GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

GM has for months been discussing and promoting the idea of community plug-in readiness.  This relates to the development of public charging infrastructure and government incentives to enhance the adoption of electric cars.  In fact, GM has clearly stated that those communities which have demonstrated sufficient plugin readiness will be rewarded with being the first rollout locations for the Volt.

People often wonder why GM needs to go through all of this effort.  I asked the following questions about it of Tony Posawatz, GM’s Volt vehicle line engineer.

A lot of people ask why is GM focusing on plugin readiness.  They say if its just like a plasma screen TV being plugged into an outlet in your garage, what’s the big deal?

There’s a little bit of history to this. We’ve made a lot of mistakes in our history and we’ve learned.  GM has already failed three times on infrastructure.

We have not succeeded on E85 yet its a really cleaver idea. I’m not referring to corn but the more advanced stuff.

Hydrogen…I don’t know what happened to the hydrogen superhighway, no infrastructure there.

Also I would argue for EV-1, we didn’t set up a good infrastructure there.

So we said fool me once, fool me twice…

The Volt was designed to make the infrastructure challenge easier.

The Volt doesn’t need public charging the Volt needs number one really good charging at home. Just plug it in? Not so fast my friend, the data we look at says.

Let’s say we don’t have a ready city initiative, or the region your going into, the education.  The electric company is a driver of special benefits too.  People would be losing out. Wouldn’t you want someone to set a standard that EV drivers get the best parking or the HOV lane?  This helps mitigate the initial cost because you get the extra value. You may get free charging. This is our effort because we have some leverage. We recognize that one of the issues with Volt is a cost issue.

If you live in a 1947 farmhouse in Connecticut and you want to plug it in, but it its not a dedicated circuit, and every morning when your vehicle is charging and your daughter turns on the hairdryer and the fuse blows.  Who’s going to get blamed?  Who are they going to call?  Its a very real situation. Many houses are not wired to code, they are wired in a very cheap manner.

We’ve learned, and we so much want to make this work we are not missing anything.

We are negotiating with some prominent companies to get the home ready… house installations, or if you want the plug moved or a dedicated circuit or a special meter or 220V.

GM won’t have its own wiring subsidiary?
No we will actively be involved in setting the requirements for a partner. There are companies that did the EV-1.

The 240 V cord has to go directly into the wall?
Yes, that’s by code.

In the showroom we want to have a system available in parallel to get the house ready.

This is why were so big on infrastructure. Number one to see if we can bring additional benefits to the customer, and to build this thing for the future so we can engage partners and build new opportunities that I can’t tell you about yet. Once your in someone’s home what kind of things well be able to do and you say to yourself, this is more than just a car.

BMW has released the details of its Vision concept car which will be unveiled in Frankfurt in September.

The car is a technological tour-de-force that borrows some of the Volt concept but expands it in new directions.

The car is a 2+2 seater sports car that has stunning performance, aerodynamics, design and fuel efficiency.

It is a plug-in hybrid vehicle not an extended range electric vehilce, but appears to share the best of both architectures..  It uses a 10.8 kwh lithium ion battery pack of which 8.6 kwh hours is usable.  Instead of taking GMs approach of only using 50% of a 16 kwh pack, BMW is using 8.6 kwh (80%) of a 10.8 kwh pack, allowing the pack to be smaller and lighter, weighing in at only 187 pounds.

The powerplant is a 3 cylinder 1.5 liter turbo-diesel engine that is supplemented by 2 electric motors.  BMW indicates the vehilce is capable of driving on electricity alone, the combustion engine alone or an infinite number of combinations of them.  For brief bursts the cumulative output of all three powerplants can be as high as 356 hp and 590 lb-ft of torque.

The car can do 0 to 60 in 4.8 seconds and has an electronically limited top speed of 155 mph.

It gets 62.6 MPG in the European cycle when running only on the diesel engine but is capable of traveling 31 miles purely on electricity when the battery has been fully charged.  This configuration will allow the vehilce very high MPG estimates when using the new PHEV measurements under developed.

