GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

Job one is the term used in the automotive industry referring to the first vehicle off an assembly line that is intended for retail sale.

That Job one Volt is the one we have been patiently waiting for for over three years.

Ward’s Auto interviewed Volt vehicle line director Tony Posawatz, and found out things are on track, as well as some other interesting details.

“The hardware is pretty tight,” Posawatz told Ward’s. “All our testing shows we’re ready to launch at the end of the year.”

He also claimed GM is still planning for a November launch even though GM CEO Ed Whitacre recently said the car would launch in October, corroborating what he had told me in a personal communication earlier this year.

We know from former vice-chairman Bob Lutz that GM will specifically be building four thousand 2011 model year Volts from 4th quarter 2010 through 2nd quarter 2011. An additional four thousand 2012 model year Volts will be produced in the 3rd and 4th quarters of 2011.

Posawatz still would not confirm pricing but said it would be “in the 30,000 range” after the $7500 tax credit.

He also disclosed two interesting comments.

First he said the Volt would be the first GM vehicle to deploy the latest 9th generation OnStar system. Included will be the capability of turning off charging upon request of the local utility company if it finds the grid to be overburdened.

Second he stated that he was confident the Volt’s battery back would last twenty years. He expects the pack to live its first ten years in the vehicle but in some cases to spend its second ten years in post vehicle use. This would include home energy storage, back-up grid storage, and in other transportation applications such as electric scooters.

Source (Ward’s Auto, subscription required)

Bob Lutz may have retired on May 1, but my exit interview with him lives on (for a little while anyway).

What factors go into pricing the Volt, and why have you’ve said the car won’t turn a profit?
We have to find that sweet spot between trying to make money and having it at a price where nobody will buy it. We could very easily do that. And coming up with a price where we could break even or not lose too much per unit in the first generation.

Now we obviously have very solid plans on how to get down the cost of the second version and the third version, and these are all being worked on.

How do we get the cost down without in any way diminishing the value of the car in the eyes of the customer? By just doing some more elegant engineering than we did the first time around where we inadvertently did some belt and suspenders stuff because we wanted to move fast. Now as we look back at the car we say ‘gee I wish we’d done his different,’ …’ gee I wish we’d done that different’ because this is a very expensive solution and we could have done that for a lot less money.

Gen two will have all these intelligent cost saving things built in. Ultimately there’s no question that we will make some money on the Volt.

On pricing, its going to be higher than people would normally expect to pay for a car of that size, but on the other hand there’s a federal credit of $7500. Many states are now talking about credits, some cities are talking about credits, and some employers are offering credits, like Google.

So that at the end of the day if somebody has a federal credit, a California credit or whatever state, a major urban credit, and she works for Google, she’ll wind up writing a five thousand dollar check and getting a Volt.

You had once said the cost of the car would include a second battery, because of the warranty, baked into the car. Is that still the case?
We were adopting a very conservative approach at the time. We now think, from our experience with the battery during the life of the car, it is going to be way better than what we initially assumed.
So that very very large provision for battery warranty I think that’s going to give us some daylight for potentially lowering the price a little bit, or potentially making a little money on the car, or how about all of the above.

That’s good news.
Yes it is good news, because our experience with battery aging and thousands of cycle on the battery is actually considerably better than what we had planned.

Achieving a ten year 150,000 mile goal is something it sounds like you’re very confident in now.
Without committing to it being ten year or 150,000 warranty basically we are very very confident in the capability and the life of this battery in all but the hottest climates.

So it could be that in certain very hot climates where people leave this thing in a baking supermarket parking lot all day, these lithium ion batteries, if they get much over 95 or 100 degrees Fahrenheit, they quickly start losing life. So we may have to adjust warrantees, but we really haven’t decided how to do that yet.

The secrecy of EEStor is understandable. They are working on a disruptive product that could profoundly alter energy storage as we know it.  A high energy and power density, lightweight storage unit that is several fold less expensive and longer-lived than the latest lithium ion batteries.

The Texas based company is founded and operated by Dick Weir formerly a hard disc storage material engineer.  His cofoudner is Carl Nelson, a materials scientist.

After more than ten years of effort and no known proof of the invention working, there was rumor a functional product would appear by the end of last year.  That date came and went silently. Zenn Motors is the Canadian company that own 10.7% of EEStor and has plans to sell EEStor-powered electric car drivetrains.  Zenn abandoned the sale of its low speed neighborhood vehicle putting all of its proverbial eggs and publicly traded stock into the EEStor basket.

