GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

Bob Lutz is the vice chairman of GM and set to retire on May1st.  He is an outspoken highly successful and provocative automotive executive with 50 years of experience in the business who is credited with creating the Chevy Volt.  I had the exciting opportunity to ask many questions of Mr. Lutz during a one hour one-on-one exit interview.  In this first segment he explains how the Volt was born and eventually made it into production.

I wanted to say that I and the GM-Volt readership wanted to thank you for conceiving the Volt concept and for carrying it through to completion, as well as for all the very interesting commentary along the way.
You’re quite welcome. Its an act of love and enthusiasm.

When you first conceived the Volt what was you’re primary intention? Was it just to float an idea out there or did you have production in mind from the very beginning?
I think the very first time I surfaced the thought at the automotive strategy board was for a purely lithium ion powered battery only car, somewhat akin to what Nissan is doing with the Leaf. The more we talked about it the more we realized we didn’t want to live with the range limitations and everybody still had a bad taste in their mouth around here from the EV-1 debacle and the amount of money we lost on that. So there was very little enthusiasm for a pure electric car and there was some hostility also towards lithium ion batteries where the story was that they would never work in an automotive cell.

My desire was to put an electric car concept out there to show the world that unlike the press reports that painted GM as an unfeeling uncaring squanderer of petroleum resources while wonderful Toyota was reinventing the automobile, I just wanted something on the show stand that would show that hey we’re not just thinking of a Prius hybrid here, we’re trying to get gasoline out of the equation entirely.

And then I just couldn’t get enough of a consensus in the company to do that.

Then when Tesla came out with the announcement of the Roadster my point was that if some group of California software guys can make a viable electric car using lithium ion laptop batteries and they can claim a 200 mile range, 0 to 60 in 4 and a half seconds and 140 mph top speed, it seemed to me that we as still the world’s most competent car company, we should be able to do likewise, and I suggested we start talking to Tesla and find out as much as we could.

That’s about when we decided,’ OK alright, lets do a show car.’

Sitting down with John Lauckner he really convinced me that all-electric really wasn’t the way to go, that we should have a small piston engine in it as a ranger extender and that way we could get by with a relative small relatively inexpensive lithium ion battery and people would not be on a tether.

As the owner of several electric vehicles from Segway to Vectrix motor scooters I can tell you that range anxiety in a pure electric vehicle is real. Your range varies so much according to conditions and temperature.

John sketched it out on a pad, then we talked to design and we got going on the original Volt prototype.

Frankly at that point John Laucker and I decided there was nothing about this concept that couldn’t or shouldn’t make it to production.

Our thought was we’ll dazzle everybody with the showcar and once we’ve dazzled everybody with the show car, people will start clamoring for production. That’s exactly how it worked out.

So you actually anticipated the response that it got?
I anticipated half of it. Even my incredibly large expectations were handily exceeded by the response that it got.

How did that reaction affect the company, the people in the company, and the leadership?
I think it changed a lot of minds. Our board of directors contained some technologists on it, for instance Kent Kresa who was formerly CEO of Northrop Grumman. He has always been an advocated of electric propulsion. Northrop Grumman was during the time he was on the Chrysler board, they actually did some lead acid powered electric minivan that was a project they were doing with the defense department. So he’s always been a pusher for advanced technology and he became very vocal and he said there is absolutely nothing he could see that should prevent this company from building this vehicle. He became a very strong ally.

We very quickly did a business case, did some cost estimates, and some investment estimates, a lot of which turned out in retrospect to be somewhat naively optimistic. All in all we were able to put together a credible business case and lay out a credible way of getting car like that into production. There was enough enthusiasm for the concept in the company to carry the day.

I recall Rick Wagoner didn’t announce production until June of 08, was that prior year still in flux as to what would happen?
That was still the year when we were putting the whole thing together. Don’t forget we completely changed the vehicle’s appearance, because the one we had at the auto show looked nice but had a poor drag coefficient. The package was no good the layout of the engine, electric motor, and the generator were all kind of in the wrong place. Then we had to re-execute the car off our global compact car architecture. That whole design development, getting the car with a decent interior package and getting it to look halfway decent, in fact I think very decent. We’re all in love with the way that it looks because it rides so low to the ground and its very sneaky looking.

Then we had to get that drag coefficient down to 0.27 or 0.28. All of that the business plan really was tied in to the drag performance of the car, because if we couldn’t get a good looking car down to .27 or .28 then we weren’t going to get the range and then it would make the acceptability of the car questionable. It all kind of had to come together. It really didn’t come together until we had a winning style.

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.

