GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

In our last post we had a live chat with Jon Lauckner GM’s VP of global program management, who along with Bob Lutz is co-creator of the Chevy Volt.

He took some significant questions from readers here and some other sites. Key information is as follows:

Price
GM has never officially told us what the Volt will cost, although about $40,000 is most frequently cited in the press. Lauckner once before indicated we would get an official price about 6 months prior to launch, or May 2010. In this most recent discussion he now refined that to “3 to 6 months prior to start of production.”

Battery Thermal Management
Lauckner confirms the lithium-ion battery will be kept at “20 to 25 degrees C.” In the cold, grid power will be used to warm the battery when the car is plugged in. If that’s not the case the ICE would go on at start to generate heat.

Future Generators
For now the Volt will use a gasoline/E85 engine as a generator, though Lauckner confirmed for the future GM is considering HCCI engines which they have been developing. These are ultra-efficient combustion engines that use extreme pressure rather than spark to completely combust gasoline within the chamber. Other types of generators are not being pursued currently, and he says he “doesn’t see” using a compressed natural gas generator at least in the US.

Acceleration
He confirmed the Volt will do 0 to 60 in 8.5 to 9 seconds depending in the weight of the payload, and that it is even “capable of squawking the tires.” He reiterates is will feel like a 250 HP V6. This exceeds the 0 to 60 time of the Prius (10.5 seconds) or Insight (11.5 seconds), and the 0 to 30 time difference will be far more dramatic.

All Wheel Drive Volt
Lauckner says while developing this variant would be possible, it is “no planned at this time”

Pure EV
Lauckner denies GM has a plan for a pure electric city car.

Charging
He says in order to utilize 220V charging, user will have to have “hard wired 220 connection from a works box to the wall unit,” that will be avaiable at launch.

Battery Warranty
Lauckner confirmed it is GM’s intention to fully warranty the battery pack for 10 years/150,000 miles.

Launch
Lauckner says Volts will not be sold prior to November 2010, though GM employees and “maybe a few others” will be driving pre-production Volts by next summer. Wonder who those few others might be?

ICE Behavior
Several negative speculations were refuted. He says GM plans to make the car seem as familiar and as much like a normal car as possible. He notes when in generator mode, “most customers will be surprised at the refinement of the ICE.” He notes the car will operate at one of several RPM points, and that none of them are “roaring”. He confirmed Volt will get “much more than 30 MPG” in generator mode.

Electrification of the Automobile
“Electrification of the automobile is here and the trend grows stronger every day,” he said. “We remain extremely committed to the Volt and vehicle electrification.”

“We’re the leaders in it today and we expect to be the leaders in the future,” he added.

I had the opportunity to ask a question of GM’s VP North America, Troy Clarke. It was as follows:

Other automakers are making cars like the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius, why hasn’t GM placed a strong hybrid architecture into a small sedan and targeted a lower price point, and rather put those systems into big trucks first?

Its not that we have a bias against small sedans. Consideration of those are in our product plans. I don’t have anything specific I can announce at this time.

Its a matter of you choose to do one thing first and the next thing next. The Volt is important to us, because so many components in it we are developing can be used not just in the Volt but to other electric vehicles as well. I think that if the world goes the way of Insights and Priuses, we certainly have the ability to react very rapidly and compete in that segment.

But you know we’re kind of excited about the prospect of electric vehicles as well and at some point we have to decide how to apply each incremental dollar of investment that we make. At least for the past year, year and a half or so, we really wanted to double down on that Volt and get that out in the market and really get down on the path of the electrification of the automobile.

And we’ve done some other things as well. You know about the fleet of Equninox fuel cells we have out, they’re fabulous products as well.

Yes the Prius is a successful product, Honda’s back in the market with an Insight, that product I’m sure will do well also. Its been interesting to me though that hybrids sell directly proportional to fuel prices. Fuel prices are down and Prius sales are down 45%.

Again we don’t have a bias against it, its the kind of business we can get into.

