GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

Tesla Motors has unveiled their 4-door 7-seat all-electric sedan in the Space-X factory in California Thursday. The vehicle is the follow-up to the current 2-seat Roadster of which they’ve so far sold 250 copies.

This vehicle will be priced at a lower $57,400 and have a 160 mile driving range. It will handle rapid charging at 440V, allowing a full charge in 45 minutes. The fact that their is a driveable prototype on display does not ensure the car will go into production. A dedicated factory is required for that, dependent at this point on the company getting $350 million in government loans.

There is no range extender.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said “Would you rather have this car, or would you rather have a Ford Taurus?”  He noted it is the plan that 20,000 copies per year would be built.  There are two battery upgrade options one for 230 and one for 300 mile range. The 300 mile pack has 8,000 individual lithium-ion cells.  Top speed is 130 mph and it will go 0 to 60 in  5.5 to 6 seconds.  A sport edition will over 0 to 60 times “well under 5 seconds” says Musk.

The vehilce has a floor-mounted battery and powertrain allowing the hood to act as a second trunk and the ability for rapid battery swapping from below.  It is reaer-wheel drive although an all wheel drive version is under development.

The chassis is made of aluminum, and the car has a 4000 pound curb weight and a CD of 0.26.

Sure is a beauty. Note the touch screen console which has 3G wireless capability allowing the driver to use Google maps, Internet radio, and to communicate with the car via iPod.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that within days the President’s Task Force on Autos is expected to announce more government aid for embattled automakers GM and Chrysler.

Interviews with Task Force members suggest the administration doesn’t want to automakers to slip into bankruptcy protection. Rather they are expected to say they see viable futures for the companies, but only if management, union, and bondholders make sacrifices. A new “firm timeline” for concessions will be provided.

The Task Force has been charged with a very daunting task that some pundits say they are ill prepared for. The team is led by Steven Rattner, a former journalist, who analogizes saving the auto industry to solving a Rubik’s cube. “It’s like a Rubik’s cube, trying to untwist it and trying to get all the colors to line up,” he said. “So we’ve learned a lot about how car dealers work, and how companies get paid when they sell a car to a dealer, and why there are a certain number of dealers more than are optimal. Have we learned everything? Of course not, but I think we are learning what we need to learn to do this job.”

Besides not yet achieving concessions from the UAW and bondholders, predicting future auto demand is also a big challenge for the team

“The biggest variable the team has had to wrestle with,” he says, is “what the demand for cars will be in five years.”

It appears likely that GM will be receiving the $16.6 billion it is asking for, but is unlikely to be getting it as a lump sum, but rather in a metered fashion as certain negotiating milestones are met.

Looks like we’ll be getting our Volts after all.

Source (Wall Street Journal)

On this intriguing day, GM spokesperson Rob Peterson decided to write his own response to my last post about the first Volt Integration vehicle being built June. He both wanted to clarify it a little and respond to some of your comments. He also wanted to share with us the actual countdown clock on the wall of Volt lead engineer Andrew Farah, showing the number of days until the first genuine Chevy Volt build begins (shown above).

Feel free to tell him what you think.

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The following is from Rob Peterson, Manager of Electric Vehicle Communications at GM:

Hello,

It’s great to see all the enthusiasm for the Volt program. I can attest the Volt development team draws tremendous motivation from the comments and feedback you provide.

I just wanted to make a quick correction to Lyle’s story – builds of the first Volt integration vehicles will BEGIN on June 1 and be completed soon afterward. Importantly, the change shouldn’t impact Andrew Farah’s goal to be driving vehicles on July 4th. Speaking of Andrew, I’ve included a photo of his countdown clock hanging in his office below (Note: Start of Build-GA, indicates the time Andrew expects the General Assembly area of our pre-production operations to begin building the vehicles). No question, it’s an exciting time for the team as the journey that began on January 8, 2007 is starting to come together. There is still lots of work to do, but we’ve made tremendous progress to date.

I don’t often get a chance to engage in the dialogue, so I’ll also answer a few questions from posters as well:

#11 Solo:

You’re absolutely correct; some of these cars will be crashed much like we’ve done with the engineering development mules already. This is standard for any vehicle program and a significant differentiator between a production program and a fleet or demo program.

#23 RamZ

Doubling up on DonC’s response, building a car for the masses is a complex process that involves meeting government regulations and consumer expectations as well as tremendous talent and even a little good fortune to pull it all off. Building a car at the same time the technology is being developed, like the Volt, only adds to the complexity. We’ve tried to be transparent about the development of the vehicle so the public understands the challenges, but also to highlight the effort and skills of all the people who are working on the development of the Volt.

#24 Statik

Glad to read you’re pleased with this progress, but I hope you’re not going soft on us. Your comments keep the dialogue “real.” There is one common thread amongst all heros…they all need a villain. This isn’t to say you’re a villain, but candid feedback keeps the dialogue relevant. (I suspect I’ll catch some flak for even hinting that the Volt could be a “hero,” but that doesn’t change my feeling that this is an important vehicle for GM and the industry.)

Currently GM has a few more than 30 Cruze-shell mule prototypes running around the proving grounds and in various test facilities. These cars have been performing flawlessly. Though containing a near-final Chevy Volt powertrain and battery, they do not possess the true Chevy Volt interior or exterior design.