I had the following discussion with Alex Cattelan who is the Chevy Volt’s chief powertrain engineer. She has a very deep understanding of how the car operates and recently drove in a fleet of integration Volt prototypes through rugged mountains of Knoxville Tennessee.

Do you feel the charge-sustaining (CS mode) experience is now pretty solid and are you pleased with it?
We are definitely pleased with the level of progression we’re at. We are right on track to where we need to be in terms of the next stages of development we need to do to meet our target. Is it commercial right now, no, but that’s why were taking the time to get it to be commercial. Does it have the capability of being commercial, absolutely. We’ve proven that to ourselves.

We just took our leadership through a test drive in Warren (Michigan) and comments are that they cant tell when the engine is coming on or off. Those are the kind of things we like to hear.

You drove the IVs around the mountains of Tennessee. What about those big hills and the generator. It sounded like it drove very briskly powerfully and effortless is that true?
Yes, absolutely. Some of our control capability to utilize the battery, the engine, and the motors and to be able to optimize for high load and low load situations we’ve been working on developing that stuff for the last year and half an I couldn’t tell you how happy I was when I was in Knoxville because that’s when I had the opportunity to see it all come together. A lot of those bits of software all came together on one trip and it was a joy to drive.

So you took it up some steep hills and mountains?
Absolutely. We were in the Cherokee area taking it up through those hills and a lot of situations following it. It was a very touristy area. Following the speed of traffic, absolutely no problem, and where I had opportunities I certainly like to push the limits of the vehicle, and we did on those mountains, and I could not get it to degrade in performance.

That’s in charge sustaining mode?
Certainly in charge depleting, we have no issues because we have battery power, I’ve got it all at my fingertips. Now in charge sustaining we know that the engine power is slightly less than the peak vehicle power but we have controls ways to manage that and to utilize the engine in conjunction with the battery to get a little bit of extra power when we need it, and replenish it back when we don’t.

I know the battery runs down to roughly the 30% level before for the engine comes on. Is that 30% itself the whole potential buffer band?
We certainly don’t utilize the full 30% but there’s a portion of that that we utilize as a buffer.

You wouldn’t go to zero ever?
No. When the engine cannot meet peak load requirements we’ll suck a little bit out of that buffer and as soon as we have a situation when we can, we’ll put it right back in. All the controls that we work do that to optimize not only the driveability but the efficiency as we’re doing it, NVH (noise vibration harshness) as we’re doing it, the total driving experience as well as to protect the battery from a life experience. This is what allows us to give really good warranty life on our batteries as we’re doing I all in a controlled fashion.

NEW: Discuss this story in the GM-Volt Forum

Around 3 years ago, a neurologist named Lyle Dennis decided he just had too much free time on his hands and decided to start a site chronicling the progress and development of a vehicle named the Chevrolet Volt.

Since then, Lyle has researched, interviewed and penned well over a thousand articles on the subject. To date, not a day has gone by without a fresh article for the readership to comment on, no small feat…especially considering his day job.

A few months ago, Lyle ruined his consecutive streak of articles by graciously allowing me to fill in and do some guest pieces, and ever since then I have been nagging him to let me do a story just on him.

Until today, Lyle had rebutted my requests saying that the readership would prefer more Volt-related news, and that the site was not to focus on him, blah, blah, blah. I’m chalking his refusal up to him just being a all around humble/good guy who really doesn’t crave the spotlight…because what he has accomplished here, the hours he puts in, and the access he has been granted inside GM for our benefit is nothing short of remarkable.

So what changed? How did this article come to exist? Well, charity finally got him to buckle…as in, I promised to give Lyle’s charity a pop in exchange for 7 questions. Lyle agreed.

On Sunday Lyle will be running in the NYC Marathon for the American Heart Association. The event looks to have over 40,000 participants and covers 26 miles of New York asphalt. Perhaps you have seen the little ads poking their heads up around the site to donate? I encourage anyone who can, to support Lyle on his run.

…and now the questions.

1.) I’ll start you off easy, can you fill us in on the NYC Marathon, your charity…and how does one run marathons, be a doctor and still find time to run this site?
I love running the NYC marathon, this will be my fifth in a row. It seemed like a good idea to do it for charity this year. As a stroke neurologist, I chose to run for the American Heart Association which is the parent organization of the American Stroke Association.

The only way to find time for all these things is to get up very early in the morning, and go full steam until its time for bed again. Every day is kind of a marathon itself.  As you can see I’m not one to sit idle.

2.) Follow-up question: What does your family think of the site? Does your spouse still speak to you?
I am very fortunate to have a supportive wife and 3 beautiful children ranging in age from 3 to 10. There are times my wife has heard enough about electric cars, and my kids know a little too much about them too.

