This is the final segment of my interview with Jon Lauckner, GMs VP of global program management, considered Bob Lutz’ first deputy and who has been very involved with the Volt project from day one.
What are the terms of GMs battery contracts with the battery suppliers?
‘A’ we shouldn’t talk about what we’ve agreed with the companies not to talk about, ‘B ‘ lets put it this way, when their is intellectual property generated, nobody’s really anxious to see it just floating around somewhere. Were going to spend a fair amount of talent and treasure developing this battery pack and we aren’t anxious to see everybody and their brother walk in after its all done and say “me too, me too”
Can you anticipate the possibility of working with both teams in the final production vehicles?
Oh sure. I would say we haven’t decided exactly what we are going to do, we are going to let the development results speak for themselves and clearly we’d be delighted if their was room for everybody.
What happens when the car gets to production and there is a huge demand for it, how will GM take care to roll it out to everyone who wants it without creating a price-gouging scenario?
I’ve worked in three regions around the world, and Ive seen the same phenomenon in all these regions, and I don’t think anyone has a completely satisfying process for how to stop that. I mean the fact is that if you look at all of our regular production cars if we were to come out with a new version of the Corvette, in fact we will, we are showing the famous ZR-1 at the Detroit Auto Show. I guarantee you that there will be people waiting in line to get a ZR-1. They will go to dealers and their will be a massive discussion about how the few Zr-1s that will be available right at the first day of production, who’s going to get them and how much are they going to pay for them. Even though its unsatisfying, if you want to be the first guy on the block with something, well most probably you’re probably going to have to pay a little more to do so. And so were going to have to work on that but I think we’ll be very responsible in that regard.
We’ve got some reasonably smart guys who probably have some good ideas about that. I don’t really talk about that, I’m product development, we’ve got our challenges, we’ve got a tight timeline, we know what we have to do.
Besides the battery pack, do you see any other hurdles to production?
I think from a product development standpoint, the battery pack is probably the major challenge.
When do you think you will be able to know with full confidence that production will happen?
In terms of the development process, we have to get through the mule phase completely and then we build integration cars where we bring all of the final designs for all the production systems together. Integration cars come after mule cars. Mule cars are basically just to develop and understand the basic functionality. And we build mule cars not just for battery packs, but we build mule cars when we want to try out a new HVAC system or if we want to try a different kind of steering system or suspension system. Well build a vehicle that basically just has the components in order to feature that area of the car. The rest of the car is just along for the ride. We build mule cars to understand and tests these systems of interest, and understand very well the kinds of changes theyre sensitive to so we can get the design exactly the way we like it. And that essentially a process that works in each and every area of engineering whether its electrical or chassis or the interior area. We get the learnings from the mule cars and we fold all that into a production design. When we have the production design then we build an integration car that basically brings all of those into one car.
Does an integration car look like the final car?
It’s very close to the final car.
How many mules do you think you will need for the Volt?
I don’t know you will have to ask Frank Weber. I’m sure we have a build schedule.
Do you know how long the mule testing phase will take?
I don’t know, some will run longer and other shorter.
Six months?
I wouldn’t be surprised, for some of them. Each mule car has someone its being built for and a particular type of usage that its intended for. So some will be road schedules to run durability tests, and others will be for , static types of things, and others will be turned over to development groups to start developing how everything is going to behave.