The next critical stage in Volt development process will be the building of true to form and function Chevrolet Volt prototypes. This particular level of vehicle are known as integration vehicles or as GM calls them, IVers.

Andrew Farah, the Volt’s lead engineer actually has a countdown clock in his office revealing that 63 days from today, assembly of the first true Volt will start. All the parts will be lined up at the low volume assembly facility and will begin to come together that day. Andrew notes the first one will take longer to produce, but for all intents and purposes will come to life on June 1st. They will then be built at a rate of roughly 10 per week until a total fleet of over 80 is completed.

Those cars “will look, taste, smell, and feel like the Volt. They are the Volt,” said Farah “my goal is by Forth of July to be out driving several of them.”

By the fall, it could be argued that GMs Volt fleet will surpass the size of the fleets of many of the start-up electric car manufacturers.

According to Greg Ceisel, GM’s Voltec manager, 2010 will bring several more build stages. “We’ve got several phases leading up to the production launch where we build larger and larger batches,” says Ciesel “in each phase as we perfect the production process, make sure we’ve got all the fit finish and other details exactly correct and that the quality of the vehicle meets our standards before we go into the first vehicles that will ultimately be saleable vehicles that will be shipped to the dealerships.”

He said there will be “a hundred or so” of these final pre-production Volts that will also act as a captured test fleet for mostly GM employees.

By November of 2010 the first saleable Volts will begin being built at the Hamtramck plant and shipped to dealerships.

There is still uncertainty about exactly how and where GM will launch the Volt come November 2010. Earlier reports suggest San Francisco and Washington DC have caught GM’s eye due to plug-in readiness, but GM denies that those locations have been settled upon.

I had the chance to gain a little more insight into this process by asking Jon Lauckner. Jon is GM’s VP of global program management, and is along with Bob Lutz, co-creator of the Volt concept.

Do you have a better idea now how many Volts you will build and where they will be released?
We have a better picture, but I wouldn’t say we have finally settled on it. I would say what we have decided is we probably are not going to use an approach where we launch the Volt simultaneously in all markets in the US. Lets face it, this vehicle is a bit different than a normal vehicle. We need to make sure that all of the charging infrastructure is in place so that all people have a really good customer experience.

There needs to be some education and training. Obviously if people buy a Volt and they don’t plug it in at night or they plug it in only sporadically they’re going to have a very different customer experience and probably not be as completely satisfied with the Volt as they would if they were plugging it in each and every night and using it exactly they was it was intended, recognizing that electricity was meant to be used as its primary fuel, not the small gas engine on board that was intended to be its range extender.

Do you think you will produce a small initial supply just for people to learn about it and then ramp it up?
I think more specifically what we will do is launch it geographically. So we’ll start in a particular geographic area. We’ll maybe pick two or three geographic areas and start there. We’ll make sure we understand everything about launching the vehicle and understand how customers are using it and what their driving experience is, and then quickly ramp up other geographic in the US and around the world.

Will you be soliciting feedback from those initial buyers?
Absolutely. Those are people that will be purchasing the vehicle but we are going to try to establish a very close relationship with those people. People that are genuinely interested in the Volt for its technology and the fact that it doesn’t use petroleum as its primary fuel and have a strong interest in helping us make that particular type of propulsion huge success. Like you Lyle. That’s how we pretty much see this thing going. We have a little more work to do before we announce exactly how we’re going to do it, but we’ve pretty much settled out on the fact that were not going to try to go everywhere all at once. That probably doesn’t make a lot of sense, we are probably better served by being a bit more measured than we would be in a typical vehicle launch.

Spring is here, and the 30-odd Chevy Volt mules have passed through their first winter with flying colors I am told.

GM has tested the cars extensively at the Milford Michigan proving grounds, the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan, and Kapuskasing, Ontario. Ten vehicles visited Kapuskasing and a few visited the upper peninsula.

The focus of the testing at the UP was more for chassis control development including stability control and braking. Battery work was not the primary task, as the lab environment is best for subjecting the battery pack to temperature extremes. Indeed those packs have been undergoing arduous temperature exposures for more than a year, with no problems identified.

In Canada, the focus of the testing was the propulsion system. The cars were kept indoors overnight, and then they were evaluated to see how they started and how they ran after a cold soak.

According to Voltec team leader Greg Ciesel, temperatures the mules were exposed to were “very much below zero,” and even at the Milford proving grounds “we got to probably minus 10 or 15 degrees F.”

Voltec spokesman Dave Darovitz said “Cold weather vehicle response depends on multiple factors including temperature, battery SOC, battery preconditioning (if plugged in) and if the vehicle was stored inside. Another factor is FMVSS defrost requirements, which demand more heat then we can supply electrically and cause the gas engine to turn on.”

He confirmed that testing was successful. “The cars performed as we expected under cold weather conditions,” he said “We still have some work ahead of us, but are encouraged with the operating conditions of the mules under very cold conditions.”

Volt lead engineer Andrew Farah gave an example of how a certain problem was discovered and fixed during the cold weather testing.. “We ran into some issues, we found out that we had a problem with one of our powertrain mounts,” he said “Why, because the car was going though some abusive driving…they told me we broke a mount. We did some analysis and we found things we knew about but we hadn’t gone far enough, it was an ‘aha’ moment and we fixed it.”