GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

People often ask and speculate about whether GM will secretly roll the Volt out earlier than November 2010 in a surprise move.

GM first publicly announced the November 2010 target launch date back in November 2007, when I happened to pick up Bob Lutz mentioning it in the scrum at the 2007 LA Auto Show.  This three year soup to nuts target is aggressive for any vehicle, let alone one so complex and dependent on new technology as the Volt, compounded by its need for a heretofore nonexistent mass-production lithium ion battery pack.

It is downright remarkable that considering all the drama GM has been through the date hasn’t changed at all.  GM apparently even has a specific day in mid-November when the first car will be launched.

GM has a new board of directors which was installed after they emerged from bankruptcy.  This has been headed by Ed Whitacre, former CEO of AT&T, who recently ousted Fritz Henderson.

Currently, according to the New York Times GM is flush with cash.  They are said to have a stockpile of $46.2 billion and the board is looking for ways to use it to help achieve profitability as soon as possible.

One idea the new board came up with, according to anonymous sources, was to offer $100 million more for the Volt program in an effort to get the car released sooner than November 2010.

Considering GM has already spend $1 billion developing the car, and around $700 million investing in its manufacturing infrastructure, what’s another $100 million if it could put it in the public hands sooner.  Of course, the simple labor of time in ironing out the glitches may not be something money could buy.

In fact, GM VP Jon Lauckner told the New York Times that more money won’t necessarily allow GM to launch the Volt out sooner, but could allow them to build more early prototypes for consumer test drive opportunities.

“We have already reduced the Volt’s development time by about seven months,” Lauckner told the Times. “Our date with destiny is November of 2010, but it could be useful for us to have the money to get some vehicles to consumers earlier than that.”

So will this money be spent, and what exactly does Jon Lauckner mean?

Source (New York Times)

As many here are aware I had the chance to test drive an advanced Chevy Volt integration vehicle last week.  Read the full report here.

I took the car for a 50 minute spin around a parking lot course with a top speed of around 50 MPH. Though the testing environment was somewhat limited, and the car not fully refined, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and came away extremely pleased and impressed with the vehicle.

I can hardly wait until I have one to call my own, which I hope won’t be too long in the future.

Below is the edited video of my test drive. Hopefully it might let you feel a little like being a passenger in the back seat. You will hear some interesting banter among myself and the two other GM occupants, Chief Engineer Andrew Farah in the front seat and Vehicle Line Director Tony Posawatz in the rear. The filming was done by a fourth occupant, a GM social media staffer who I am grateful to for his help.

There are quiet periods which allow you to hear the generator.

Many other journalists and other people of influence got the chance to drive the car that day and others and all the reports have come back uniformly glowing.

GM has announced it will be investing $336 Million into the Detroit-Hamtramck plant for the purpose of retooling and preparing the plant to build the Chevrolet Volt electric car next year.

“We expect the Detroit-Hamtramck plant will be the first facility in the U.S. owned by a major automaker to produce an electric car. It is the hub for the wheel that we began rolling in 2007 when the Volt debuted at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit,” said Jon Lauckner, GM vice president of global product planning. “Since then, the field of challengers and partners has grown significantly. This competition will expedite the development of electric vehicle technology and infrastructure.”

So far GM has invested nearly $700 million in Volt related needs in eight facilities.  In addition to today’s announcement the following other money has been spent:

• $37 million in Bay City, Mich. to produce cam shafts and connecting rods for the Volt’s engine generator.
• $23 million in the Flint, Mich. Tool and Die facility to build the dies to stamp metal parts for the Volt.
• $202 million at the Flint Engine South plant — this is where GM will build the 1.4-liter engine generator that provides Volt an extended-range capability of more than 300 miles.
• $1.7 million at the Flint Metal Center, in presses to stamp parts.
• $30 million in the Weld Tool Center, in Grand Blac, Mich., to produce the robotic weld tool cells that were installed in Detroit/Hamtramck plant.
• $27 million in the Alternative Energy Center at the GM Tech Center in Warren, home of the new, state-of-the-art battery lab where GM tests and refines the Volt battery pack.
• $43 million in Brownstown Township, Mich., to open the world’s first OEM-owned, high-volume, lithium-ion battery pack plant.  GM expects battery-pack production to begin there early next month.

GM will begin production of the first validation build Chevy Volts in Hamtramck in March of 2010.

This work will gradually shift into regular series production of the car by late next year.

This investment indicates GM’s robust level of commitment to the future of the Chevy Volt and other electric vehicles.  It is the first electric car plant GM has operated since the EV-1 plant 13 years ago.

“The race to build a mass-produced electric vehicle – a race that has its roots with the EV1, but began in full with the reveal of the Volt – has been one of the most exciting developments the auto industry has ever seen,” writes Volt vehicle line executive Doug Parks.  “Detroit/Hamtramck is the finish line for the race and one we will cross this time next year as Volt begins arriving in dealerships.”