Zenn no longer comments publicly on EEStor, nor does its other customer military powerhouse Lockheed Martin or investor Kleiner Perkins.  This informational dead zone and stealth mode extreme silence is a source of anxiety to Zenn investors and EV advocates alike who fear the technology will never come true.

Recently an enthusiast of EEStor, active on the fan site theeestory.com, through some detective work was able to contact a close relative of a high level manager at EEStor and reported that information on the EVcast podcast. It was an attempt to break through the secrecy and find out what is going on behind the scenes in that Texas storefront.

The report garnered considerable controversy on the validity of this source as well as the source’s information. Considering me a “trustworthy reporter” this EEStor fan/reporter (known as thuben or Fred) contacted me and provided the details of his contact. Using this information I was successfully able to hold a brief conversation with the gentleman.

I can confirm through both the admission of the individual and independent 3rd party Internet sources he is indeed a first degree relative of a senior manager at EEStor and knows Dick Weir well.

He does not live in Texas and admitted he has never visited EEStor’s facility. He also wished to remain anonymous, a request I shall honor. He said of EEStor’s work he had only “very basic knowledge that you could get off the Internet.”

He said he does not know if the company has any working prototypes, but claims they are working ”at the pace they are working” to develop the new technology and that making both the product and equipment to build it is “a slow and tedious process.”

The source admitted it is possible EEStor ”might not achieve a viable product,” though Weir remains excited about the possibility they will. He did not confirm that he had told Fred it would take one to two years to produce a working product, saying “I don’t know if even they could tell you when they will have a product.” He said the company had about one to two years of finances left.

Calling the process similar to “alchemy” he noted “if it were easy it would have been done by a lot of other countries and companies.”  He admitted EEStor’s secrecy is to prevent competitors from creating the same technology.

Finally he did admit they were still “getting the capacitor or dielectric to work,”  and mentioned there have been considerable unexpected “obstacles” on the way to commercialization.

This week in Dudenhofen Germany, Opel gave assurances that the Ampera was “on track” for production in the fall of 2011, hinted at pricing, and once again opened the door to a Europe-based production facility for the vehicle in the short term.

Stateside, the very first pre-production Ampera came to life as it rolled off the line in Warren, Michigan on Friday April 23rd. Andrew Farrah, who is also Vehicle Chief Engineer for the Ampera, marked the occasion by also saying, “We’re right on target for producing the Ampera for European markets later next year.”

The Ampera is the sister car to the Chevy Volt for Europe, and therefore it will only travel in kilometers; it has a range of “up to” 60 of them on electric power, and over 500 with the aid of a small gas engine once the 16 kWh battery is depleted.

At some point during the press junket nefarious ‘company sources’ reared their ugly head again and said the Ampera will likely cost about €40,000…or as we are fond of expressing prices here at GM-Volt, $53,000 in US dollars.

To be fair you have to allow for a number of factors to get a realistic translation of what a car priced in Europe would likely sell for on US shores. (VAT allowance, EUR/USD pegging, source of supply/labor, etc)

I won’t go through that calculation specifically – it would be needless long, and the end result would be several readers gouging their eyes out and submitting claims to our legal department for damages, but by my estimation 40,000 Euros on a Ampera works out to around a $34,000-$36,000 price point in the US.

Nick Reilly, who is Opel’s CEO, also mentioned this week that while the Ampera will be built in the US and imported into Europe, GM still plans on European production at some point.

In a statement to a German weekly (WirtschaftsWoche) he said, “The first Amperas will come from the USA next year, but it is our aim to build the car in Europe as soon as possible. We have not yet decided where that will be.”

It is interesting that the focus is on the where it will be built and not the when, previously when a Magna-GM deal was in the works for Opel, the notion of a European made Ampera was put almost on permanent hiatus, with our own sources at GM-Volt.com predicting that Ampera production in the near term to be “minimal.”

Both England (Ellesmere Port) and Germany (Bochum) have expressed an interest in producing the Ampera at their factories, and have bid up GM in a effort to green light production in their countries. I would think that the statement from Mr. Reilly signifies a not-so-open solicitation for the two regions to come back to the table with refreshed incentives, and if they are good enough, Opel will make a decision to build.

Given the current state of GM’s relationship with Germany (and its laborers) after the Magna deal fell through…and Germany’s own pre-election struggles coming to terms with the bailing out Greece (and potentially a good portion of the Eurozone), I think this is a case of Opel seeing how much support they can ring up from England with this project. /the dream of a European made Ampera lives on