GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

People often speculate, wonder, and hope GM will surprise us and launch the Volt sooner than the publicized November 2010 date.

I had a discussion with the Volt’s lead engineer Andrew Farah about that.

Is it possible you could go to production and begin to sell Volts before Nov 2010?
I don’t think we can get the assembly plant cranked up before that. We will do our presaleable validation builds and all that, but we time it so that all our tooling and the investment is available just in time to meet the schedule.

Right now to make a major pull ahead on all of the tooling would be unlikely. Could I speed up all the tooling and pay four times as much for it? Sure. I think we’ve got other things to do. We need some time to do the development.

By the end of 2009 we’ll have over 80 IVers. We will continue to build the vehicle in volume, by early next year we will surpass some startups and have more out on the road and built. We need all that feedback to come in to get refinement up to the last minute.

As we draw closer and closer to the Chevy Volt launch day, we might wonder if GM has an exact target date within November 2010 for the launch.

Greg Ceisel is the Volt Program Manger. I asked him whether GM will begin to ship Volts to dealers closer to November 1st or November 3Oth. “The exact date in November is about the middle of the month,” he said. “There is a target date. In this program, every hour is scheduled.”

Another question is exactly how many Volts GM intends to release in the 2010 calendar year.

“How many will be sold will depend on the shipping time to the dealerships and the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays,” said Ceisel. “Those things will limit the number from a logistics standpoint, but I expect there will be a lot of interest for every vehicle that we can get to a dealer in 2010.”

For 2011, he says “Well be ramping up production as rapidly as we can to meet demand.” He notes that “the market demand will be one factor, and we intend to ramp up production to meet it. The Detroit-Hamtramck plant is a high volume plant so we are not talking thousands, we’re talking tens of thousands.”

When asked if GM could deliver 100,000 Volts in 2011 he said “I don’t know if we’d make that in 2011, but we’d certainly do our best to make (customers) happy.”

It has been long known that the Volt would begin its North American launch in November 2010.  GM continues to report confidence in being able to achieve that deadline.

Previous interviews have suggested the Volt would be rolled out throughout North America more or less at the same time.  However, without giving much detail it was just disclosed by Volt vehicle line director Tony Posawatz that the the Volt would be “rolled out 9 months later in Canada.”  This puts it into August 2011.

Recent cold weather testing of the current developmental mules confirms the car operates as expected in cold climates including tests in Kapuskasing, Ontario at temperatures “very much” below zero.

Volts kept unplugged for prolonged periods in extreme cold would start the generator first to heat or condition the battery to optimum operating temperature before going into EV mode, a battery life-saving strategy pure EVs do not have.  If the cars are plugged in in extreme cold, grid electricity would be used to keep the battery warm via an internal heating element.

Of course it will be warm in Canada in July anyway, but winter is always on the way.

Did you know 9% of the last 30 days visitors to GM-Volt.com were from Canada?  Eh?

There is still uncertainty about exactly how and where GM will launch the Volt come November 2010. Earlier reports suggest San Francisco and Washington DC have caught GM’s eye due to plug-in readiness, but GM denies that those locations have been settled upon.

I had the chance to gain a little more insight into this process by asking Jon Lauckner. Jon is GM’s VP of global program management, and is along with Bob Lutz, co-creator of the Volt concept.

Do you have a better idea now how many Volts you will build and where they will be released?
We have a better picture, but I wouldn’t say we have finally settled on it. I would say what we have decided is we probably are not going to use an approach where we launch the Volt simultaneously in all markets in the US. Lets face it, this vehicle is a bit different than a normal vehicle. We need to make sure that all of the charging infrastructure is in place so that all people have a really good customer experience.

There needs to be some education and training. Obviously if people buy a Volt and they don’t plug it in at night or they plug it in only sporadically they’re going to have a very different customer experience and probably not be as completely satisfied with the Volt as they would if they were plugging it in each and every night and using it exactly they was it was intended, recognizing that electricity was meant to be used as its primary fuel, not the small gas engine on board that was intended to be its range extender.

Do you think you will produce a small initial supply just for people to learn about it and then ramp it up?
I think more specifically what we will do is launch it geographically. So we’ll start in a particular geographic area. We’ll maybe pick two or three geographic areas and start there. We’ll make sure we understand everything about launching the vehicle and understand how customers are using it and what their driving experience is, and then quickly ramp up other geographic in the US and around the world.

Will you be soliciting feedback from those initial buyers?
Absolutely. Those are people that will be purchasing the vehicle but we are going to try to establish a very close relationship with those people. People that are genuinely interested in the Volt for its technology and the fact that it doesn’t use petroleum as its primary fuel and have a strong interest in helping us make that particular type of propulsion huge success. Like you Lyle. That’s how we pretty much see this thing going. We have a little more work to do before we announce exactly how we’re going to do it, but we’ve pretty much settled out on the fact that were not going to try to go everywhere all at once. That probably doesn’t make a lot of sense, we are probably better served by being a bit more measured than we would be in a typical vehicle launch.

I had the chance to speak to GM VP of global program management, Jon Lauckner about how the Volt will be rolled out, and what GM’s plans might be for pre-production test fleet rollout.

Will you launch the Volt globally all at the same time when production begins or will you start US first and then gradually move it worldwide?

It hasn’t been finally decided. Lets put it this way, we will have a rollout plan. We haven’t decided exactly what we’re going to do because frankly the work is development. We are going to start in North America and then depending on what makes sense we’ll start exporting the vehicle to other areas around the world.

We think we have a line of sight on all the major markets of the world with an opportunity to make the Volt a reality in those markets as well.

When it comes to rolling out the car in the U.S., do you anticipate starting out with a small fleet and gaining information about how the car is functioning, like you are doing with the fuel cell Equinox, or are you just going to release it?
First of all as part of the development program we typically have small numbers of vehicles that we put out in the hands of people that drive them on a daily basis. That’s a part of our development program that occurs prior to production. We call that a “captured test fleet”. Captured meaning we know where the cars are and we know who the drivers are, and test fleet because the cars aren’t in production yet. We use the versions that we build at the tail end of the development cycle to really put them out there on a daily basis to get better understanding of whats going on with the vehicles.

We will be doing that with the Volt as well. We will have the typical development program that will result in a captured test fleet prior to starting production. And then, once we reach production, then we will start ramping up.

Again we haven’t decide exactly how we are going to do it, but I would anticipate that we will do it in a fairly measured way. And this is not unusual for us, we do this in Europe as well. In Europe its not unusual for Opel/Vauxhall to start production in one market and then as they build volume in that market, they add additional ones down the line.

The point is it makes no sense if you’re ramping up production to have people frustrated because the car is in theory able to be sold in every area but they cant get their hands on one because the amount or volume is relatively small.

So I am sure that we’ll use a cadenced approach but typically we ramp up our plants reasonably quickly and beyond that its too early to talk about volumes and specific geographic areas.

Is the captured test fleet something that people would buy or will it be a leasing scenario?

Typically we put these in the hands of GM folks, when we do it prior to the start of production; employees, people in the technical community, people who work in the plants, manufacturing, etc.

The idea is to put those with a small group of peole where you can get rapid feedback on what’s going on. Now thats the way we’ve done it for our regular production programs. What we do for the Volt could be a variation of that. There’s nothing to say that we couldn’t do a program much like Project Driveway.