Anyone See this Volvo Approach to EV's?

I was talking about something like back in 2011. Glad someone's doing this.

More broadly what I was talking about was taking the "battery is a structural member of the vehicle" to a more broad scale -- introducing "batteries as structure" throughout the vehicle, not just at a contiguous "battery location".

If I was reading it correctly the carbon fiber panels are part of the battery design. So the battery is part of the structure and the structure is part of the battery, which leads me back around to wondering, what happens when this puppy takes a lightning strike?

Transepoch said:

If I was reading it correctly the carbon fiber panels are part of the battery design. So the battery is part of the structure and the structure is part of the battery, which leads me back around to wondering, what happens when this puppy takes a lightning strike?

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Probably the same thing that would happen when any car takes a direct lightning strike. I doubt it's really high on their list of engineering considerations.

It's tp bad that Tesla and Volvo didn't team up. I miss my Volvo already.

GDH said:

It's tp bad that Tesla and Volvo didn't team up. I miss my Volvo already.

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Volvo Cars is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co., Ltd.

It is no longer part of AB Volvo, which is probably the company that made your missed car.

brianman said:

I was talking about something like back in 2011. Glad someone's doing this.

More broadly what I was talking about was taking the "battery is a structural member of the vehicle" to a more broad scale -- introducing "batteries as structure" throughout the vehicle, not just at a contiguous "battery location".

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Personally, I prefer the batteries to be tucked underneath the car. It allows for battery swap and it also contributes to much better handling and stability because of the lower CoG. I worry that if the modules were distributed throughout the vehicle it would lose that big benefit of an EV. Not to mention you'd have a bunch of cooling lines running all around and it would complicate maintenance efforts.

apacheguy said:

Personally, I prefer the batteries to be tucked underneath the car. It allows for battery swap and it also contributes to much better handling and stability because of the lower CoG. I worry that if the modules were distributed throughout the vehicle it would lose that big benefit of an EV. Not to mention you'd have a bunch of cooling lines running all around and it would complicate maintenance efforts.

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And there are more door dings than undercarriage ruptures.

apacheguy said:

Personally, I prefer the batteries to be tucked underneath the car. It allows for battery swap and it also contributes to much better handling and stability because of the lower CoG. I worry that if the modules were distributed throughout the vehicle it would lose that big benefit of an EV. Not to mention you'd have a bunch of cooling lines running all around and it would complicate maintenance efforts.

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Granted. But I'm thinking more along the lines of "commodity vehicles". Think how Apple (and others) have made the battery kind of "all over the place" to bring up energy storage while bringing down weight/size.

If, for example, you can replace "pure normal metal" with "metal mixed with energy storage" in certain parts of the frame then I would expect you could lower the overall weight of the vehicle, reduce materials cost, etc. "Disposal EVs" might be a lot cheaper (Gen3).

Off topic (Sorry :redface: ):

GDH said:

It's tp bad that Tesla and Volvo didn't team up. I miss my Volvo already.

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If only… That would have been great! (Maybe not for Tesla though... :wink: )

RobStark said:

Volvo Cars is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co., Ltd.

It is no longer part of AB Volvo, which is probably the company that made your missed car.

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AB Volvo – unfortunately as it would turn out – sold Volvo Cars to the Ford Motor Company in 1999. And so (again very, very unfortunately), Ford had to sell Volvo Cars in 2010. IIRC, because Ford basically was all out of R&D $$$. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if the Swedish government would have seen it the same way as the US gov. did, and hence bought both Volvo Cars and SAAB. The CEO of SAAB at the time even publicly suggested that the Swedish government should do that. Following such a hypothetical scenario maybe Tesla could have had some Swedish competition by now (or at least by next year)…

But it wasn’t to be. And as I understand it, now the real owner of Volvo Cars is actually the very, very undemocratic Chinese dictatorial ‘government’. I’ve laid it out in detail here:

Volvo V60 Plug-in Hybrid (See post #2)

:crying:

Oh well. Carry on…

I don't think having high voltage batteries as the skin of a vehicle is in anyway a good idea. A paint chip becomes an electrical short :wink: