GM - less confident about the Volt than before?

By Joe Simpson.

Reports in the auto press are questioning GM's confidence in the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid car - in response to comments made by Bob Lutz (head product czar at GM), that when production starts only 10,000 units a year (which is small beer in auto terms) would be made - rather than the 60,000-odd as first thought.

So what to make of this? Well, doubtless the doom mongers will point to it being the first signs that GM is slowly going to kill the project off, as they were accused of doing with the EV1 electric car. Rumours have swirled around this car since its unveiling as a concept and have increased since rumours that GM might not hit its own target dates have surfaced. But Lutz has gone on record at length saying that, while GM is now convinced it has the battery tech sorted, the software and tech needed to actually run the car, and make it acceptable to the average Joe is what's giving them headaches. Primarily, this is to do with the fact that although the Volt will come with a petrol motor (in European versions it'll likely be a diesel) that engine isn't directly connected to the wheels - it's just a generator to pump up the battery once you've exhausted its initial burst of juice.

When you think about that in relation to how you normally drive a car, that's going to be interesting. When you stamp on the gas pedal in a normal car, the engine revs rise, and the car moves forward more quickly. But for the Volt to charge effectively, engineers we've talked to have led us to believe that a fairly constant engine speed will be best for charging the batteries. So driving a Volt might actually feel like quite a different experience compared to a normal car. Stamp on the loud pedal, and you'll shoot forward, but if the petrol motor is running, it might not actually change its tone.

This is just one of the things they've to sort out. Lutz also spoke recently of the need to re-examine things like air conditioning units and light and audio power systems, so that they put less drain on the car energy-wise, and admitted the first Volts will run with redundant and outdated forms of technology.

Whether this has anything to do with the decision to reduce the production number doesn't seem clear. It could be that they'll ramp up production once everything is sorted and they're sure it's working reliably, or it could be that their demand forecasts are much lower than first thoughts. Or - and this is a long shot - it could be that GM simply thinks the Volt is a very specific sell, which they're going to only push in certain places (hands up all those in California) and tweak - for market specificity elsewhere...

Original article: Motor Authority - Volt production to start at just 10,000 units per year

Related articles:
The Chevrolet Volt
The Chevrolet Volt (II) - How it works
What Shai Agassi did next

Image: GM Media under a creative commons license

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 25th February 2008

Comments

[kent beuchert]

I regularly read the independent website www.gm-volt.com. They have the latest and greatest info and all the insights. Far from looking to shelve the Volt, GM recently announced that all their divisions will have access to the E-Flex platform. This slam dunks any nonsense about killing off the program. What has become clear is that the first several year's will be a time of cost engineering, something that their extremely tight schedule has not permited. There is also the matter of high priced batteries that won't come down until there is widespread mass production. All this adds up to a car that will cost about $7,000 more than the $28,000 Lutz originally was
predicting. All this adds up to the obvious result that no one at GM probably believes, and justifiably so, that 1) there will be a giant market at this price level; 2)there will be too
many unknowns to justify turning out the orginally planned 50,000
cars - a big mistake would be devastating, and there is nothing to be gained anyway. Whether it's 10,000 or 100,000 will make not one whit of difference either in terms of oil avoidance or carbon reduction. Those who imply that 60,000 Volts will have a measurable effect are totally out of touch with reality. This country has over 200 MILLION vehicles on the road and consumes 140 BILLION gallons of gasoline every year. 60,000 cars will have hardly any greater effect than the 600 odd EV-1 that were leased in California during the 1990's. The EV-1 deserved to be cancelled - no one was leasing them at the end and the paltry amount (less than $1.4 miilion) that GM was offered for their fleet of 1100 cars didn't even cover the cost of the battery packs. Something the fictitious crockumentary "Who Killed.." never acknowledged. No company today has any plans to buidl anything as expensive ($43,000) or with as short a range (about 80 miles) as the EV-1. The EV-1 technology is as dead today as it was when GM made the mistake of trying to resurrect a long obsolete technology without a battery that was any better than the one that propelled the Detroit Electric back in 1907. That may have been the dumbest move GM ever made. But the Volt will do everything that the EV-1 could not, and at a lower cost and with the ability to be a viable alternative to the gas car,
something the EV-1 wasn't even remotely capable of. A commuter fleet of Volts in the US can avoid 93% of the need for any liquid fuel, and can use ethanol to meet any that are required.

[Mark Charmer]

Joe - It might be worth adding that Tom Gage of AC Propulsion (who for the benefit of other readers, Joe and I caught up with in San Dimas a few weeks ago), was adamant that large scale shipping of Li-Ion batteries for car applications was much farther off than public perception and EV rhetoric would lead people to think. "I just can't order batteries to be delivered by the pallette-load" was I think his comment, and he didn't see it happening any time soon... This is bound to be a major factor for GM.

[Gerald Shields]

And most of us are actually suprised by this?! This is what they had intended to do from the begining. However, the joke's on them for we we get tired to them and we will buy the cars of the future from someone else.