3.) If you had the option to buy either the Concept or Production Volt in November of 2010? Which would it be?
Believe it or not, I actually prefer the production design. Yes the concept was cool but it doesn’t seem realistic. Also I think making a car palatable for the widest swath of the population will help lead to highest sales volume and thus lead to less oil used. The Camaro, for example, is very striking in design, but not everyone is willing to drive one.

4.) It is a well known fact that all .com owners are multi-millionaires, does it cause conflicts with GM executives when you are able to fly your jet to all corporate events and they now have to fly commercial?
Sorry that .com rule doesn’t apply to bloggers =)

5.) From your own ‘want’ list survey. What is the most you are willing to pay for a Chevrolet Volt (in USD)?
I think $40,000 is the number. I realize its high for the mass market but to me its worth it to be an early adopter.  With time it will come down considerably.

6.) We know you are currently driving a electric Mini, and have tested several electric cars from different manufacturers, if GM gave you a free pass and let you change one thing about the Volt, what would it be?
I’ll pick two; a third seat in the rear and 50 amp 220V charging capability.

7.) What happens to GM-Volt.com past the launch of the actual car? How do you see the site evolving once the car is mainstream?
The site has been a fascinating experiment for me. I started it with no idea if it would ever be noticed, so all of its attention has been a great surprise.

In my very first post in January 2007 I promised to continue the site to the launch and beyond, so that hasn’t changed.

I hope post-launch it will be the go-to place for all things Volt and for Volt owners to hang out and interact, free of corporate oversight and spin.

I also hope to implement, besides the forum, the ability for anyone to create their own microblogs within the site and to be able to post frontpage content in real time, along with what I contribute.

8.) Yeah I said only 7 questions, but this is one is important…and Lyle will probably not answer anymore questions from me. Ever. Who are you pulling for? Yankees or Phillies in the World Series?
I was born in the Bronx and live in NY Statik…do you really need to ask?

Sidenote: My thanks to Lyle for doing this quiz even though he didn’t really want to…and for giving us a little piece of the internet to call ‘home’ everyday.  Please donate to the American Heart Association in support of Lyle’s November 1 2009 marathon run by clicking here.

Prabakhar Patil is the CEO of Compact Power Inc.  CPI is a subsidiary for LG Chem, the Korean company that was awarded with the Chevy Volt cell supplier contract.  CPI helped GM to develop the packs for the Volt.  I had a chance to interview Dr. Patil on the current status of the relationship and operations.

Where are things with respect to pack development and considering GM’s announcement about in house pack and your relationship with them?
The relationship is good and unchanged because the decision for GM to manufacture the pack in-house after they got into volume production had been made some time ago. We agreed to it in the spirit of partnership because for strategic reasons it was important for GM to do this in house, even though we were prepared to support them in high volume production.

Right now nothing has really changed. As you know we shipped around 50 packs last year, this year we are shipping around 400 packs and that continues to happen. We are validating the pack design, the manufacturing process etc, and these are the prototype packs that are going into GM vehicles. That part is exactly the same as it would have been were we to make the high volume production packs.

So the prototype packs are currently being produced at your facility?
Yes, and they will continue to be made here until GM’s facility is up and running.

Are you helping GM to prepare their facility?
We work together. It’s a joint team that is actually at work.

As a subdivision of LG Chem, will you continue to work in GM’s facility?
No, once the production moves to their facility our role will be more supportive.

LG Chem got a $150 million DOE grant for setting up a cell manufacturing facility that will be locating in Michigan?
As you know, up to now the cells are made in Korea and we assemble, engineer, design and manufacture the pack here. The DOE grant is targeted at making the cells here. That has always been our plans and our footprint but this helps expedite the process.

So you are going to build a US battery factory from the ground up with that money?
Yes.

When will you start construction?
We probably will complete the site selection process by the end of this year and then we’ll be breaking ground sometime next year. We have to go through all the permits and site preparation and all that stuff. More importantly in terms of production, the first of the cell lines in that new facility we expect to come on in production rates by second quarter of 2012. It will be fully done with all of the cell lines and electrode lines and all that stuff a year later. At that point, it will be capable of producing enough cells to support anywhere from 50,000 to 250,000 vehicle packs depending on how many cells the packs contain.

Is that factory going to solely be used for the Volt pack or might it be used for other automakers?
It is not tied to a single application or customer, that’s part of the flexibility that we will have that it can support different applications. Because as you know the cells for the Volt will initially come from Korea. In fact, that cell line is already up. It has to be in order for us to have certified cells that have to be ready well ahead of the vehicle launch so GM can go ahead with the pack validation and so forth.