Charging takes 2-1/2 hours at 240V, 16 amps.  A 380 v 32 amp fast charging option is available allowing the car to be recharged in 44 minutes.

There is a 6.6 gallon fuel tank giving the car a 400 (diesel) + 31 (EV) total driving range of 431 miles.

The car also has an astounding coefficient of drag of .22 making it extremely aerodynamic.

It uses lightweight construction techniques and has a cur weight of 3056 pounds.

Styling is aggressive and stunning, there are overhead doors and 3 heads up driver displays.

PRESS RELEASE BELOW:

 More 

Every so often GM-Volt.com rises to the attention of the national media. In the most recent case our little blog wound up featured in a story in the Wall Street Journal penned by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Kevin Helliker.

The focus of the story was the fact that despite the global financial meltdown and the particular decimation of the auto industry, online automotive writing and publishing has actually continued to increase. So people may be buying less cars but reading about them more.  This is interpreted as meaning America’s love affair with cars remains strong even if they can’t be afforded.

It was noted that the number of online auto sites is nearly 5000, and the number of online automotive writers has increased to 2700 from 1600 in 2005.  The total number of auto sites increased around 2% in 2008, the same year car sales slumped 30%.

It is also clear that auto shoppers are increasingly turning online for research, with 75% of potential car buyers conducting online research in 2008, up from 70% the year earlier.

This site was mentioned in the context of the increasing popularity of sites particularly devoted to electric car coverage.

I was quoted as saying “This Web site has just added a whole new dimension to my life.” You can say that again.

Source (Wall Street Journal)

For the last 100 years, calculating a car’s efficiency was easy, one determined how many miles a car could travel under certain standardized conditions on one gallon of gasoline.

However, the new era of electric and partially electric cars is turning that convention on its head.

This was too brought to a head earlier this month when GM announced that Volt would get 230 MPG in typical city driving, and later that day Nissan tweeted that its LEAF would get 367 MPG.

In the case of the Volt, that number was arrived at by looking at the average amount of driving a cohort of city drivers did, presuming they were driving Volts and charging daily, and determined a total of 230 miles of driving would be covered over time for every one gallon of gas used.

Nissan’s number was based on a completely unrelated measure of the petroleum equivalence factor, which converts electric consumption into an equivalent amount of fossil fuel.

These numbers aren’t the end, but the beginning of a potential list of numbers that if displayed on window stickers may make it hard for consumers to compare and choose vehicles.  Some even argue that a dollars per mile measurement should be adopted, but due to volatility of energy prices and wide variability among different energy sources this method is insufficient as well.

Progressive Automotive X Prize is a marketing-neutral organization which will award $10 million to the winner of a competition among vehicles for the one that will get at least 100 MPG.

They are promoting the widespread adoption of a measure known as mile per gallon equivalents (MPGe), determined by the following formula:

MPGe = (miles driven) / [(total energy of all fuels consumed)/(energy of one gallon of gasoline)])

This system essentially levels the playing field for all energy sources propelling the car including electricity, gas, or alternative fuels.

As examples, using these methods, the Tesla Roadster consuming 53 kwh over 244 miles of driving would get an MPGe of 158. The Nissan LEAF traveling 100 miles on 24 kwh of charge would get 142 MPGe.

And what about the Volt?

Well the calculator found here would work for it too, but still missing is the value for the Volt’s MPG in charge-sustaining mode, Another problem is the fact that MPGe will vary as a function of range, from 170 MPGe for trips under 40 miles down to 58.2 MPGe on a 200 mile drive (assuming 50 MPG in generator mode.)

I asked John Shore who is Senior Advisor of Progressive Automotive X PRIZE what total driving distance he believes the Volt should be analyzed over.

He wrote:

Two relevant data points are the MPGe achieved at the 100 mile and 200 mile range requirements of the Alternative and Mainstream Classes, respectively. But it’s very important to note that the overall MPGe value used for scoring our competition will likely be considerably higher than these values, since MPGe over shorter ranges will contribute more to the overall value. Thus you might want to estimate the Volt’s MPGe at the various trip lengths listed in the table on page 36 of the Competition Guidelines – current version available here. You could then estimate a combined MPGe by taking a weighted average with the distribution weights shown in the table.

