GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

Lithium batteries and cold weather do not go well together. An incredibly important part of engineering the Volt, and electric cars in general, is to assure that they will function properly in very cold weather.

My MINI-E which is rudimentary and relies on cabin air to warm the pack, was just  in the shop having been towed for the third time in its short 7 month life. In temperatures below 32 degrees I regularly only get about 55 to 60 miles of range. I came out of my workplace two weeks ago to find the car unable to start with the battery registering zero.  A “battery module” was replaced.

The Volt battery has its own independently regulated software-controlled liquid thermal management system that ensures stability, reproducibility and longevity.

GM’s Voltec engineering team are on another road trip to Kapuskasing Ontario to cold-weather test the Volt.  Kapuskasing is 500 miles north of Toronto and this time of year has temps regularly below zero.

As Volt engineer Pam Fletcher writes:

We want to see how the vehicle responds in temperatures as low as -40 degrees C. Basically, we try to simulate customer behavior to be sure the vehicle responds exactly as a customer would expect.

Despite the frigid temperatures, the Volt is engineered to handle extreme conditions.  The battery is warmed up during plug-in charging, which is recommended particularly in cold climates, but we realize not everyone will do this.  So at night, we plug-in some vehicles and some we don’t.  We want to ensure the vehicles start in the morning, or if the battery is too cold, we want to be certain the engine-generator starts first to protect the battery.  The engine-generator system will provide energy to heat battery if it was not plugged in or to supplement battery temperature.  By the time you remote start the car, or remote cabin conditioning as we refer to it in the Volt, pack up your things and get in, the car is ready to go.

To learn more about cold weather testing the Volt, and to ask your own questions, tune in at 730 PM EDT for a live real time chat with Pam and Volt lead engineer Andrew Farah in the box below:

Tom Stephens is GM’s vice chairman for global product development and spoke Tuesday at the Renewable Fuels Association conference in Florida.

He told attendees that GM is spending $100 million each year to develop cars that are E85 (85% ethanol/15% gasoline) or “flex-fuel” capable, and that “ethanol is the best near-term solution to displace petroleum.”

He said by 2012, half of the cars GM sells will be capable of running on E85.

The problem is, as Stephens sees it, there aren’t enough E85 pumps available to drivers.

“Today’s there’s 2,200 (ethanol fuel stations) that are out there but that’s not enough,” he said. “Two-thirds of the pumps are concentrated in 10 states and those 10 states have only about 19 percent of the flex-fuel vehicles that we have on the road.”

Stephens calls this discrepancy “a big problem for us.”

“GM is spending about $100 million a year adding flex-fuel capability to our vehicles. “We can’t afford to leave this capital stranded,” he added.

Stephens called for the installation of 10,000 additional E85 stations across America to “have ethanol fuel available for every one of our customers within about two miles of where they live.”

He said government intervention will be needed to achieve this goal.

“I think it would be very helpful if we could get government assistance,” he said. “But I really want the oil industry,…the government and…us to just work together to make ethanol a reality.”

With respect to the Volt, we also learn for the first time that the initial production run of the car will not be E85 capable.

“We are finalizing some of our options and the associated timing that goes with them,” said Volt executive Tony Posawatz. “The E85 capable emission package will have its timing finalized soon.”

“It will not be available for November 2010,” he confirmed.

This actually substantiates a rumor we first reported here in August of 2007.

According to Stephens, GM does eventually plan to introduce E85 capable Chevy Volts a year or so after production begins.

Though Nissan has recently disclosed some details on how to order the LEAF EV, GM has not officially released the Volt’s MRSP or sales mechanism yet, and claims they won’t do so until the summer.

I did have the chance to discuss issues about how these decisions might be made with Jim Campbell who is GM’s new Chief of Chevrolet

Do you anticipate a conventional pricing scheme for the Volt or are you looking at a surprise or battery lease?

Obviously we haven’t priced the Volt yet.  That’s going to be my job on the Chevrolet side to lead that effort with our team. One of the previous assignments that I had was to manage our retail advertising.  I’m familiar with a lot of the different tools we have in our toolbox, and I’ve been involved in my whole career on pricing activity when I was at Chevrolet previously.  We haven’t priced it yet, we’ll look at all the options we have to make a smart business decision and proposition to the consumer.  That’s going to be one of the tasks at hand as I start my new assignment.

