GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

As you may now by now from my numerous interviews with him on the site, Frank Weber is the Chevy Volt’s vehicle line director. He is profiled by the Detroit Free Press.

He is described as a health-conscious musician with a penchant for tinkering and independent thinking. The German native is described analogously as the Chief Technology Officer of the Volt (if it were its own company) .

Mr. Weber was first given the job of E-Flex/Volt VLE two months after the show car was announced in January 2007, and is said to be enlisted to do “what even Toyota can’t”. He is described both as the cars VLE but also it’s chief engineer, to help expedite the timeline. He says “Many of the things we are currently doing are very fundamental technical decisions that will guide this architecture for years and almost decades,”

The article mentions the challenge not only of the batteries but of creating low power components say for radio, A/C, and windshield wipers, and the fact that these have to be built anew and have a supply base developed.

Frank reports directly to Jon Lauckner, VP of global program development and Steve McQueen VP of global powertrain.

Clearly he is challenged by the extremely tight timeline, 30% less than usual as per Volt design leader Bob Boniface, and as the article goes, he appear to be rising to that challenge .

Source (Detroit Free Press)

My interviews with Frank: 2/18 , 12/20, 12/17,

There have been discussions about how many Volts GM plans to produce at first. We have heard before that as many as 60,000 could be built and more recently that tens of thousands were intended to be built.

In a recently published article by the Globe and Mail, GM vice-chair Bob Lutz gave a much more specific prodcution plan. He said:

“Volt will be about 10,000 units the first year, just to make sure we’re prepared for any issues that might come up, and then ramp up production from there,” and “So we’re not going to see a wholesale move to electric vehicles right away.”

He was implying that there will be development issues in need of optimization before full mass production could take place.

Source (Globe and Mail)

Thanks to James F. for the tip!

Motor Trend published a report summarizing some of the presentations at the Society of Automotive Engineers Hybrid Symposium in San Diego last week.

One of these was by a Dr. Menahem Anderman of Advanced Automotive Batteries, which gave a “cold-eyed view” on PHEVs. His report concluded that GM won’t be able to make the Volt affordable without Toyota.

He is reported to doubt PHEVs will be very significant players in the near future, and states that a 40-mile PHEV battery like the one in the Volt costs about $10,000, which is too high to be replaced in the vehicles serviceable lifetime, and makes the car expensive.

It was also his contention that promoting the Toyota hybrid system will do more to reduce CO2 emissions, since they are already the market leader in hybrids, claiming hybrids offer a greater efficiency jump over gas engines than PHEVs do over hybrids.

He also say lithium ion batteries futures are “too sketchy”.

It is implied he thinks that Chevy Volts wont sell in volumes due to their price, and that lithium-ion battery prices wont drop until Toyota puts them into their cars.

The conclusion is therefore, that the Volts price cant drop until Toyota sells lithium-ion battery cars in large volumes.

Do you believe this?

Source (Motortrend)

We discussed a few days ago, along with several other major blogs, Bob Lutz’ comment about global warming, where he had called it “a crock of s–t”. Apparently the GM vice-chair was quite amazed about how that took off on the blogosphere.

He has now responded on his own blog, and makes the point that his opinions about global warming are his own personal ones, are immaterial, and have no impact on the decisions he makes for GM and the direction the company is headed.

He advises us not to form opinions about him, but rather about GM the company, and advises us it is GM’s plan to take cars out of the environmental equation. He even says that doing so is “good for the planet”.

He concludes the Volt is being built under his personal supervision and he fully believes it will revolutionize the automotive industry.

Source (Fastlane Blog)

GM’s outspoken Vice-Chairman, and father of the Volt wrote an opinion piece for the Feb 25th edition of Newsweek entitled “The Road Ahead.”

His task was to predict the future automotive landscape and writes that it will be “markedly different than today”.

First he predicts some change in “proportion”, cars will be smaller, but feels that those in the U.S. won’t reach European sizes until gas climbs above $ 10 per gallon. He writes that Americans still have a need for trucks, and, memorably:

“Not everyone is suddenly going to switch to very small cars, or tiny little pickup trucks, unless they suddenly decide to haul tiny little horse trailers carrying tiny little horses. ”

His other prediction is a change in “propulsion”, and agrees with his own prior statement “the electrification of the automobile is inevitable”.

He tells us GM is “pouring resources” into developing the E-Flex platform which will power not only the Volt, but “a generation of vehicles,” and he re-iterates his point that the Volt “is not a hybrid” but an E-REV.

Finally he mentions the planned Volt mule test drives this summer and promises “then you’re going to see, gradually but emphatically, this vision of the future of the automobile turn into the present.”

Source (Newsweek)

Most GM executives involved in the Volt program say the battery is the major stumbling block to development. Other new low-power components have to be made for the car in order to allow the 40 mile range, but these are mostly minor engineering tasks.

Normal cars have tremendous supplies of energy for the accessories to run off (radios, wipers, A/Cs, etc.), but considering the very tight supply of battery power the Volt will carry, these components will have to be tightly managed and highly frugal energy “sippers”.

Sharon Terlap at the Detroit News published an interview with Frank Weber, Volt vehicle line executive, to further expand on this area.

Frank told her:

“People tend to believe that if the battery question is solved, everything is solved and the vehicle will work, but beyond the battery, the electric vehicle presents challenges that are significant.”

The report mentions that the supplier base for these energy efficient components has to be built up as well for the car to make it to mass production.

Weber also says “There is not an established supplier community for this. It’s a very complicated system with known technological solutions. But they’ve never been integrated in these forms.”

In the end Weber admits, though, that it’s really “not a matter of invention” but rather the application of technologies that cars wouldn’t ordinarily need.

Source (Detroit News)