GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

One question the Volt engineering team is often asked by journalists is how much accessory electric draw will effect the Volt’s 40 mile all electric range.

Clearly there will be an effect.  During the recent 30 to 40 degree mornings I, for example, have been driving my MINI E electric car with the heat on moderately for the first time since I got the car in June.  This is resulting in around a 10 to 15% decrease in range.

Conventional gas cars are able to use the heat of the gas engine to heat the car but pure electric cars and the Volt in EV mode don’t have that luxury instead having to rely on electric heating elements.

Indeed GM announced in August that using some unspecified average amount of HVAC and city driving schedule, the Volt would achieve 25 kWH/100 miles.

As was reported yesterday, a fleet of eight integration Volts are currently on a three day extended test drive which will total 1200 miles of driving.

Among many other things, engineers have been testing the HVAC and Volt engineer Andrew Farah explains how the Volt will handle this issue when he was asked how HVAC draw will affect range.

There is going to be an effect , there is no question about it. What we’re trying to do is give the customer an opportunity to decide how much they want it to have an effect.

For example, one of the things that the Volt has that other cars don’t is not only do you select what temperature you want and things like that, but you can also select if you want it to use full available power because you’re interested in being 100% comfortable 100% of the time, or whether or not you want to restrict how much power the system can use.  Yes that will take a little longer to heat or cool the cabin, but again it really has to do with what the customer is interested in doing. We try to make it easy for them to make that kind of choice.

So it seems the Volt will let you dial in an economy HVAC option to extend your EV range if desired.  It is also believed that the Volt will be able to programmably precondition the temperature of its cabin while plugged-in, using grid energy, therefore requiring less energy from the battery once driving begins.

So what are the priorities of we early adopters?  Will you choose to limit your HVAC power to extend range, or just go for sheer comfort?

On Tuesday morning, eight Chevy Volt integration vehicles left the Milford Proving grounds compound in Michigan on a historic extended test drive into Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The cars were driven for more than 9  hours and 300 miles continuously in a special effort to analyze their behavior, performance, and comfort on such a long drive in real word conditions.

Key personal in attendance on the drive included Volt chief engineer Andrew Farah, Volt vehicle line engineer Tony Posawatz, and advanced technology engineer Larry Nitz.

“Development drives are key milestones for every vehicle program,” said GM spokesperson Rob Peterson. “The extended seat time allows the engineers to experience every aspect of the vehicle – from ride, handling and performance to the comfort of seats. The drives also help uncover engineering issues that need to be resolved before the vehicles are put into the hands of customers.”

“Having the capability to drive several 100 miles in a day is a significant advantage for the Volt team too,” said Peterson. “Remember, the EV1 team needed to be trailered to areas like Pikes Peak or Pennsylvania for testing, or trailer a small generator to extend the vehicle’s range.”

Lead engineer Andrew Farah wrote the following observations about the drive:

HVAC comfort is good, and sound quality in the NVH (noise, vibration, handling) vehicle is excellent.

We have uncovered a number of minor issues with some of the gauges and displays. Up-level sound system makes XM really sound great!

City traffic in Pittsburgh was just what we were looking for after the rolling grades outside of town. On the way in, we all put the transmission selector into the “L” position and this worked as intended in the stop-n-go conditions. At speeds under 35 mph, you can basically drive with one foot because of the heavier regenerative drag as you fully release the accelerator. It is smooth and blended. Seat comfort evaluations are also being conducted. We have our top 3 comfort configurations from previous activities. So far, the top choice seems to be clear, but there is still some work to do.

This was the longest continuous real world drive to date the Volt development vehicles undertook in a single outing, and illustrates how the Volt is capable of doing what no pure battery EV could do.

Besides providing the engineer with valuable data on how to make the cars as perfect as possible, it also produced some very cool photo ops.

Meanwhile GM also announced it was investing over $200 million to upgrade several production facilities in preparation for building the Chevy Volt and Cruze.  In particular, the engine plant in Flint where the 1.4 L Volt engine-generator and 1.4 L turbocharge Cruze engine will be made was allocated $202 million.

Some recently published numbers about Volt prototype production volume are inaccurate.

First, though the Detroit Press reported the 74th car was the final Volt prototype built at GM’s pre-production plant in Warren, according to Bob Warner, GMs Director Global Pre-Production Operations, it was actually the 80th.

“The 80 vehicles we built are now entering the next stage of development, which includes a series of crash tests, developmental drives, battery checks, climate tests and other measures we take to make sure the production vehicles meet our high standards,” he said.