So you have two very dramatic and intense tasks managing the demand and the price of the Volt .

Yes those are both very important.

Do you expect to do a  special pricing/selling scheme or straight MSRP?

That will be part of the whole pricing process.  We’re already deep into it but I don’t have anything to announce yet.  The pricing  responsibility is in my shop.

Can you say if battery leasing is being considered?

No.

Is there any chance GM will get the cars out earlier than November?

I would just say we’re on our plan to bring it out by the end of the year, and that’s where we’re at right now.  I’m excited to be back at Chevy on this team to prepare the launch of that vehicle and other new vehicles like the Chevy Cruze.  We’re on our plan, well produce them by the end of the year.

I heard Maria Rhorer was reassigned.  Will there still be a position of Global Volt marketing director?

There definitely will be, there’s no question about that.  I’m in the process right now of identifying the person.  In the meantime, I’m heavily involved with members of my executive staff.

I’m in the process right now of identifying who’s going to lead that process for us leading the Volt.

What do you anticipate the lifecyle to be from when Gen 1 launches to Gen 2?

We talked about early adoption of technologies.  If you look at new technologies in other categories sometimes those generations one two and three come very quickly, sometime it takes a little more time.  So I’m really counting on our engineering leadership to really set the timing on that and to make the right decision on that front.

Outspoken GM vice chairman Bob Lutz turned 78 on Friday and as usual had something to say when he met with reporters in Florida.

He admitted that GM loses and will always continue to lose money on hybrids, including it seems the Volt when it comes to market.

“GM will lose money on hybrids,” he told reporters. “We will continue to build them–they are required by (Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations)–and the cost will be spread across other cars.”

Lutz also doesn’t think hybrids will ever obtain much market share, blaming their very existence on corporate fuel economy requirements.

“We may see up to 10%, but a lot of it will be driven by fuel-economy regulations,” he said.

I reached out to Mr. Lutz for confirmation and he clarified he was specifically referring to hybrids, PHEVs like the Volt, and pure EVs.

“For the next 10 years, that’s the way we see it!” he replied.  ”That would would be over 1.2 million units per year; at today’s price premium for plug-ins, that’s even an optimistic estimate, I think.”

“If it turns out to be more,” he added.  ”We’re better prepared than anyone else!”

Lutz also went on to declare Toyota having lost its edge due to its recent massive recall of 8 million cars including 270,000 2010 Prius hybrids.

“With one of our competitors that the positive halo is gone, or fading,” he said but added the opposite is true for GM.  ”In our case, the negativism is fading.”

People used to say “only Toyota knows how to do environmentally friendly cars,” said Lutz. “The Volt was one way to change perceptions about Chevrolet and in a larger sense, GM by leapfrogging the then-viewed technology leader, which was Toyota.”

Lutz confirmed GM’s plans to produce 8,000 to 10,000 Volts by the end of 2011, increasing to 50,000 to 60,000 per year as the market demands.

He said a price of near $40,000 before a $7500 federal tax credit was a ” good working figure” but would not confirm it.

Source (Dow Jones) and (Reuters)

For what seems like forever, hydrogen fuel-cell technology has been a shimmering mirage dancing on the distant horizon of the auto-tech desert. No matter how long we keep trudging, how many reams of press-releases we wade through, nothing definite ever seems to happen to bring it any closer. Until now?

Honda Motor Co. has announced the development of it’s latest (fourth generation), compact, solar-powered, home refueling station for the hydrogen fuel FCX Clarity (200 of which are being leased in a California pilot project). With a compact 6-kilowatt solar panel array for power, the station contains a revolutionary high-pressure electrolyzer that can deliver 0.5 KG of extremely pure, pressurized hydrogen gas to the car for every 8 hours of sunlight. Why is this significant?

Although every major automaker has a fuel-cell research program, with GM in particular proclaiming that hydrogen (rather than advances in batteries) is the basis of it’s long term energy strategy, there are several obvious barriers to the success of the technology:

* Hydrogen is actually an energy storage medium rather than a fuel in the petroleum sense (i.e. all usable hydrogen fuel must be produced by electrolysis or reformation, which consume electricity).
* an entire hydrogen refueling infrastructure would need to be built, across the U.S. and around the world.
* vehicle fuel cells remain incredibly expensive to produce.

