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• General Motors plans to purchase Cobasys outright

  Filed under: Hybrids/Alternative , Green , GM , Earnings/Financials , Rumormill Shortly after reports of leaky batteries coming from Cobasys, which greatly slowed the production of GM's mild hybrid vehicles, such as the Saturn Vue and Aura hybrids and Chevy Malibu hybrid, comes a report from Automotive News which suggests that General Motors may just purchase the troubled battery maker outright. That's one way to manage the problem, wouldn't you say? Though GM would own 100-percent of Cobasys, some sort of partnership is said to be in the works, though that other entity remains unknown. Before this announcement, Chevron and Energy Conversion Devices, co-owners of the battery supplier, had been fighting over ownership of the company. What effect this news may have on GM's future hybrid plans remains unknown. Currently, Cobasys supplies nickel metal hydride batteries to the General. The upcoming Chevy Volt will use the newer lithium ion batteries. Still, General Motors recently... Posted Jun 05 2008, 11:32 AM by Autoblog Filed under: Green, GM, Earnings/Financials, Hybrids/Alternative, MildHybrid, Mild Hybrid, GmHybrid, gm hybrid, Rumormill, cobasys, HybridBatteries, hybrid batteries

• Doh! Battery leakage hurts GM hybrid production

  Filed under: Hybrids/Alternative , Green , Plants/Manufacturing , Recalls/TSBs , Chevrolet , GM , Saturn As much as General Motors would like to sell more hybrids, we'd imagine it would be pretty tough to do so without having the batteries on hand. It turns out that since December of last year, GM has had to recall some nine-thousand battery packs produced by its supplier, Cobasys, which were due for installation in mild hybrid versions of the Chevrolet Malibu, Saturn Vue and Saturn Aura. The culprit was reportedly an internal leak in the pack which caused the entire unit to be inoperable. This setback hurts even more in the face of record gasoline prices and the resultant record sales of hybrid vehicles. Chevrolet plans to begin production of the 2009 Malibu hybrid on June 23. Cobasys says that it has resolved the leaky battery problem and that current units are shipping without defects. Unfortunately, some damage has already been done, especially for the Saturn brand, as sales of... Posted Jun 03 2008, 01:28 AM by Autoblog Filed under: Green, GM, Chevrolet, Plants/Manufacturing, Recalls/TSBs, Hybrids/Alternative, Saturn, MildHybrid, Mild Hybrid, GmHybrid, gm hybrid, MalibuHybrid, malibu hybrid, AuraHybrid, VueHybrid, vue hybrid, aura hybrid, cobasys