Also, we reported that GM is preparing to begin building the next phase of Chevy Volts called pre-production or validation vehicles at the full scale production plant in Hamtramck Michigan next quarter.

Volt vehicle line engineer Tony Posawatz told us GM will build cars in “the two to three thousand range” of volume.

This led some of us to wonder what would become of all those cars if they weren’t saleable, as it seemed a rather high volume for prototypes.

When asked about that, it turned out Mr Posawatz wasn’t referring to PPVs with that number.

“The (PPV) number is much smaller,” he said. “It is easy to get caught up in terminology, certainly less than 100 non-saleable units beginning with PPV’s (will be built).”

Thus once those non-saleable PPVs have been built and the process for building them well understood and the tools for making them completed, GM will begin cranking out final Volts in significant volume.

It is therefore those Volts for sale that GM will build 2000 to 3000 of in the 2010 calendar year.

As was reported on Friday October 9, GM completed building the last of a total of 74 pre-production Chevy Volts, which were built in the modest-sized pre-production operations facility in GM’s Warren campus. I had the chance to discuss with Volt vehicle line engineer Tony Posawatz what happens now.

Now that these cars are finished what happens next?
Interestingly enough this is probably where the intense work begins. From a build perspective, we won’t build again until early next year in Hamtramck. What we do now is we take the production intent designs that were built up in the integration vehicles and we test the living daylights out of them and continue to do iterations and iterations. A lot of it is software. A lot of it is taking some of the crudeness in fit in the body fits and tighten them up. Although we do it on math, variations occur and flushness and fit come out a little differently then they do on paper.

So we’re now tuning it. And between that time from October of this year and March of next year, we test the vehicle to confirm the production design works, tweak and fix things, and as we tweak and fix things those changes have to be incorporated in the production tooling and those things typically have a longer lead time.

Then the production tooling is in place. Those are the big heavy expensive dyes to stamp the sheet metal. Those are more significant molds and cavities and processes to manufacture plastic parts in high volume. That’s kind of what happens right now. Right now is the testing, problem-solving, refining and putting all that learning into the production tools. Come the March timeframe and we’re running Volts with production tools. And that is still an iteration process or learning process to refine it for what’s going to happen later in the year.

Are you beginning to put hardware into the Hamtramck plant?
Oh yeah, the Hamtramck plant and the battery plant are on a project plan to upgrade themselves to be ready to build in the early 2010 timeframe. So right now there are tools in toolshops being produced and as we find out, we need this or that, we’ll change it on a production tool. That’s the process we’re in.

When you first start building in March what are those vehicles called?
We call them PPVs, pre-production vehicles or validations. We have a couple more “flavors” but those are all flavors of production vehicle that we work through. This is fairly state of the industry, our terminology is a little different, but every manufacturer does these iterations or flavors of vehicles that have the next phase of software.

At some point in time for example the interior parts have a certain graining to them that you do as one of the last things. You put in a little grain into the tool, but once the tool is grained and they have this nice little texture to the plastic parts it’s very hard to change the tool if you have any functional dimensional changes. Later in the Spring we’ll actually grain the parts so that they really look like production and piece the cars together.

Right now things are actually going pretty well.   We have certainly a lot of issues but that’s standard for this type of project and where we are at in the program. Issues are actually a good thing. We know no one is that good to get it spot-on or if the issues don’t properly surface they somehow surface later. If you have a lot of variation in some of the parts, and you don’t see it early enough to try to control it, to get thefir finsihs and execution elements perfect.

PPVs are not saleable?
No, they’re not saleable yet.

So you will build a few hundred of those?
No we build in the two to three thousand range. We’re finalizing that number right now. A lot of that is practicing the processing of that. Ultimately their will be a line rate of many jobs per hour when we do this so you want to get the guys actually practicing in the production environment.

CEO Fritz Henderson took to the airwaves this week to give us a first 90 days update on the happenings at ‘new’ GM.

Mr. Henderson confirmed that the majority of the restructuring plan that was put in place in July was still on track, and that the four remaining core brands were performing to expectations, and retaining the market share expected of them.

He further announced that through the first three quarters of the year, GM has trimmed the number of dealers to around 5,800 (from 6,575-with many more still to come), reduced the total workforce by more than 18,000, and eliminated three more nameplates on their journey down to 34 for 2010.

Throughout the conference call, GM’s CEO stressed the need for improved business results, good cash flow and profitability in the very near future. The success of those three items being paramount to launching a successful IPO next summer.

In a related matter, ‘new GM’ has yet to release any financial reports at all, and this conference call itself was prefaced by Randy Erics, Executive Director of Investor Relations, with the statement: “…as we review the first 90 days, I would like to point out we will not be discussing our financial results today.”