Since before 2000, billions of dollars have been pouring into vehicle fuel-cell research, but if any practical developments in these three areas have occurred they’ve been kept remarkably quiet. Critics like Doug Korthoff of LiveOilFree accuse automakers (and oil companies) of having used fuel-cell technology as a red-herring to distract lawmakers from requiring battery electric vehicles. Even among those critics who don’t suspect bad faith, many point out that the first barrier is not so much a challenge we can hope to overcome as it is inescapable physics. In other words, the whole proposition may simply not make much sense, particularly if we see competing improvements in battery technology.

But here is where the potential significance of the home refueling station becomes apparent. With one relatively small solar panel and some plumbing that could easily fit on a garage wall, the Honda home station provides enough purified, high-pressure hydrogen from a single day’s sunlight (0.5 KG) to power the car for one standard commute for most drivers.

Voila! Both the first and second obstacles appear to have been dealt a serious blow! It would seem that with this equipment, both the “problem” of where to get the energy to create hydrogen, and the crushing economics of building all the refueling infrastructure necessary to get the system on the road, have been significantly reduced. Of course hydrogen filling stations would still be required, but early-adopters should be a lot more willing to buy a vehicle without waiting for a filling-station network that blankets the earth, if they know that at least they can fill their cars at home. And conceptually, this system works even better if it’s paired with a EREV such as the GM-Volt, with the fuel-cell taking the place of the existing range extender. Days might pass before the vehicle actually consumes any hydrogen, days in which the home system is gradually topping off the tank. Filling station construction could, initially at least, be concentrated on the highways.

Of course, all this may not be quite as wonderful as it sounds (what ever is?). Omitted in the Honda press release and in many of the press accounts is the fact that the electrolyzer requires natural gas as a raw material to generate hydrogen. So the solar panels are not simply providing 30 miles/day of travel directly from the sun, they are in effect converting one fuel to another, albeit a tremendously abundant, environmentally friendly fuel. How much energy is coming from each source, and at what efficiency is of course proprietary information that is not available. We can hope that the technology will ultimately be adapted to water electrolysis, but who knows? And none of this speaks to the third barrier, the current exorbitantly high cost of vehicle fuel cells.

Nevertheless, those of us who until now have been skeptical of the coming “hydrogen economy” can look at this development and say that if it’s not exactly the light at the end of the tunnel, at least it’s starting to look like there really is a tunnel, and not just a black arch painted on the side of a mountain by a lunatic coyote.

Sources: (Cartech, New York Times, HondaNews)

Jon Vandervelde is a designer, writer, and robot combat promoter, with a love for all things mechanical.

We have known for a long time that the Chevrolet Volt is only the first car of a lineage of future vehicles that will be sold not only in North America but globally.

In 2007 GM revealed an Opel Flextreme small SUV concept, and in 2008 they revealed the Cadillac Converj concept.

These cars like the Volt depend on the Voltec propulsion system, which is a primary electric drive with a combustion engine generator to extend driving range.

GM has also shown two concept cars in which a hydrogen fuel cell was used as a range extender. This included an early Volt variant, an later the Cadillac Provoq concept.

There is evidence GM is about to lift the curtain on a new as-yet-unseen Voltec vehicle.

It will be unveiled at the Geneva Auto Show on March 3rd.  A teaser image has been released and appears above. Notice the slick “Voltec” logo on its very unusual grille.

GM/Opel aren’t revealing many significant details about the car yet, or whether it will be production intent.  This is all GM will say publicly at this point:

Concept car gives clues to Opel’s future environmental direction

Opel will premiere a concept car that embodies much of the company’s future thinking in terms of design and engineering.

Using green innovation and alternative propulsion, the concept is proof that size and comfort do not need to be sacrificed for a vehicle to be environmentally efficient.

More details on the concept car will be revealed in due course.

According to GM spokesperson Rob Peterson “the Opel is simply a concept that showcases the potential of the Voltec system.”

Can’t wait to see.