GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

Several other bloggers and I had a press conference with Rick Wagoner, GM’s CEO.

My second question and his answer were as follows (first question here):

Obviously GM is taking a risk in developing, marketing, promoting, and advertising a car that doesn’t exist yet, how do you feel about that risk and what it represents for the company?

“On the first point, there’s some risk. We didn’t go into the objective lightly. By the nature of the process you don’t know whether all this stuff…are we going to be able to scale up the battery and address all of the issues particularly in the timeframe. But I would say it has been kind of motivational for the people that execute, to have the data out there, and make sure they know that we want to make it as soon as we can, ideally by the timeframe indicated, and if they need help holler. If people need to put some extra resources in to keep it on the fastest pace possible, we’ll do that. So I think its been helpful for us to keep us moving as fast as we can and frankly help us with our suppliers to keep them moving on.

We take risks every day in the business, this one might just be a little more public. But it is one that is the right risk for the time, and so far I’d say its been pretty motivational for our teams working on the project, and its been a good rallying point. It’s an important car and an important technology, and the symbolism is important too. Well see how it plays out, but no regrets for being in the race.”

To see the whole video of the blogger press conference check out Matt Kelly’s post here.

Here’s a Volt we can all afford.

It’s $13.95 in fact,but only 7500 being made. You can order yours here.

Reader response has clearly been quite negative in reaction to Bob Lutz’ mentioning the Volt may cost more than 30,000 initially.

There are several considerations however:

Cost of fuel will be a lot less; 2 cents/mile for electricity versus 15 cents per mile for gasoline.

High likelihood of significant tax rebates for Volt owners.

Possible leasing of the battery.

The very first models will be more expensive but if demand is great, price may come down with ramp-up in production.

Nothing is ever guaranteed anyway, the car isn’t even built yet.

In terms of the waitlist, I have only collected emails. There will come a time when members will be asked to confirm their interest, as we get closer to production and begin the process of connecting people to actual cars.

Anyway, I for one am hanging in there and continuing my support of the car that could change the U.S. and the world. I hope you will do the same.

Many months ago Lutz told us it was GM’s intention to sell the Chevy Volt for under $30,000. Not surprisingly that was GM-Volt’s top voted post of 2007.

In an interview with WIRED magazine, Maximum Bob dropped another bombshell.

With respect to the car costing under $30,000 he said:

“I’ve always said I’d like to be able to sell it at around $30,000. The way things look now, it doesn’t look like that’s going to be possible. It looks like it’s going to be more.”

and, as to how much more:

“I don’t know. You’d like to have it at about $30,000 for the customer, but what I’m hearing from the team is we’re not going to get there. They say we might get there on the second generation, and they say if they had a lot more time they might be able to cost-optimize it. I don’t want to wait for cost optimization. I’d rather come out in 2010, and if it costs closer to 40 than 30, well, that’s too bad.”

This information shouldn’t surprise us too much as GM North American president Troy Clarke told us early adopters might have to pay a premium. Just think about the very first plasma TVs. A 32 inch set cost $10,000 in 1998.

Source (WIRED)

Bob Lutz reiterated on Monday during the Cadillac press conference, that he was overly optimistic about having mules for test drives in Easter, and once again said it would be “more like June”.

I was able to get some clarification on this from Tony Posawatz, the Volt’s chief engineer, just after Lutz’ comment.

Tony said “Bob is an accountable guy, he always speaks the truth.”… “He wanted to have an event when journalists could drive early Volt properties, to get to see how the system worked, how close we were to 40 miles range, etc, etc.”..”we have counseled him that for safety reasons, and to give the engineers a little more time to drive them themselves, it might be better to do it in June”.

Very importantly Tony said “There has been no change (in timing) to our development activities.”  Specifically they are still on the same timeline for the mules, it’s just that they want the mules to be more advanced than they will be in April before they let outside journalists drive them.

Tony said with respect to packs being late, “well a week or two here or there, that’s nothing too significant”..”the timetable is very compressed, it’s hard”..”if it were something more substantiative as it relates to the program, we’d let you know”..”A123’s pack will be here by the end of the month”..”We have put demands on these suppliers that are kind of unheard of, and we’d prefer it that way”..”we are asking people to stretch beyond their normal limits given the nature of the technology.”

I asked him about the issue of the software needing to be more perfected before test drives. He said “exactly, thats the issue”…”We wanted to make sure that safety proceeds, that we’ve got everything covered. We want to have a little bit more time so that the driving experience of the journalists is a little less crude. It will still be somewhat crude. We talked to Bob about it. He understood he got a little ahead of himself. You got to give him credit, he is always going to be honest. He wanted to make sure because he said it that he would say it in front of everyone at (at the press conference).”

CEO Rick Wagoner took some questions from bloggers today.

I asked Mr. Wagoner for his response to Toyota president Wantanabe’s comment that he looks forward to direct competition with GM in bringing a plug-in hybrid to market by 2010.

His response:

“The comments from Wantanabe-son are fine. Actually, I saw some summary of the stuff he talked about, and I read it and I said, well ‘that’s my speech’ (laughter).

In a way thats OK. That tells us first of all this is a competitive industry with some pretty good players on the other teams, and one of those is a pretty successful competitor and is seeing a lot of the same opportunities we are, maybe executed in different ways. It doesn’t make me nervous, it makes me think we’re on the right track.

Toyota s a very good company, very accomplished in a number of areas, but it is not a foregone conclusion that we and them are running the same race, that they win or we win, we have to play our best game.

There’s a tendency from depending on where one sits in a country like the U.S. with the trends of recent years, to say Toyota’s going to win this. I would invite you to visit China and think whether Toyota’s winning is inevitable where we had the same start 10 years ago and none of us had anything there and now we sell about twice as many cars and trucks there. They’re not doing badly but my point is on a level playing field we’ve shown in a number of new markets around the world whether it’s China or Russia or India, we can compete very well with them.

They are good and I’m sure their interest in this topic will motivate our people to hustle even more which we need to do to try to make these deadlines.”