Source (GM)

When former GM CEO Fritz Henderson was ousted last week it came as a surprise to many.  Ed Whitacre, the former CEO of AT&T who had himself been installed as GM’s Chairman of the Board was responsible for Henderson’s dismissal and put himself in charge.  While GM searches for a new external CEO, Whitacre has indicated he may stay in the role for as long as a year. GM executive pay caps installed as a result of government ownership would limit attracting new talent.

Whitacre also made some other rapid shifts in executive management including moving vice chairman Bob Lutz from marketing back to product development.  Lutz will remain vice chariman and along with the other vice chairman Tom Stephens will advise Whitacre.

Whitacre is known to be a stern taskmaster and is shaking up the company to remove some of its inbred mentality to avoid repeating some of the same mistakes of the past.

But Whitacre’s seizing of the wheel raises some questions from those of us interested in the Volt and GM’s shift to electrification.

At his recent keynote address Bob Lutz said “We have significantly expanded our commitment to electrically-driven vehicles at GM, and are now in the midst of an extraordinary transformation.”

“GM is moving from a company that, for 100 years, has been based on mechanically driven automobiles, to one that will eventually be focused on electrically driven vehicles,” he said. “This is a big deal.”

I subsequently had the chance to ask Mr. Lutz if Mr. Whitacre was also committed to electrification of the automobile.

“He will not try to run the programs,” Lutz told GM-Volt.com. “He (by his own admission) knows almost nothing about the business.”

“Nobody will diminish our focus on electrification,” declared Lutz.

The Chevy Volt story has been long, intense and very high profile. This site has served as a beacon and helped fan the flames of media interest primarily to help acheive our goal of reducing petroleum use.

However, some Chevrolet dealers are apparently frustrated by Volt marketing and are concerned that it is shifting emphasis and marketing dollars from cars in the showroom right now, and GM’s new CEO may be on their side.

This idea was suggested in a Wall Street Journal report about last week’s executive shakeup at General Motors.

Fritz Henderson was ousted by Chairman of the Board Ed Whitace, the former AT&T CEO who in the process seized the position of CEO.

Whitacre made some other immediate moves.  He kept veteran car gurus Bob Lutz and Tom Stephenson as his first hand advisors, and removed marketing responsibility from Lutz.  He also shifted Susan Docherty, 47, into being in charge of both marketing and sales, and Mark Reuss, 46, into head of North American operations.

These actions reportedly illustrate Whitacre’s drive to accelerate and simplify decision-making and help break GM’s slow-moving and oblivious historic cultre.

It also shows his desire to create a leaner, younger team.

Possibly these changes could also shift focus to selling cars available today instead of spending millions marketing the Volt which isn’t here yet, and when it does arrive will be in small numbers, and be sold at a loss.

“If I were to tell you how most dealers feel in all this, it’s that we’re at a point where we wish they would focus on selling the cars they have today to today’s customers,” said Steve Cook, owner of Cook Chevrolet in Michigan.

“We’re tired of talking about Volts in 2011,” Mr. Cook told the Wall Street Journal. “We want to sell Malibus, Impalas and pickup trucks in December.”

Many expect the early Volt to be a halo car to improve GM’s image in the mind of environmentalists and others and lure people into showrooms perhaps having them leave with less expensive more available cars such as the Cruze.

Will Whitacre’s moves push the Volt to the back-burner? Could his ouster of Henderson on the very same day GM was in the midst of a Volt media blitz in the key target state of California been his way of sending that message?

The next few months ought to tell.

Source (Wall Street Journal, subscription)

In a continued effort to educate the public about the value and significance of the Chevrolet Volt, GM commissioned the development of an official Chevy Volt song.

It is a cheerful, upbeat and catchy tune that debuted on the first consumer day of the LA Auto Show this week.

Maria Roher is GM’s director of global Volt marketing, a newly formed position critical for bringing the Volt from the test track to the driveways and roads of America and the world.

She explains to us the significance of this new song:

As you know this week was not only packed with meetings with press and social media folks like yourself, in addition,  we also attended a middle school, Harvard-Westlake to engage in a conversation about Electricity and how Electricity of today will power the next cars of tomorrow.

Now, why did we do that?

Chevrolet and I feel very strongly that educating our future leaders, kids, on the future of the electrification of the auto category works hand in hand. We are not only looking to sell our Volts come start of production but we are also looking to educate our youth on something that is rather new and sophisticated and quite eco minded.

Our goal is to craft that education in a manner that is family friendly ( as it should be because we are America’s original mass /heart brand), entertaining and simple to understand for a rather sophisticated product.

A Volt song helps us to achieve those objectives.  ’Chevy Volt and Me’ explains what Volt is all about as a better EV in simple friendly terms.

We debuted it live at the LA auto show for anyone who wants to hear and see it come to life. It is running once per hour.

Stay tuned as we move through next year, we will intro more fun educational ways to get engaged with Volt and all of its attributes.

With all due respect to GM I felt somewhat compelled to use the song as a soundtrack to a video montage of the history of GM-Volt.com and of course the three years of Volt developments weve been following so closely.

Enjoy it below: