GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

GM’s bankruptcy filing doesn’t spell an end to the company but actually a new beginning. The Chevy Volt remains a critical element of GM’s future and therefore the program will not be affected in any way by the filing.

Jon Lauckner is GM’s VP of product development and along with Bob Lutz, co-inventor of the Chevy Volt.

“We’re closing one chapter and opening a new chapter,” he said. “This is really a defining moment for us. Its new future for the company. It going to let us solve problems that have been with us for many many years and really its a once in a lifetime opportunity to reinvent the company for the next 100 years.”

“We in product development really need to stay focused on the future,” said Lauckner. “We are moving valuable assets into the new GM, we’re going to have a more focused product portfolio, a smaller, nimbler, faster moving company; and that’s all part of the reinvention of GM. Over the next 60 to 90 days all of that will take place and we’ll emerge a faster leaner enterprise.”

“We are still open for business,” he said.  “We are out there to make sure that we satisfy customers and that we are backing all of our vehicles with warranty coverage and that we are working on our future portfolio.”

I asked the following questions of Mr. Lauckner.

Are you confident if everything goes to plan and made lean that GM will be able to be profitable even at 10 million SAAR?
Yes, because the viability plan has GM downsized to the point where we can break even at an industry volume of 10 million units, more or less where we are running today. That means as the economy recovers in the US, and industry volumes increase, that really sets the stage for us to generate significant profitability and cash flow. When you look at how the company is going to be resized and refocused we really have a tremendous opportunity to generate the kind of profitability the old company wouldn’t have been able to generate.

How will bankruptcy and government intervention affect the Volt program or will it in any way?
It won’t in any way impact the Volt program.

Production volume plans wont be affected?
Anything material that we’ve had as the plan for the Volt will not be changed. This does not change anything that we’ve set up in terms of the Volt.

The government questioned the Volt’s profitability at one point, does the government now support it fully?
I don’t know if it makes sense for me to speak for the government. The point is that everybody understands the Volt shows the way forward. You go back to the original introduction of the car in 2007 and you look at what’s taken place since then and every one agrees that the the question of electrification of the automobile is not a question of if, it has changed to a question of when.

It makes no sense for us to take a fundamentally different approach on the Volt as compared to where we were before today.

In 5 to 10 years what percentage of GM’s total portfolio will be Voltec vehicles?
That’s almost impossible for me to forecast with any certainty. We’re out there with the Volt and we are working on other potential applications of the Voltec propulsion system, and those studies continue. We’ll just have to see how the whole story develops. Its more fundamental than talking about what the Volt is going to do by itself, but more how the whole environment develops over the next few years.

Are you hopeful Voltec could become quickly a large segment of vehilce sales?
We see it as a very key technology going forward, and while we are in  the late stages of the development of the generation one Volt, we are already looking into generation two that would have technology that might  allow us to have better performance and lower cost.

This is something that we’re going to continue to work on. We know that no doubt as good as the Volt is in employing the very latest and greatest technology that’s out there, things will move forward in the next few years and there will be future developments that we will incorporate into the next generation of the car.

What is the time line of generation 2?
It depends on what you want to characterize as generation 2. There is the car and the technology and they may not line up. We have the propulsion system and it may make sense to make some interim improvements in some of the elements of the propulsion system within a year or two after start of production. And then longer term you talk about the lifecycle of the car itself. I don’t think you can make the evolutionary improvements that may take place in the propulsion system and just roll that up to the car level.

We have to take a look at it and we haven’t got all the work done, and we know we have to make cost reductions and that will involve changes and then of course you have the next generation of the complete car that we typically have on longer lifecycles than 1 to 2 years.

Will GM leapfrog to Volt and skip the small sedan hybrid?
We haven’t excluded any sort of hybrid propulsion systems from our thinking process in terms of what we might do in the future.

What about a pure EV without the generator?
We haven’t announced anything like that.

Is the Cadillac Converj greenlighted?
No the status of the Converj hasn’t changed.

Frank Weber is GM’s straight-shooting vehicle line executive of the Volt program. I had the chance to ask him what was happening with mule development.  At this point there are 35 or so developmental mule vehicles.  Mules are early prototypes that have the full Voltec drivetrain but a borrowed interior and exterior.  Within days the engineering freeze on the first true Volt prototypes or integration cars will occur.

What is the current status of the mules, since you are done with this phase, and where are they in the testing process?
Actually what is happening is we have done all the testing as planned last year. We have been using the winter for winter tests. You are counting in summers and winters. This is a very important phase to test everything under very cold conditions and this is what has been happening now.

So are you still figuring out the control algorithms and computer code?
This is all the standard procedures in a car and you know what to do and we have all those controls incorporated into the cars. But now what’s happening is the true development work that you say OK this is the temperature of the battery, and this is the temperature of the system, and this is what happens when you are plugged in, etc.

There are parameters that we call calibration, you have the basic software functionality on those cars defined, and then we start to calibrate it looking at the temperature and when to we start it, what is the true power of the battery at a certain temperature , etc.

How do you know how the batteries are performing in the mules, and how can you extrapolate forward to know that you hit the right sweet spot to make the battery last 10 years?
What you know is what the behavior is for the cars that we are testing, and then you make an assumption for how a component will behave over time and how it will behave under the same situation in several years.  This is what we call accelerated testing. This gives you some indication of durability.

The piece that is tricky and interesting about the battery is to do a really accurate extrapolation of the true behavior. For a mechanical part this is very simple. For a mechanical part you can replicate its lifetime and find out when it will break.

The battery is electrochemical and its more difficult to make those extrapolations. This is part of the learning we have to do, battery learning between the battery supplier LG and us. By the way this is still the element of risk. This is also why we are unable to get the car out any sooner. It is those things that have to be developed now with the components that are representative of the production vehicle.  There is no way to do this any faster.

Have you started to build the integration vehicles yet?
No this is a different phase. Mule cars are now completed and have been since last year. They were all built on time. Whats happening now is those mule cars are now being tested up until the middle of 2009 and then they are replaced by the next generation of vehicles which are called integration vehicles. It takes a couple of weeks to complete the build.

Are the internal parts on those more refined than the current generation.
Yes, always. Whats true in the development is if you find something you might make a small adjustment to it to improve it. Its an updated version of those components.

Are you going to take those integration vehicles out of the test grounds and drive them around the real world?
Normally you have to be a little bit careful, but since we’ve shown the world the production version we can in principle take them wherever we want.

Will you?
Only if it is value added. There are a couple of interesting streets in the world where development insight is really generated. Then it might make sense to take then out there. By the way the current mule cars are being taken out on the public roads.

People who follow the Volt development closely know that GM has about 35 mules clad in Chevy Cruze bodies.  These have been undergoing extensive continuous daily testing for months.  By the summer we will see the arrival of the first full Volt interior and exterior prototypes, and likely begin to see public test drives.

I had the chance to ask Jon Lauckner who is GM’s VP of global program management what has been happening with control development on the current Volt mules.

GM has already “laid out all of the concepts that we want to use and written a lot of the preliminary code,”  said Lauckner.  He notes the car’s behavior “has to be software driven” and that all the code has already been “put into our mule cars and we’re evaluating and testing it.”

GM has apparently figured out most of how the vehicle will behave. “I would say that conceptually we’re most of the way there if not all of the way there,” in terms of behavioral programming said Lauckner, “but there’s a lot of work to be done still to make sure that the whole thing operates seamlessly.”

Lauckner feels it is imperative GM makes this car absolutely perfect.  He said “we need an experience where people say ‘Wow’ this is really something special. These guys have put a lot of thought into the technology, a lot of thought into the interface between me as a driver and how the car behaving that it tells me the kind of information I need know when I need to know it and that it operates very intuitively.”

“That’s the level of refinement that requires very little explanation for people to understand exactly what going on,” he said.

He says having the car operate completely intuitively and with very little driver explanation is “the reason why we do development.”  He says GM really has to “love this thing a little bit to make sure that you not only get it that it actually works but you get it working in such a way that its completely intuitive.”

As to why this development process seems so long to us he said “we need the time with the car and we need the time over a wide variety of conditions to simulate certain things, so that we can see just exactly how the car is going to behave and what sort of information the driver is going to get to make sure everything works in as seamless a way as we can possibly make it.”