I had the chance to speak with Nick Zielinksi, he is GM’s vehicle line director for advanced technology vehicles. He is doing some of the coolest stuff at GM, developing the engineering for their “way in the future” cars.

Since you are responsible for the generation two and three Volts can you say anything about what ideas you’re considering?
Its far enough in the future that we can’t talk about the details. But we think (we know) from what we’ve learned on the Volt so far, from your site and people that have been exposed to the car, and the mule development. I can say things like in terms of the AER and performance we’re happy about how the vehicle is progressing.

Are you working on any high performance vehicles, like an electric Corvette?
We’re working on a lot of exciting stuff but I can’t go into the details. We’re working on a lot of neat things, a lot of it focused more on efficiency and improved fuel economy as opposed to balls out high performance.

I think people want better prices, so why not make a car with a smaller battery to reach lets say 20 grand?
You’re pretty much describing our plans for Gen 2. Looking to improve efficiency, maintain performance, take cost out of the car and how can we broaden Voltec technology to other vehicles.

Who decides what the future goals are?
The way we did it for Gen 2 is we pulled together the Volt executive leadership like Jon Lauckner (VP of global program development) and Frank Weber (Volt vehilce line executive) and sat down with them to get a vision of where we want to take this car.

What about other models?
We have a future car portfolio planning committee and we’re trying to identify market trends where there may be holes in the market or new markets we can exploit and its their responsibility to come up with cars for those purposes.

And then they’ll ask you if you can do it?
Exactly.

People want a more economical car, and that seems like they way to go.
You’re right on target. We think there’s so much promise in the technology but we’ve got to get the cost down and the volume up and its going to go together.

GM just received last night an additional $5.4 billion in government loans bringing the total so far to $9.4 billion. They are expected to receive an addition $4 billion on February 17th.

While in Detroit, I had a chance to ask one question to Ray Young who is GM’s CFO. Ray noted that GM has to submit a plan to the government on February 17th showing its progress on how it will be achieving viability in exchange for the loans that have been received.

A major factor in GM being able to be viable in the future is for them to shed the massive debt they owe bondholders and the retiree healthcare pension or VEBA fund. They are trying to reduce unsecured bondholder debt from $28 billion to $9 billion, and a halve the $20 billion VEBA debt by turning it into equity.

My question to Mr. Young was as follows:

How confident are you that debtholders will accept their haircuts for reduced payments on the dollar, and that the UAW will agree to swap VEBA debt for equity?

On the UAW issue Ron Gettelfinger has indicated that they (the union) will come to the party and support the restructuring of our industry. They also indicated they wont be the only ones coming to the party and we need to make sure other people including the bondholders will too. So therefore we’re working on the different structures as to how to effect a debt to equity conversion or a debt to debt conversion or a capital restructuring of the company. And while its going to be challenging, its not going to be impossible.

We’ve actually got the smartest brains on Wall Street working with us on that. I spent 3 days in NY last week working with these folks and I’m confident we’re going to get something done here. The debtholders understand that this needs to be done and that the government wants this to be done too.

While at the Detroit Auto Show I had the chance to meet GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner in a group discussion with about ten journalists. It sort of reminded me of the film Roger and Me, here I am some bumbling Michael Moore-type winding my way through months of effort to finally stand next to GM’s CEO, although in my case I was actually invited to do so.

We each had the chance to ask one question. Here’s how mine went:

First I wanted to express to you some of my reader’s and my best wishes to you in these trying times.

Thank you.

It seems the Volt is a very important part of GM’s viability plan and yet cost is high, volumes are low, and profit margins are thin or nonexistent. So I’m wondering how you reconcile the Volt and GMs viability at the same time in GMs immediate future?

Lets face it for a while you have to look at it as investment in the future and we spend R&D money every year and we spend on advanced engineering and advanced design. I think in the very early stages you have to recognize that you have to invest and sometimes the investment cost is higher than the market will bear.

