GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

In honor of Women’s History Month, the female engineers responsible for some of the Chevrolet Volt’s systems will be participating in a live web chat today at 3 P.M. EST

Joining the chat will be;

• Pamela Fletcher, Chief Engineer for Volt and Plug-In Hybrid Propulsion Systems
• Teri Quigley, Plant Manager at Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly
• Britta Gross, Director of Global Energy Systems and Infrastructure Commercialization
• Cristi Landy, Product Marketing Manager

Anyone wishing to participate can hit the jump and be instantly taken to the chat window, where staffers will answer questions and comments regarding the car. The chat can also be accessed at ChevroletVoltAge.com

N.B  - Due to formatting issues the chat window is not visible, but there is a clickable link available in the white space.

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With demand anticipated to skyrocket, General Motors is considering adding a second shift to its Detroit Hamtramck plant, a move which could add 1,000 jobs overall. The news was reported by the Detroit Free Press, and comes as gas prices continue to increase across the nation.

A GM spokesman refused to comment on the matter, but the move would help create economies of scale for the electric drive technology, allowing GM to cut the price of the second generation vehicle by an estimated $7,500. GM CEO Dan Akerson also wants to triple the company’s EV sales between 2012 and 2015 to 135,000 units.

General Motors is planning to build 10,000 Volts in 2011 and 45,000 in 2012. So far, the company is only on track to sell 3,600 in this calendar year. However, rising energy costs could see a sudden spike in demand for the Volt.

[Image Credit: Detroit Free Press]

The ongoing crisis in Japan may disrupt the supply of transmissions for the Chevrolet Volt, with GM President Mark Reuss stating that the supply of transmissions may be interrupted.

According to the New York Times, Reuss stated “We just don’t know from a supply standpoint,” when pressed about possible supply chain interruptions regarding the Volt. The Volt’s window sticker states that its electric drive unit comes from Japan.

A GM spokesman told Inside Line that “Volt production is currently not impacted by the crisis in Japan. We continue to monitor the situation closely as we do for all GM products.” Nevertheless, the possibility of a disruption remains, as Reuss went on to state in the Detroit Free Press that contingency plans are being created. Reuss also noted that one possibility is that shipments from Japan arrive at U.S. ports with unacceptable radiation levels.

On a positive note, Reuss said that GM’s plan to hire 1,000 engineers to work on electric cars in Michigan is still in place, but could change based on future events.

GM’s admission last fall that the engine participates in turning the driveshaft in the Chevolet Volt led to a lot of publicity and controversy.  Naysayers and EV purists were upset about the news, and others felt as though they had been lied to.  Needless to say the car eventually went on to sweep several automotive awards including North American Car of the Year, validating the brilliant  design.

GM had determined by letting the engine sometimes help turn the wheels improved charge sustaining fuel efficiency.  But how about taking it in the other direction, and letting the engine participate all the time in turning the wheel.  Could that lead to even more fuel economy?  I asked Mickey Bly who is GM’s Executive Director of EVs and Batteries.

In the next generation Volt would you consider having the mechanical supplementary connection be engaged during all extended range time?
It’s mechanically inefficient to do that. The only time we bring that on is when we can take advantage of a higher efficiency capability. It gets us five or ten percent efficiency for us to bring those clutches on. We will do whatever it takes to get the most efficient performance for the customer. We wouldn’t want to artificially hurt the customer going down the road from a fuel efficiency point of view. There’s no reason we can see with this architecture to do it any more than we are doing.

So this is optimized as much as possible?
Absolutely.

To bring the engine in at lower speeds and loads doesn’t improve the fuel efficiency?
No, it doesn’t at all.

You’ve experimented with that?
Absolutely. Analytically we have run those models

But the Prius or two mode hybrid does bring it in at lower speeds.
This is not a two mode hybrid. The reason was the engine sizing. We have a small engine on this vehicle and on the two mode we have a large engine, and its more efficient to go into a 4 cylinder mode on the V8 or into a full V8 we have a lot of torque capacity we can use that more efficiently intermittently. That’s the main differential there.

So because the engine is so small compare to the size of the electric motor it doesn’t pay to bring the engine in all the time?
It actually hurts to.

