GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

GM has partnered with personal mobility supplier Segway to develop and build a new kind of vehicle. The lightweight 2-seat neighborhood electric car is given the acronym PUMA which stands for “Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility.” The device was unveiled Tuesday at the New York Auto Show.

It is a open-air, partially enclosed two seat vehicle that can travel up to 35 mph and travel 35 miles on a 35 cent charge. It uses a lithium-ion battery pack includes two-wheel balancing technology, 360 spinning, vehicle to vehicle communications for autonomous driving and is meant as an emissions-free solution to dense congested urban driving.

“Project P.U.M.A. represents a unique solution to moving about and interacting in cities, where more than half of the world’s people live,” said Larry Burns, GM vice president of research and development, and strategic planning. “Imagine small, nimble electric vehicles that know where other moving objects are and avoid running into them. Now, connect those vehicles in an Internet-like web and you can greatly enhance the ability of people to move through cities, find places to park and connect to their social and business networks.”

GM hopes to make these vehicles available by 2012 and although pricing isn’t announced, it is expected the vehicle’s operating cost will be 1/3 to 1/4 that of a traditional vehicle.

[flash http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY4msj5Q05Q]

An important element of GM’s recovery plan is that every vehicle in its portfolio must be able to pay its rent.  This refers to a break from past operations in which the company would make healthy profits on every truck and SUV it sold but either break even or sell at a loss small cars.

The Chevy Volt, however, will be allowed to stay as the exception to this new rule.

“We can’t make money on the first Volts,” reports Troy Clarke, GMs president of North America. “But as we get a chance to change the generations of technology, we’ll lose less and less.”

Now that the Volt is nearing engineering completion, GM is already working fervently on 2nd and 3rd generations of the car. In these iterations the company is striving to take as much cost out of the battery packs as possible. These packs, costing several hundred dollars per kwh, are the prime reason for the car’s high price tag and non-existent profit margin. Volt vehicle line director Tony Posawatz says GM has the potential to take several thousands off the price of the car in future generations.

But, according to John Smith GM VP of global product planning, even the second generation Volt may not make money.

Looking forward to a change in philosophy for the company, Clarke said “It’s not our intention to lose money forever.” All future products “have to have a line in sight to be commercially viable.”

In related news GM VP of R&D Larry Burns told reporters that GM once made viable is likely to get $10.6 billion in low cost advanced technology loans, including $2.3 billion for developing and producing two other new electric cars and one hybrid car in addition to the Volt. “Treasury wants to fully understand what our ultimate destiny is before giving us that (DOE) loan,” said Burns.

Source (Automotive News) and (Reuters)

PayPal founder Elon Musk is the CEO of Tesla Motors.  Recently he unveiled the Model S 4 door all-electric sedan shown above to much fanfare.  The car exists only as a prototype but the company hopes to mass produce it if it can obtain a $350 million dollar government loan to build the assembly plant.

Tesla has already been producing the 2-seat electric Roadster and has plans to eventually build inexpensive electric cars and partner with automakers.  GM vice chairman Bob Lutz has even credited the company with inspiring him to develop the Volt.

But one thing that stands out is Tesla has no plans to build an extended range electric car like the Volt.

I had the chance to ask Elon Musk why.

What is your feelings about the range-extender concept of the Chevy Volt and why have you not considered it it any of your products?
We looked closely at a range extender architecture for Model S. It ends up costing about the same in vehicle unit cost, a lot more in R&D and a lot more in servicing. Also, although performance is ok when both battery and engine are active at the same time, it turns really bad when the battery runs out and an undersized engine is carrying all the dead weight of the pack. Essentially, a REV is neither fish nor fowl and ends up being worse (in our opinion) than either a gasoline or pure electric vehicle.

An important consideration that people without a technical background don’t understand is that you can either have a high power or a high energy cell chemistry, but not both. Since the battery pack in a plug in hybrid like the Volt has to generate the same *power* as a much larger battery pack in a pure electric vehicle, it has to use a low energy cell chemistry.

That means a 40 mile REV pack is not 1/5 the size of a 200 mile pure EV pack, as simple proportionality would suggest. Another factor is that the REV pack is forced to do three to four times more cycles that a pure EV pack and is (obviously) hit with five times the current per cell during acceleration and regen braking, which forces the REV pack to be derated considerably.

