies are available for electric cars made by Chinese automakers, like the e6 made by BYD, giving them a huge competitive advantage. The Volt, if G.M. proceeds with plans to begin selling it in China by year’s end, will be the first mass-market predominantly electric car imported to China by a foreign manufacturer.

The Volt has not yet been priced in China. But the Chinese subsidies are nearly half the Volt’s suggested retail price in the United States of $41,000, before including a tax break of up to $7,500 that Washington offers.

The American tax break is not restricted to domestic cars, nor does it require technology transfers.

G.M. is pressing Chinese officials to let the Volt qualify for the subsidies and tax breaks without the technology transfer. “We’ll bring it up in every conversation we have,” said Raymond Bierzynski, the executive director of electrification strategy at G.M. China, which has headquarters in Shanghai. G.M. has a series of joint ventures with several Chinese automakers, but plans to import the Volt from Michigan.

Global companies like Ford, Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen and Daimler have spent billions of dollars to develop electric and plug-in hybrid cars. They are eager to start earning a return on those investments by selling them in China, where 17 million cars — virtually all of them gasoline-powered — were sold last year.

But Japanese and European automakers in particular have held back for fear of losing trade secrets if they are forced to share their newest technologies with Chinese companies. The Volt would be the pioneer, with the subsidy issue shaping up as a crucial test case.

G.M.’s arch rival, Ford, already intends to accede to the Chinese demand, a Ford executive said. But Ford is still conducting only demonstration projects of electric cars in China, including an effort here in Tianjin, and has not set a date for commercial sales.

Chinese automakers may need technology assistance for advanced cars because their research budgets tend to be only a tiny share of sales by international standards. That is why the Chinese government wants to ensure that its automakers gain the technology to manufacture their own electric and hybrid cars.

“We have to break through and master the core technologies,” Chen Jiachang, a deputy director of the ministry of science and technology, said in a speech Saturday at the conference here.

At least five trade experts said that Chinese government policies making it uneconomical to sell an imported electric car in China without transferring technology could violate rules of the World Trade Organization, of which China is a member.

“The rules do not allow a country to impose a requirement affecting the internal sale, distribution or purchase of a product in a way that favors its own product over imports,” said Carolyn B. Gleason, a partner at McDermott Will Emery in Washington and longtime specialist in W.T.O. cases.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/business/global/gm-aims-the-volt-at-china-but-chinese-want-its-secrets.html?partner=rss&emc=rss