Between Elsewhere and Here

The Offical 2011 Chevy Volt


GM is celebrating 100 years of automotiveness and the celebrations kicked off today in Detroit with the roll out of the official 2011 Chevy Volt. For those of you who don’t know, the Volt is GM’s answer – in a way – to Toyota’s Prius. GM has been showing off a concept version of the Volt that looked like a futuristic sports car. The concept itself wasn’t anything great, it was more a physical manifestation of a theory. The theory was that GM could and would build the most advanced low-emissions vehicle on the planet that would change pretty much everything about driving except for the steering wheal.

For the average consumer, both the Volt and the Prius are just hybrid cars that combine battery power and a gasoline engine. Both have low-emissions and both make you feel smug and superior to SUV drivers everywhere. That’s pretty much where the similarities end. The Prius uses electric power for speeds under 15 miles per-hour. This is why the car is so quiet (and dangerous) in congested urban areas: no one can hear it coming. Once it hits 16 MPH, a gas engine takes over and despite the smug sense of superiority, you’re just like every other car out there – only uglier.

The Volt is a different beast all together. It’s driven by an eclectic engine that itself is powered by a “T” shaped battery with 220 lithium-ion cells, that’s the same battery technology in the laptop you’re reading this on. One full change of the battery is good for 40 miles of driving. Consider that the average American commutes for 24.3 minutes to work a day, the Chevy Volt will run at zero emissions for the average commuter to and from work – assuming you can change it up at work.

And if you can’t charge it up at work, what happens after you’ve used the 40 miles of driving from the battery? Easy, the car charges itself. A small gasoline engine kicks in when the battery is running low to charge it up. The only thing the engine does is extend the range of the battery by charging it up while you drive. This is much, much, much different than the way Toyota, Honda and others have approached hybrids. They don’t have faith in battery technology being able to live up to and handle the demands of daily driving. In truth, the battery is the one of the largest, most difficult challenges GM faces in building and delivering the Volt.

Back to today. What’s so fascinating about the Volt is how open GM has been with letting people in. Most cars are developed under tight security. Security is so tight, an entire industry has sprung up to get “spy shots” of cars being tested on the road. Typically pre-production models are covered in all sorts of disguises so that companies can test their cars in real world conditions without the public seeing it.

With the Volt, GM is doing the exact opposite. When a “mule” carrying the power train of the Volt was under going testing, everyone was invited to stop by and have a look. Press people have been given unheard of access to the men and women working on every part of the Volt. GM sees the Volt as not just a reinvention of the automobile, but a reinvention of themselves. The more press they get, the more coverage they get, the better. The logic goes something like this, “If we tell everyone it’ll be ready by the end of 2010 and we show everyone how hard we work, then we can’t fail or everything goes down the crapper.”

And that’s why I really want this to work. Bob Lutz, CEO of GM, has called the Volt the “car industries’ moonshot“ and there’s nothing like doing something most people thought was impossible. It is a fascinating story and an amazing project. So far, it looks like they’re doing everything right, and while the production version of the Volt isn’t as sharp as the concept, I actually think it looks pretty damn good.

[Link: Video Walk Through of the 2001 Chevy Volt]

[Link: GM CEO Bob Lutz tours and talks about the Volt design.]

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By Christopher on 09/16/08 04:36 PM | | Link | Comments [0]

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