GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

The other day I was in my office when my cell phone rang. I picked it up and on the other end heard a strong voice with a slight Texas drawl, “Dr. Dennis? Hi , Ed Whitacre here.”

You could imagine how taken aback I was, caught by surprise, but quite thrilled and honored.

You see I had been trying to reach out to Mr. Whitacre for a while to learn about his perspective on electric cars, and thanks to GM communications leadership it very suddenly became a reality.

I joked with him that we shared something in common, neither he or I knew much about cars before we started these roles, and he agreed. “I don’t know anything about cars, ” he admitted.

But clearly he knows how to run a business.

I asked why he took the job at GM.

“The government called me in the summer, the Treasury Department, and asked me if I would consider being Chairman,” he said. “I had been at AT&T many years and was happily retired and so I said no I won’t, and they called back the next day and the next day and my conscience finally got to me and I agreed to be Chairman of the Board. I did that for about four months.”

Since it wasn’t much publicized I asked about why Fritz Henderson was fired.

“The board had the feeling GM wasn’t moving quickly enough or the right way, so Fritz left,” he said. “He’s a great guy and he left. I’m pretty old but there wasn’t any other candidate at the time. I had been chairman of AT&T for 17 years so I said yes I could be the CEO.”

“I don’t expect to stay in the position long,” he said. “There’s a search committee doing a search.”

As you might know, Mr. Whitacre also sits on the Board of Directors of ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest petroleum producers, and it is of interest to see how he might reconcile that with the mission of GM’s Chevy Volt, to help wean our country off of oil.

“ExxonMobil is very concerned about the environment and the future also,” Whitacre said. The company works towards “finding different sources (of energy) and converting to natural gas.”

“We provide the fuel to a lot of powerplants that generate electricity, and there’s a lot of scientific work as well like growing algae (for biofuels),” he added.

He described ExxonMobil as being “responsible citizens,” and noted there is opportunity for the company in a world of electric cars.

“They’re tuned into the electric car,” he said. “As good as (our electric cars) are, the electricity has to be generated by some fossil fuel.”

That the CEO of GM reached out to me and us, and was genuinely thankful for our work here on GM-Volt.com is a very, very wonderful thing. Stay tuned for some more of our conversation.

Coskata, Inc. is a pioneering cellulosic ethanol production company. It was announced in January 2008, that GM had invested and taken an ownership stake in the company.

Coskata has developed a proprietary high temperature plasma gasification process that turns any carbon-containing waste or biological product into ethanol. In the first step the carbon containing material is gassified into CO and hydrogen. Proprietary microorganisms then combine both gases directly into ethanol. In the final step the ethanol is separated from the water.

The technique does not rely on expensive enzymes, as the microorganisms can reproduce themselves.

A great value of the technology is that ethanol can be made from many sources including numerous feedstocks, wood biomass, agricultural waste, sustainable energy crops, and garbage, old tires, and construction waste. It yields a 7 to 1 energy ratio and uses half the water it takes to produce gasoline.

Earlier this week the company opened a small-scale or semi-production facility in Madison PA that is capable of producing 50,000-gallons-a-year.

This facility demonstrates the capability of scaling up the technology from the laboratory into the 65 foot high structure. The next step will be opening a full scale production facility capable of producing 55 million gallons per year in 2012.

According to the company’s CEO Wes Bolen, the cost of the process is about $1 to make one gallon of ethanol.

As part owner, GM is also one of Coskata’s first customers.

“We invested in Coskata so that we could enable the rapid deployment of commercially viable and environmentally sustainable ethanol globally,” said Bob Babik, GM Vehicle Emissions Director. “We’re proud to say that we have already accepted some of Coskata’s ethanol at our Milford facility.”

As we know the Chevy Volt itself is E85 capable, and on one leg of the recent extended development test drives, the Volt prototypes were filled with E85 to analyze function using that fuel source.

Source (Coskata)

Since the Volt is at its core and electric car, people often ask whether it will be able to run without any gas in its tank.

According to Volt vehicle line engineer Tony Posawatz, “the VOLT can run without gas since it is an EV.”

Here’s how he explains it:

We will provide many tips to customers on how they can get the most out of their VOLT as we continue the education process, work our demo programs and train our dealers and customers at the point of sale. For example, we will recommend that they keep some gas in their tank to avoid range anxiety and if they are always driving in EV, we want to make sure that once every month or so, we can perform a maintenance run on the engine (for keeping the engine parts lubricated and the gas from getting stale).

This will be done automatically for the customer because of the intelligence built right into the car. We don’t want to have the customers worry about putting additive in their gas tanks like snowmobilers and boaters have to. If the customer runs primarily in EV mode, we would also suggest that they not keep their tank full. That’s a lot of extra mass to carry around. Prior to a long trip is the right time to gas up at one of our countries 170,000 gas stations.

As to whether the car can run without its battery he says “the VOLT can run with an injured battery but not without a battery in the car.”