GM is under no obligation to release financials to the public as it is currently a private company, however Fritz Henderson later suggested that more financial clarity will come at some point in November. The cynic in me now expects a announcement on the DoE ATVM loans to GM to manufacture more Voltec-based vehicles just before this November fiscal update.

While the 90 day update did provide some good prospective on the overall picture at GM, inventory levels and future predictions, the CEO failed to address the costs associated with the failure to close deals on three of the four major brands slotted for sale (Saturn, Saab and Opel-GM did finalize the deal to sell Hummer just this past Friday). As a example of such a problem would be that Saturn was not included in ‘old GM,’ and with the failure of deal with Penske, the 371 existing dealers will now be due compensation under state franchise laws…not to mention the lost revenue stream of not building product for Penske’s Saturn.

Also, Mr. Henderson did not comment on the costs/future commitments that GM is taking on with the reintegration of Delphi components into the mothership (about 2.85 billion-ish), as it exited bankruptcy on Tuesday.

Fortunately for those of us primarily interested in the Chevy Volt, all the news was good. Mr. Henderson stated once again that the Volt project was still on track, while reminding us that the Brownstown Township facility will produce lithium-ion battery packs for extended range vehicles in 2010, and that over 80 pre-production Volts have been produced to date.

Looking past the first 90 days, it seems that the first job for day 91 at GM was to show the door to accept the resignation of Mark LaNeve, VP of US Sales, and former VP of Sales & Marketing. On the conference call Mr. Henderson stated the following in regard to Mr.LaNeve’s dismissal resignation and future plans:

“Mark LaNeve has elected to leave General Motors on October 15 to pursue another opportunity with a non-automotive company.” On a personal note, I will miss Mark’s optimistic wordsmithing on monthly sales reports. Also, that ‘non-automotive opportunity’ is at Allstate, where he is said to be heading up the marketing. It doesn’t seem possible, but Mark will have a even more daunting task at Allstate than GM, trying to make people forget their ‘three D’ mantra for handling claims – Delay, Deny and Defend. /bonne chance

And so the executive shakeup begins. Score one for new Chairman Ed Whitacre.

Which begs the question, can CFO Ray Young’s departure be far behind? While Mr. Henderson acknowledged rumors of Mr. Young’s impending exodus during the Q&A following his presentation, he stopped short of giving Mr. Young a vote of confidence going forward simply saying, “There are a lot of rumors in the press and Ray is our CFO…Ray is our CFO. I read the rumors like you do.”

Strangely enough, on the very same day as Mr. LaNeve elected to leave, GM has already named his replacement in the form of Susan Docherty (formerly of Buick/GMC fame) to become the new VP of US Sales…and then (according to Automotive News)
severed ties with Mark’s favorite ad agency Modernista two days later.

Hopefully they asked Ms. Docherty what the price of diesel was before they chose her for the job…it would be nice to see some of GM’s international, fuel efficient diesel lineup hit North American shores to compliment the Volt’s introduction

Source (GM)

October 9th, 2009 marked the end of another chapter in the Chevy Volt’s development.

The 74th and final integration vehilce prototype version of the Chevy Volt rolled off the assembly line at the pre-production operations plant at GM’s Warren Technical Center campus.

Those following the Volt story closely will remember the countdown clock chief engineer Andrew Farah had on display in his office showing the day the first one of these Volt vintages would arrive.  That day was just before July 3rd.  And now 3 months later, 74 of these cars have been made.

These vehicles are for all intents and purposes full production-intent Chevy Volts though they have some minor fit and finish issues as they are the first true cars to be made from the original math models.

GM has been and will continue to rigorously and tirelessly test these cars.  From what we know they have been from the pit of Death Valley to the summit of Pikes Peak and spend all their days on GM’s test track and around Warren.  This author even got to ride shotgun in one with Volt executive Frank Weber at the wheel.

“This is our shining moment after all we’ve been through with the bankruptcy this year,” said Andy Pawlaczyk, who is chairperson of UAW Local 160, which will build the Volt with Local 122 at GM’s Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant.

“This is the same kind of work we do on any new car, but it’s got a different purpose,” said Keith Brown, who is an an assembly worker in the preproduction facility. “We want to get off foreign oil. I hope everybody buys the Volt and loves it, and we can push the industry in that direction.”

Using all the learning these cars can provide, GM will begin building the next iteration of car on the Hamtramck assembly line in the first quarter of next year.

And we are one step closer to a world without oil.

Source (Detroit Free Press)