If we do the math he suggests up to 100 miles (99% of trips), the Volt then gets 167 MPGe, beating both the LEAF and the Roadster.

[NOTE: Graphic above is from Wall Street Journal article and illustrates yet another efficiency measurement, gallons per mile]

Its hard to believe, but we are actually drawing close to the day the first saleable Volts roll off the production line in November 2010.

Recently the DOE announced a $30 million grant for GM to use to release a test fleet of 500 Chevy Volts to consumers, and 125 to commercial entities. GM has not officially indicated their specific plans about this keeping it rather coy.

I had the chance to briefly ask Volt executive Frank Weber about it.

He said the grant, “means when we do our development activities with charging infrastructure activities and vehicles and provide test data that we will make available to the DOE, they can learn from the vehicle to understand how the vehicles operate.”

Asked specifically if these cars would be distributed prior to November 2010, he said “it is part of rolling it out for Nov 2010.”

Pressing for more specifics as to whether it would before or after November 2010 he said “its (both) coming to November 2010 and after November 2010.”

Understanding that to mean some cars would be released prior to November 2010, and undeterred, I asked specifically “Will consumers get into those cars before Nov 2010?” At that point Weber looked at me wryly, smiled, and said nothing.

You can take that anyway you want, but don’t say I didn’t try.

Some sources are suggesting that the Volt production run for 2010 will be extremely limited anyway. According to Automotive News, “GM plans to build only 200 to 400 cars in November and December 2010, as 2011 models.”

They also report GM will build just 10,000 copies during the entire year of 2011.

It is also clear GM will limit roullout geographically.

So no matter how you cut it, assuming you can afford it, getting an early Volt won’t be easy.

When Bob Boniface, the Volt’s Chief Designer, officially presented the first ‘IVer in motion’ on July 28th (also known to him as Christmas morning), that Volt was painted in the finest color known to man, which of course is not a color at all, it is black. While this made the Volt look impressive, it made design changes a little hard to pick up on.

A few weeks later at a media event, another IVer Volt was put through its paces by Frank Weber, who is officially ‘King of the Engineers’ at GM. (Ok, that is not his actual title, but it is way too long to repeat, and too boring to remember)

This particular Volt gave us the opportunity to more easily judge/identify the changes, because it was in the worst color known to man, Robin’s Egg Blue.

Actually, that is bold-faced lie. Bob Boniface just recently sent me a note telling me that particular IVer was in “e-coat gray without paint,” not Robin’s Egg Blue. (However, my making that mistake illustrates my point…that Robin’s Egg Blue is a terrible color, and all previously built Volts in that color (or similar) need to be used in crash tests…but I digress)

As you can see from the illustrations, the hood has been changed into more of a bonnet, and the front side quarter panels have been adjusted accordingly. This type of hood, while often seen on trucks and SUV/CUVs is a rarity for sedans.

What was unclear is if this design change is functional or aesthetic. From first glance, it appears it could allow for more access, or perhaps it offers additional protection/redundancy from the elements for the sensitive components inside. Then again, perhaps Bob Boniface just really liked the new Ford Fiesta and this is his homage to it.

When I inquired about the subject, all of those first assumptions proved incorrect, and Mr. Boniface has this to say:

“Hood cutline change was made for compliance with European Pedestrian Protection regulations. Hood cutines tend to be very stiff due to metal flanging and the original ones fell into test zone for head impact.”

So there you have it, functional changes. However, he did add his thoughts on what that meant for the aesthetics as well:

“I was happy to move them because I think the side view line makes the fender appear thinner.”

Taking the reason for the changes to its logical conclusion, one could assume these changes will see their way to the Opel Ampera project as well.

Personally, I think the new changes give it a little more of the “nerd’s shoe” mystique, but it also gives the Volt a little more uniqueness…and that can’t be a bad thing.

Sidenote: Frank Weber’s official title actually is “Global Vehicle Line Executive/Global Vehicle Chief Engineer, Global Electric Vehicle Line Team” …that has to be one whale of a desk plaque.