The Chevy Volt is here, and hundreds of Americans are beginning to buy and drive them. We’ve watched the car develop from a concept over the past fours years. Now that the car is actually out among us it is important to understand what it means to GM and the company’s future

Mark Reuss is GM’s President of North American, a high ranking executive position that oversees all four brands from sales, marketing and development standpoints.  Gary Witzenburg is a reporter who had the chance to interview him about the Volt and its importance.

Reuss admitted the Volt is “very important in the market and to our customers,” but cautions “it’s not the only thing that’s important.” Reuss says customers ask not what happened yesterday but instead “What have you done for me today?”  He explains the automotive industry is a “long-lead business” and that things can quickly “flip and turn bad.”  GM must carefully try to predict where things are going to be years from now and not make the mistakes of the past.

He says the Volt represents ”the soul of the company” meaning vehicles that have “high desirability, technical leadership, (and) breakthrough technology.”

Reuss feels the awards the Volt has achieved are warranted. “People can see and taste success with something like the Volt, which no one else has, that addresses a whole different set of customer needs,” he said.

Reuss explained how GM is looking at the downstream future of the Volt both from a vehicle as well as technology perspective.   He said of Voltec propulsion, GM plans to “take that technology and get the maximum out of it.”    To achieve that “we can begin to take a lot more mass and money out of it and create the next hyper-efficient Voltec drivetrain,” he said. As mass is removed from the car, “the mass of the battery pack and what you’re asking it to do become less.”

Through incremental improvements of the current configuration, “you get efficiencies out of both the car and the battery without asking for a complete breakthrough in battery technology,” he said.

He appears to suggest the company hasn’t firmly decided exactly what the next Voltec vehicle will be after the volt. “We want to take this technology and do other things with it,” he said. “So we’re looking at how and where to do that.”

Reuss was asked why GM is being so slow in ramping up Volt production, considering how much demand there is. “We’re building it at a very low rate to begin with…on purpose,” he said. “When you do something like this that’s breakthrough, quality is extremely important,” he added. “We do not want to risk screwing it up.”

“Lithium-ion is not something to be taken lightly when you bring it to production,” said Reuss. “We want the production process and the stability of that to be perfect, and we are going to be perfect with it.”

“Chasing volume would be irresponsible,” he added.

Source (Autoblog)

The Chevrolet Volt went from concept to consumers driveways in just under four years.  Though these four years may have seemed slow for those of us who waited the whole time, GM’s accomplishment is really very remarkable.

In the beginning the car was considered nothing more than vaporware, a PR exercise that would run on battery technology considered at the time immature and untested.

Not only did GM design, engineer, test, and build the Volt in under four years, the actual vehicle some of us are lucky enough to be driving is truly a blockbuster.

Electric car start-ups like Tesla, Think, Fisker, Coda and others face extensive hurdles trying to get their cars on the road.  In fact the Fisker Karma still hasn’t reached production yet and the company just bumped its price to nearly 100K.  Building and selling a great electric car from scratch just isn’t easy.

GM gives credit to its whirlwind success with the Volt to its long expertise engineering electric drivetrains.  In particular the company said in a press release that learnings from the EV-1 electric car program, the 2-mode hybrid program, and the fuel cell Equinox program have proven invaluable in making the Volt a reality.

By using and utilizing highly developed components and substrates as the building blocks of the Volt GM engineers could focus on integration, packaging, and refinement.  Despite its considerable complexity, this resulted in a well-honed and flawless end product.

“By adapting sub-systems such as the EV1-descended motors developed for the front-wheel drive hybrid system and electronically controlled brakes from the fuel cell Equinox, the engineers were able to focus more resources on the new lithium ion battery and overall vehicle integration,” said Volt lead engineer Andrew Farah. “A new drive system like this involves a lot of complex control software such as the regenerative brake blending which benefited from the Two-Mode hybrid development.”

Farah was a lead engineer in the EV-1 program as well and has been hard at work for over a year and a half on the next generation Volt.

The power electronics, traction motors, generators, and battery management systems developed for the earlier electric car programs were readily integrated into the Volt.  Furthermore, GM expects to use the learnings from those programs and the Volt itself for future products.  Those are envisioned as even more complex integrations of potentially multiple fuels sources and energy storage devices.

“In the future, vehicles will likely combine different energy systems including batteries, ultra capacitors and hydrogen fuel cells with common and scalable electric drives systems depending on regional and application needs,” said Daniel O’Connell, director of fuel cell commercialization.

Source (GM)