Finally Posawatz declares “the VOLT is a very smart car, it will be the smartest device on the smart grid of the future.”

An unknown area about the Chevy Volt is how much gas the tank will hold and how the possibility for stale gas will be dealt with. It is known the first 40 miles of driving will be from the electricity of a fully charged battery. After that the car will get 50 MPG.

I was recently told by Volt vehicle line executive Frank Weber that “the gas tank will be between 6 and 10 gallons.”

Below is some further detail I was given by Volt lead engineer, Andrew Farah:

A long standing secret seems to be how large the Volt’s gas tank will be, can you clarify?
Its not a secret. I’m still balancing (the decision). I can trade off fuel tank size for other things. As we’re taking the vehicle through this critical phase of development this calendar year, there’s a strong likelihood I’ll still be making changes to that variable. And rather than throw a number out, we have said the car is going to go several hundred miles. Exactly how much is something we’re going to be tuning and trading off for other things.

So the size of the gas tank affects the mass and thus may be varied according to your needs?
Certainly. Fuel is very heavy and it also takes up space so maybe we’re going to use some of that space for something else too.

Have you solved the stale gas problem?
I’m not so worried about that. Most people are going to use up some fuel at some rate, probably faster than six months. Fuel is certainly going to be good for six months without concern. Most people are going to take one or two long trips in six months. We’re not designing this vehicle as a pure EV for a reason. Most people realistically while they’re going to get their 40 miles and there’s going to be five days a week when they may never use any gas at all, there’s a strong likelihood that they are going to use enough gas that this isn’t going to be a significant problem for most people.

So you feel you don’t need to build in a system to deal with it?
I don’t think we need to build in a special system.

If somebody never uses their gas in a year and a half will the car remind them about it?
That’s one solution, but if you go read the regulations about fuel management and evaporative emissions, (you will see) we have to limit our evaporative emissions to almost nothing. If you limit your evaporative emissions to almost nothing, things don’t get stale very much.

Take any volatile fluid, in the sense that it has a low vapor pressure and keep a lid on it and what happens? Almost nothing. Its not the same as in a lawn mower where you don’t have a sealed system. We have a sealed system. So there is something we are doing, it is not particularly special, but thats what we’re going to do.

Obviously the Volt can be driven without gas, in fact that the whole purpose. The range extender exists only for if you have to go further than 40 miles between charges.

One thing to consider is what would happen if the car ran out of gas after the battery has reached its depletion point, or was in charge-sustaining mode. Since there would still be charge in the battery, it is conceivable that the car could be engineered to dip into that a little and give the driver a “limp-home mode” that might allow 1 to 2 miles of slow driving to get you to the gas station.

The New York Times has just reported that Volt executive Frank Weber mentioned such a limp home mode might be available on the Volt.

Or will it?

I just recently had asked this same question to Mr. Weber’s colleague, Bob Kruse, who is GMs director of Hybrids and EVs.  My questions and his comments follow:

Will there be a limp home mode, if you run out of gas at the same time you’re at battery depletion, allowing the driver a couple of miles of low speed driving?
If it’s your Volt, are you willing to wound your battery for that convenience?

If it happens very rarely it may not impact the cells longevity.
Well I’m the expert on that and is that something that you’re willing to sacrifice, the longevity of your battery in order to overcharge it?

Ideally no, but I think if it were a dire situation the car could give you a big red button on the screen…
I could let you do it but you can’t expect me to give you a life of the car battery of you want to operate outside the norms. But we do have Onstar so if you use it they’ll bring you a gallon of gas.  I don’t know whether were going to do it (have this feature) or not.

So it looks like this idea is probably still up in the air.

Would you want this feature?

Natural gas has rising potential for use as an alternative fuel for vehicles. Indeed natural gas vehicles already exist using compressed gas (CNG) as a fuel.

Reserves of natural gas are considerable, cost is low, and domestic supplies are twice as large as that of petroleum. This had led many here to speculate that natural gas would make a great range extender option for the Volt, or as a primary fuel source for other vehicles. As well, oil tycoon T Boone Pickens has been promoting a plan to move the US to CNG vehicles.

GM Europe President Carl-Peter Forster said that he wanted European governments to encourage the use of CNG, stating “we need a policy that creates concrete action now to make…CNG widely available.”

GM already has the capability of making natural gas vehicles, but unlike Honda, has no models available in the US. I asked GM spokesperson Dee Aleen about GM’s US CNG car production plans. Dee stated, “In Europe we have the CNG Opel Zafira and Astra, and Chevrolet LPG, and I believe some models in Asia — but nothing in the U.S. ”

I also asked whether CNG would make for a good range extender in the Volt. He replied, “Let us get the original version out before we start having variants. As we’ve said from the beginning, even when no one believed we were even serious, the range extender can be gasoline, E85, diesel, hydrogen, cooking oil, solar, whatever . . . as long as it can efficiently regenerate the electricity in the battery.”