That cell line is already up. That will be used to supply cells for the Volt until the cell line here comes on line, so we have a lot of flexibility.
As far as GM or any other customer is concerned they won’t be able to tell the difference as to whether the cell is made here or in Korea.

The cells for the Volt, are they pretty much going to be a standard LG automotive cell for all applications or are you developing differently nuanced cells for different applications?
There have to be different nuances. For example, if you go from a non plugin hybrid to a BEV there are three discrete types of cells that you need. On plugin HEV like hybrids, the power to energy ratio is high, because those hybrid configurations don’t need large pure electric range.

On the other end of the spectrum the battery electric vehicle where the energy density requirements are very significant when you get to 50 or 100 miles of range. The P to E ratio in that case is relatively low then. Plug in HEV cells like the Volt are in between in order for the cells to be optimized we have to tweak the chemistry or the recipe.

Alex Cattelan is head of the Volt propulsion engineering team.  I had the chance to discuss the current state of Chevy Volt development from her perspective.

What is your role in the Volt program?
I head up the team that does all of the propulsion systems for the Volt. That includes motors, power electronics, we don’t do the battery but we work extensively with the battery team to do the integration of the battery, and the EV propulsion system

Are you only working on the Volt?
I am dedicated to the Volt and I heave a team of people that are dedicated to the Volt and I’m extremely enthusiastic about the Volt. We have segregated a team of people that are working on the Volt and the Volt only.

What are you doing now?
The specific stage of the program that we are in, for powertrain, is building on our third level of hardware which is integrated in the the vehicles. We’re doing all of our validation testing on that level of hardware; we’ve got past development where the architecture needs to be, through two generations of hardware we’ve confirmed all of our performance requirements with that architecture.

There are three major areas I’m focused on right now. Making sure that all of our hardware that has been built to date, that third level of hardware is in testing. We are validating all of our parameters for it; durability, that’s the hugest piece, the reliability, making minor fixed to areas that we’d like to improve.

The other major area that we’re focused on is the calibration of the system which is huge, because it’s a very complex system from the perspective of the torque generators we have, the engine, the motors, the power electronics. So we’re tuning all of those systems to make the vehicle fun to drive, to meet all of our efficiency requirements, our drivability requirements, noise vibration and harshness requirements, and we are now entering the phase of program where we will do all of the development for certification. So that’s fuel economy label certification, and that will continue for some months now. We’re going to test per the procedures that are being developed for this program and verify that all of our calibration is tuned in for optimization of the driving experience along with the efficiency of the vehicles. And that’s really the stage that were tuning into now.

In addition the third element that we’re working on is tuning in the manufacturing systems. So we’ve been building our production in our manufacturing plant and we’re right now preparing for what we call pre-production level hardware. That before we build saleable parts we’re going to build pre-production parts in the assembly plant so that its ready for volume. Make sure that our suppliers are prepared for that, make sure that our supplier’s tools are prepared for that and tweaked for quality, our manufacturing plant is tweaked for quality. I was just there last week and walked through all of their systems and systems development to make sure there ready for the production phase.

So those are kind of my three major areas of focus right now.

When you mention the production plant are you talking about Detroit-Hamtramck (DHAM)?
No that’s vehicle assembly plant but ahead of that we’re going to our suppliers and their manufacturing plants for individual parts and systems. And in addition, our drive unit and engine have their own manufacturing facilities that we are walking through and making sure they are ready.

Is GM building its own electric motor for the Volt?
The motor is actually supplied to us but we will be integrating that motor in our drive unit so its encased in our drive unit, we provide tooling, rotating components and all of that which is built in a manufacturing plant owned by GM. We are getting ready to do all of that manufacturing , so the housings, for example we take the castings from a supplier we do all the machining of the housings, the bearing the gearing, all of that kind of stuff.

So you get some of the parts from outside but you put them all together?
Exactly, so it’s a manufacturing step that happens and we send that drive unit and that engine to the assembly plant in DHAM for installation into the vehicle.

Have they done anything at DHAM yet to get ready?
There’s a ton of work going on at DHAM to get ready, and we’ve built our what we call our integration vehicle, and we’re towards the end of that phase. That is being built in pre production operations, however the DHAM team has been very integral in those builds. They have been overseeing the builds they’ve been doing slow builds, they’ve been identifying all issues for their production processes. They’re currently working on tooling for the body. There’s a number of things that DHAM’s doing to get engaged and ready. Because the next phase of vehicle, which is not a saleable vehicle yet, but its our next phase of product, will be built in DHAM so they are getting all of their systems tuned, the personnel trained and ready to go.

When will the first vehicle be built at DHAM?
We’re tuned towards first quarter of next year for that date.