The net result is that a 40 mile REV pack is roughly half the size of a 200 mile EV pack. On top of that, you have to add the engine, generator and all the interconnects between engine and battery. It ends up having about the same mass and worse packing efficiency than a pure EV, plus you still have to deal with all the environmental issues of a gasoline engine.

If at this point any doubts remain, US Treasury Secretory Timothy Geithner went on CBS’ Meet the Press on Sunday and proclaimed “GM is going to be part of this country’s future.”

“We want to see a strong automotive industry emerge from this recession,” he said, also indicating the government needs to assure that GM “can emerge strong enough without having to have government help on an ongoing basis.”

Currently a quick-rinse bankruptcy is not ruled out and CEO Henderson said of the company’s required restructuring “If it can’t be done outside of a bankruptcy process, it will be done within it.”

Some pundits are reporting that all this bankruptcy talk may actually be a high-stakes game of chicken noting Obama to be an avid poker player. The idea is that bondholders and the union will wither to accept concessions in the remaining weeks rather than face the prospect of greater losses in bankruptcy court.

Meanwhile GM presses on with the preview today of a new upcoming vehicle, the 2010 GMC Terrain. The bold radically-styled new truck is based on the same platform as the upcoming Chevy Equinox. Impressively it uses a 2.4 L 4-cylinder gas engine delivering 182 horsepower and achieving a remarkable 30 mpg highway. The sister-car Equinox has already been value-priced at a $23,185. I know, no plug no sale.

It has been long known that the Volt would begin its North American launch in November 2010.  GM continues to report confidence in being able to achieve that deadline.

Previous interviews have suggested the Volt would be rolled out throughout North America more or less at the same time.  However, without giving much detail it was just disclosed by Volt vehicle line director Tony Posawatz that the the Volt would be “rolled out 9 months later in Canada.”  This puts it into August 2011.

Recent cold weather testing of the current developmental mules confirms the car operates as expected in cold climates including tests in Kapuskasing, Ontario at temperatures “very much” below zero.

Volts kept unplugged for prolonged periods in extreme cold would start the generator first to heat or condition the battery to optimum operating temperature before going into EV mode, a battery life-saving strategy pure EVs do not have.  If the cars are plugged in in extreme cold, grid electricity would be used to keep the battery warm via an internal heating element.

Of course it will be warm in Canada in July anyway, but winter is always on the way.

Did you know 9% of the last 30 days visitors to GM-Volt.com were from Canada?  Eh?

The Obama administration believes CEO Fritz Henderson represents change for GM.  White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee said GM’s new CEO Fritz Henderson was “considering all the various options to make it a viable plan going forward and to avoid an uncontrolled liquidation,” and that “it’s clear he’s embracing a change of direction and they’re trying to work on a viable plan.”

“The key thing the president is trying to do there is avoid an uncontrolled liquidation of these companies … but at the same time not turn companies into wards of the state that can’t live except for getting an allowance from the government,” the adviser said. “They’ve got to be viable enterprises.”

With at least 5 of the 60 days already gone in which GM has to convince bondholders and the UAW to accept concessions, the fate of a “quick-rinse” bankruptcy cleaving GM into a “bad” liquidated and a “good” surviving company appears increasingly likely.

Former CEO Wagoner had held out against bankruptcy all along claiming it would lead to loss of the company.  Henderson however takes a more open-minded view. He said “If we have to resort to bankruptcy then we’re going to do it fast…there are non-traditional ways to do this but it requires a fair amount of force, will and leverage and we have force, will and leverage.”

I took the liberty of emailing Mr. Henderson my and our GM-Volt.com well wishes. I wrote:

Dear Mr Henderson, Just a note of strong support for you from me and the GM-Volt.com community. We wish you well on your monumental challenge, and believe GM will emerge lean mean and green and we will finally get our Volts. Please let me know if there is anything I and my readership can do to help.

And in a move representing change to me, he responded to my email, something Mr. Wagoner had never done.  He wrote:

Lyle- thanks very much for your support! Best regards. Fritz

Somehow I have a good feeling about this.

Source  (Automotive News) and (Reuters)