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.

Nick Zielinki is a Voltec engineer who is charge of advanced engineering at GM. He is responsible for designing their future cars including the Cadillac Converj, and future Chevy Volt generations. I spoke with him at length while in Detroit.

Did you engineer the Converj?
Yeah, my job is advanced system integration I did modeling to make sure its propulsion system would work if we go to production.

Are there design blueprints for under the hood?
The car is a concept, so its a design exercise but it has the right configuration in size and space to fit in the Voltec propulsion system.

Would the car have to be changed in shape?
Not really, very close in the shapes and sizes but probably a little bit of a change for Cadillac performance. The expectations of a Cadillac customer are different than a Chevrolet customer.

Have you developed an all wheel drive Voltec model?
We actually did show a chassis with a front electric drive unit and two individual rear wheel motors in the Provoq concept. The front drive motor has a differential.

How about four in-wheel motors, Michelin showed a concept of a tire and wheel with its own electric motor built into it.
That’s more for mini cars or urban-type vehicles. When you need a motor strong enough to drive a car it gets pretty large. Trying to package it in the wheel and turn the wheel is a challenge.

Was the Converj built to be able to be produced?
The original Volt started as a concept based on the propulsion system and we did a lot of modeling that indicated it would work. We worked with design staff but we didn’t have a set of parts that existed to know how the car should be shaped.

To be honest when we did the concept car we did not do it with the thought that it would be a production car. We thought it would be a good public reaction, but it was actually overwhelming. Then so within a couple of weeks of the Auto Show our board of directors said you better do something. We decided we really wanted to do it and do it fast in a reliable way.

The Converj is closer in basic proportions to be able to use the Voltec propulsion system without making any major modifications. The aerodynamics are also a lot closer.

So would you need a bigger battery pack to achieve its stated performance?
On the Converj even though its a concept car we did go through some modeling to see what we could get in terms of performance. When we designed the Voltec system, we had enough bandwidth in the basic subsystem design that we could adjust its performance.

And keep the range 40 miles?
Yes.

By increasing the battery operating window?
Well there’s a number of things that are happening. In the later generations of the Volt Gen 2 stuff that we’re working on, we’re working on the battery. We’re improving things such as the efficiency of cooling so you don’t need as much energy for parasitic losses. We’re looking at ways of improving the electronic control system and simple things like axle ratio change or final drive ratio change allows us to get a little quicker acceleration for the Converj. With the improvements in the battery and control system we can compensate and attain the top speed of the car and attain the driving range.

It wont be like a CTS-V performance?
No, no its going to be a little better and punchier feeling that the Volt off the line.

I had the special opportunity for a one on one exclusive interview with GM vice chairman Bob Lutz. I apologize for the sound quality as we had to go to a place where the mobs of reporters wouldn’t besiege him, and there was a lot of background noise. You may have to turn up the volume to hear it well. The video appears below. I have summarized our conversation as follows:

I asked him about whether the Cadillac Converj would be produced. He said he wanted it to be and said the production clay model is already built and essentially identical. He notes financial difficulties limit the certainty for moving ahead. He also said the government would have to clear it as being worthy of advanced technology loans. He said it would be an internationally accepted vehicle.

I asked him how much the car would cost, he said about “two Volts”.

I asked if he believed GM was responsible for the auto industry’s recent rapid focus towards electrification, and he said he did.

I also asked him why electrification was so important for him. He mentioned the need to displace oil and to achieve legislative efficiency requirements.

He also explained how he believes in three years battery packs will be “way down” in price.

I asked him whether GM could build packs for other companies as a new business considering their new pack assembly plant plan, and he said he saw no reason why not, although said it hadn’t been contemplated yet.

He said the Volt program production volumes remain unchanged despite GM’s financial situation.

Lutz said he does feel Volts wouldn’t sell as well if gas stayed at $1.50 per gallon, and that at first they won’t make GM a profit.

He said the Converj would cost only slightly more than the Volt to build but yet could be sold at double the price and actually make money for GM, and that’s one of the reasons why he said he’s so enthusiastic about bringing the Converj to production.

Bob Lutz GM Interview January 2009 from Lyle Dennis on Vimeo.