DETROIT — General Motors has launched a feature within its Ultium battery platform that repurposes energy to enable longer range, faster charging speed and sportier driving.
The Ultium energy recovery feature is standard on all electric vehicles powered by the automaker’s proprietary Ultium battery platform, GM said in a statement Monday. It has already helped enable the GMC Hummer pickup’s Watts to Freedom mode, which accelerates the pickup from 0 to 60 mph in three seconds by pre-cooling the propulsion system.
“Having a ground-up EV architecture gives us the freedom to build in standard features like Ultium’s energy recovery capabilities,” Doug Parks, GM executive vice president of global product development, purchasing and supply chain, said in the statement. “This helps us squeeze more efficiency, performance and overall customer benefit out of our EVs.”
The system is based around an automotive-grade heat pump that repurposes wasted energy, which is more sophisticated than a heat pump in modern homes, said Lawrence Ziehr, project manager of Ultium energy recovery capabilities.
As EV batteries, power electronics and propulsion components produce heat, the Ultium energy recovery feature can recover, store and repurpose the wasted heat. It can also use humidity from inside and outside of the vehicle, including body heat from passengers, GM said. The Ultium platform then uses the stored energy to heat the cabin more quickly than vehicles with an internal-combustion engine.
The energy recovery feature also reduces the need for the system to power heating and other functions from energy stored in the Ultium battery, GM said, which can add 10 percent more range in the EVs. The benefits of the system have already been factored into the Hummer pickup’s 329-mile range and the Cadillac Lyriq’s more than 300-mile range. Ultium-powered vehicles could also charge faster through reconditioning the batteries before charging because of the feature.
Another advantage to the system is that it will be used across all Ultium-powered vehicles, said Ziehr. “It lends itself to be more robust because of the commonality across the systems,” he said.
The recovery system is covered by 11 patents, GM said. In the late 1990s, GM engineers developed the first EV heat pump on the automaker’s first EV, the EV1.