Bankrupt battery maker A123 Systems was scheduled to go up for auction today behind closed doors at a Chicago law firm, but the list of bidders is likely to cause trouble.

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Siemens might be a household name, but it is normally associated with appliances such and blenders and sewing machines.

However, now it hopes to add another daily appliance to its resume, by making an electric car. To do so, it has partnered with Volvo to make a fully-electric car based on their C30 platform.

Volvo, which has been quite keen over the last few years to produce an electric car will certainly gain a lot from Siemens technical know-how on this subject.

“We are very happy to have Siemens as a partner. Their world-leading knowledge and experience will bring the technology in our electric cars up to an entirely new level,” says Stefan Jacoby, President and CEO of Volvo Car Corporation.

Volvo has shown electric versions of the C30 in the past, but now with Siemens help it can get this project a lot closer to production. Volvo will deliver 200 vehicles to Siemens by the end of this year for testing.

Volvo hopes to start a small production run of the electric C30 this year, with a plug-in hybrid version of the V60 to be launched next year.

Apart from their limited range, another objection to electric vehicles is that they take hours to recharge a depleted battery.

Recently Siemens announced that prototypes of a high-powered electric vehicle charger promise to make filling a typical EV battery inside of 60 minutes. The first 22-kilowatt (kW) CP700A chargers are being rolled out through the European Commission-sponsored, Europe-wide Green eMotion initiative. They will first be deployed in Germany, but it is expected this technology will soon become available elsewhere.

Siemen’s electric mobility team head, Ralph Griewing, was reported as saying that the CP700A is the next best thing to taking an EV to the gas station in terms of speed to refill. The sub-60 minute estimate is for a typically sized battery that is fully drained. Naturally, periodic top offs for partially drained batteries would take less time, and this is actually recommended to extend the number of recharge cycles in a li-ion battery’s life cycle.

While the CP700A is capable of a 22kW dump, its software reads what kind of vehicle is being plugged in. If an electric motorcycle or scooter were to connect, it would know not to force heavy amp loads into it, and could trickle charge as low as 3.7 kW.

[Source: Autoblog Green]