Obviously were hoping for and we will get some good government incentives to consumers for products like the Volt which will help to cover some of that cost shortfall. The other thing is we have to work like crazy to get the cost down. This is where if the EV market in the US grows very gradually it makes the risk of it being unsuccessful much greater than if it can grow rapidly. If it grows rapidly you will see the suppliers investing and people putting R&D into the next generation technology, improving the manufacturing processes and being able to get the costs of the battery down much faster. This is where proactive government policy in this area will make all the difference.

There’s a reason today why most of all of those lithium batteries that we use in our cellphones and computers come from Japan. Its that when it wasn’t financially viable for private enterprise (to manufacture them), their governments were supporting it 15 or 20 years ago. We need to recognize in certain areas that proactive government engagement, clear directional policy, and in some cases support for R&D is going to be critical to move towards energy independence and leadership in battery technology.

Wouldn’t it be a shame to go to this massive effort to shift reliance from oil to diversifying the use of batteries, and we wind up having to buy our batteries from somewhere else.

Frank Weber is the Chevy Volt vehicle line executive. I had a chance to sit down with him for some discussion while he was in New York at a recent event.

How is the mule development going?
The big step was when we finalized the mules vehicles at the end of August and delivered those on time at the end of August. These are the Cruze-mules using production-intent components. We wondered how they will behave, is there anything that we have not predicted? But so far as surprising as it is for us internally, we have not found anything that is fundamentally flawed.

You stumble over a hundred small development items, software talking to each other, and functions having to be clearly defined, and triggering points, etc, but there is no fundamental flaw that cannot be developed out of the system in the next two years.

So I say there is a lot of work still, but nothing that will prevent the promise of 2010. We still have development to do, and I don’t know what I don’t know, but at this point, I am confident.

So those production intent parts hadn’t existed before in a vehicle?
We had component tests, individually 6 months before those components went into vehicles. But there is always a difference from when you have a component in isolation to when you put them all together in a vehicle.

So is every component that will go into the final Volt, known, understood and finally engineered?
Finely engineered has different meanings for different people. The design since we are going into the development and validation phase it means that we’ll do adjustments, but we have currently for 80-90% of the vehicle, the component designs are available. These are then the in going components into our mule vehicles.

The next stage of our prototypes called integration vehicles, they are real prototypes, exterior, interior, everything. This is coming next summer. So we are currently working on the designs for those integration vehicle next summer, and when you look at that and you count backwards it means you have to have components in May, and to tool them a couple of months, so it means by January we have to have all the components designs and everything available and finalized.

So you don’t have enough time to observe the Cruze-mules much prior to that next stage?
We have some feedback. You have some learning from these Cruze mule vehicles to finally then finalize these designs and say here we have to do a software tweak or here we have to do some adjustments. There is some learning, but not extensive learning. In a traditional program you would probably test those mule cars for a year or two, but we said we have enough experience to develop this car in such a sort time scale. That is the risk element. We have always said this will be a high speed project and we’ve always openly said we are sharing the risk involved.

Do you oversee the assembly of the mules?
Yes. The mules are built at the tech center. It is a mini assembly plant we call our "prototype build operations." There you see them as the engine and powertrain are loaded into them. We have already tested the equipment, how you do the battery loading in the plant. When you look at the process, you have two marriages. In the assembly plant when the power cube is loaded into the car its called a marriage. In the Volt we have two marriages, the power cube and the battery.

Because we have never loaded batteries from underneath so we wanted to see that process . We had guys from manufacturing engineering came in that had equipment to test to lift 400 pounds with precision and the tolerance is very small. Its on a moving plate, it guides itself into position. and then is bolted into the underbody structure. I would say we now have a very robust process on how the battery assembly will work. What the tech time is, etc.

Are the battery packs also finalized?
We have frozen the design for the integration vehicles for next summer. Not only the external design of the packs but all of the internal components. The cooling system, electronics, the frames, the modules.

The software and the software functionality is defined. But what we call the calibration is still development work. What is the temperature band? When do you cool, when do you heat? All of those things need to be calibrated. This is why we need two winters and two summers on the development work. Basically the software is on the platform. The real development work is on the trigger points. The temperature outside needs to be known, the battery temperature needs to be known. Many many things need to be known.