GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

GM-Volt.com has reached the next level.

For more than a year I have served as your intermediary. After building visibility and credibility to the point I could meet with actual GM executives in charge of building the Volt, I brought your questions, ideas, and enthusiasm to them. We let them know we are here and holding them accountable to building this car. It has always been my hope to connect you all to them as well. A couple of months ago I proposed to GM that they co-host the GM-Volt.com community in a town hall-type event, where we could all get together, meet in person, inspect the Volt show car, and get our questions answered directly from GM executives.

Well, they took me up on the offer!

Wednesday, March 19th, 4:30PM at the Jacob Javitz Convention Center in New York City, the first VOLT NATION Town Hall event will take place.

The venue will be the last conference of the NY Auto Show press days, before it opens to the public.

The first 250 people to register, exclusively on this site, will get guaranteed entry and a press pass. At the show we will have a private, exclusive get-together with the entire Chevy Volt executive team, on stage, gathered around the show car. Your questions will be taken and answered.

Don’t miss this unprecedented opportunity to continue to get our message and input to GM how much this car means to us and the world.

Register by sending your name, address, email address and phone number to voltnation@gmail.com. Your data is secure and will be managed by me (with a little help from GM’s PR firm).

Witness the power of social media!

I sat down for a brief Q and A with Frank Weber. He is the vehicle line executive for the Chevy Volt and all of E-Flex systems for GM. He knows a lot about what’s going on and is very forthright and forthcoming.

What was GMs motivation to build the Volt?

Societal challenge. Look at the future what you see is that not the industry nor any individual OEM can afford not to believe that this is next big step. Because it is the only technology currently available that can make a fundamental difference. People say “yes but you do hybrids”, but this is there to improve fuel economy above regular fuel-consuming vehicles. Then you look at the data that we currently have on the Volt, and we did intensive work. What we did was in Southern California there are data released from the regional traffic survey, over 600 people had data recorders in their vehicles to see “how long did they drive”, “how demanding was their driving”, lots of data, and we looked at it and we said “What difference would the Volt make in that context relative to hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and conventional vehicles?” The data is just amazing. They had engines starting ten times, we’d have it starting one time, reducing emissions by 70%. When you look at the fuel economy in the end and you saw how many percent versus conventional, you would be at twenty percent of fuel consumed for those drivers, and by the way, those were regular drivers, and SUVs and everything, so this was not a special group.

With the Volt what you see is this is the only way to produce (the energy) independence that we were looking for, and the 40 miles, and this is what made us so comfortable that the concept was right, will really be for a majority of drivers, because the only thing that counts is what will be the reality when you drive this vehicle, is the guy able to say the week has seven days and I will be able to drive six of those without burning any fuel. This is whats going to happen.

If you think this concept through its not about whether you have then once a week the engine will start and burn fuel, this is fine and give people the security that they can do everything with this vehicle that they are used to, but what really counts is what will happen with daily driving in a real world environment. There many people have not even understood how significant the changes are that that this concept will introduce.

The Volt development program is unique because it is parallel in that you are developing the pack at the same time as the rest of the car instead of in serial order?

(Normally) What you would do with the propulsion train and the battery side is you would have a what we call a decoupled or pre-development of that activity, only the moment you know that this is all working and you have tested it then you would start the actual vehicle program.

What we have done is we said to save time, (considering) our confidence with the battery technology and the propulsion technology is so high that we will start the vehicle and the propulsion/battery at the same time, except that this is introducing a higher risk to the development process. What we are doing with this is that we will have the tests of batteries in cars available in early 2008. I’d be surprised if things occur that were not foreseen, although this might happen. We still think it is still the better way to accept risk and build up hardware for the real production vehicle. It speeds up things dramatically.

Beside the battery packs, do you already have all the rest of the hardware for the vehicle functional, for these development mules, i.e the motor control systems, and generator, etc?

What we are doing is we are leveraging, we have a powertrain portfolio because of the strong hybrid and 2-mode hybrid, there is a lot of electric drive experience, and we have the Equinox fuel cell vehicle which is electric, and what we are now doing for the Volt is we are combining those efforts and are not developing everywhere, especially in places where it is not necessarily unique, developing everywhere new components, so the regenerative brakes are just another generation of what we are doing on the two-modes, so we are combining everywhere now pulling together this portfolio of fairly reliable components where we have some background.

Is the electric motor for the Volt the same as what you already have in the 2-modes or fuel cell Equinox or new and different?

It is a different motor specifically designed for the performance needs of the Volt. We will have the first prototypes soon, but as a physical part it is currently not available. We are talking about 115 kW of peak power and this is not something we have around. The hybrid motors don’t need this power. It is a different configuration.

Are you considering different options for generator configuration, for example a parallel design when in charge-sustaining mode?

What we always said is clearly, we have a simplified gasoline or biofuel engine on-board that is only there to generate electricity, and we don’t want to introduce more complexity to the design. Many discussions around the engines itself have been had whether it is diesel or not, but in the end I said I really don’t care because it is an engine that is only there to generate electricity and we will do everything to simplify wherever we can.

If the engine is only there to generate electricity why don’t you use a turbine or a Stirling engine?

What you will see is midterm and longterm there might be other solutions for how you generate electricity but since we said time is important and being fast is important, and also commercial viability is important you will leverage what you currently have in your portfolio, picking up “family zero” small displacement gasoline engines. By leveraging existing powertrain components means for us limiting engineering risk, being fast in execution, and being at a cost point where all those, what you’ve described, advanced solutions that are currently not available, would not be affordable. In the end, these don’t make much of a difference, because we dont want to burn gasoline to generate electricity, this is not the idea of the vehicle. So there will be alternative solutions in the future but for the time being I think we are more comfortable in taking something that we have.

Have you chosen the exact engine that you want to use?

The one that you saw in the show car last year is a “family zero” engine. We are currently working to optimize the specific setup for it, but we will be working off that specific engine.

When we first heard GM was planning to increase the price of intial Volts to more than $30,000, government subsidies in the form of tax credits was discussed as an option to lower cost.

Certainly tax credits have been a factor in the adoption of early hybrids such as the Prius.

We even heard directly from Congressman Jay Inslee on the status of tax credits for plug-ins and the fact that it didn’t pass the legislative chambers. GM sources I have spoken with have also indicated support for Volt tax credits.

From these discussions, it was interesting to hear the wide range of opinions of readers here on the pros and cons of this issue.

So it seems a reasonable idea to start a poll on whether you think the government should or should not offer a tax credit (not deduction) for buying a plug-in car like the Volt.

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Elon Musk, founder of Paypal, is also chairman of Tesla Motors, the silicon valley start-up that has recently rolled it’s first production electric car, the Roadster, off the production line.  Musk himself owns that one.

He was interview by Michael Kanellos of CNET and they covered a range of issues.

When asked about whether he felt the major automakers were serious about electric cars he responded that he thought Toyota wsa “really very serious” and that GM was only “pretty serious”.

When asked about the status of Tesla Whitestar, the company’s planned lower-priced (than the Roadster at $100,000) sedan he said, “We are about to finish the styling on the sedan and hope to unveil it in the second quarter of this year. The working prototype would be later this year”.  He also said Tesla expected to build between 10,000 and 20,000 of these per year at a retail price of $50,000 to $60,000.

Source (CNET)

We often discuss how much the Volt will eventually cost us, the consumers, as that’s the bottom line as to whether people will actually buy or be able to buy the car in mass numbers.

We don’t hear too much though about what the program is costing GM.

An article in the Wall Street Journal by the notable reporter John Stoll puts a number to this. He reported that the Volt program is costing GM nearly one billion dollars.

We’ve heard that the introduction of this car is for GM analogous to the “moon-shot” as had been called for by JFK. Not only that, but it seems to have the same budget to boot.

Is this a lot to pay for a company already in the red, and if the initial sales are unlikely to make them a profit?

Source (Wall Street Journal)

By now many of you have probably heard about this. Originally reported in D-magazine is a “closed-door”conversation between GM Vice-Chairman Bob Lutz and several journalists. On the topic of the Chevy Volt, Mr Lutz reportedly called global warming “a total crock of sh-t”.  He went on to say he’s a skeptic rather than a denier and further clarified that the desire for GM to build the Volt was more to replace foreign oil than to reduce CO2 emissions.

On this site we examine all the Volt news, and it isn’t clear what type of PR this statement will generate. The comment was picked up by Jalopnik on Tuesday and made it to Popular Science and WIRED on Wednesday.

We here, of course, were dealing with some important politics and science in the interim, but hey, why not stir the pot a little.

One thing that’s clear about Mr. Lutz is he tells it just like he sees it.