Future Models - Holden 2012 Volt

GM confirms Chevrolet's electric Volt for Oz

Plug-in: General Motors describes the Volt as its Prius-buster.

• What is green?

Bob Lutz confirms the Chevrolet Volt will bring plug-in hybrid power to Australia

25 March 2008

By JAMES STANFORD

GENERAL Motors global product vice-president Bob Lutz has confirmed the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid car will be sold in Australia.

The vehicle that Mr Lutz describes as a “Prius-buster” will be introduced in the US in 2010, with Australia set to commence sales one or two years later.

“It is being engineered in right-hand drive, left-hand drive and is being developed to meet all safety standards, pedestrian-protection requirements, exterior and interior protrusion – in other words, worldwide requirements are being taken into account, so it will, I’m sure, be sold in Australia,” Mr Lutz said.

“Initially the production is going to be pretty low as we ramp up and make sure the battery suppliers can follow us with the volume etc, but at a very early stage we want to get to 60,000 a year, and then it’s ‘you name it’.”

California will be the first US state that will receive the Volt because its government requires car-makers to build a certain number of electric vehicles each year.

Mr Lutz said GM would then introduce the Volt in Washington “for political reasons” and subsequently in Florida “where no-one buys American cars anymore.”

He said the Volt would be a “re-conquest” weapon to win back buyers GM had lost to imports.

However, before finetuning its sales and marketing campaign for the electric vehicle, GM still needs to iron out engineering issues.

“(We have) no problem with the (battery) cells themselves, but the engineering problems come in when you have to organise all of these several hundred individual cells into a big T-shaped battery pack,” Mr Lutz said.

“Then the big T-shaped battery pack has to interrupted in the middle because of the cross car beam that is necessary for the dynamic side impact. Getting all of that hooked up in series and in parallel and making sure that the cooling tubes all go to the right places, and making sure all the coolant goes to the right places and that the coolant flows through all the critical places around the cells, it doesn’t require science or invention, it is just engineering.”

The Volt’s lithium-ion battery pack sits on the floor of the car, with a line running along where the transmission would normally be and spreading out into a T underneath the driver and passenger seats.

While engineers continue to work on the powertrain, the exterior design of the Volt has been locked in.

Mr Lutz said the production Volt would look very different to the concept car that was shown at Detroit in 2007.

“The back-end looks a lot like the concept car, but the front-end and cabin look quite a lot different unfortunately,” he said.

“The show car, while it was very interesting design and very interesting looking, from an aerodynamic standpoint it was a complete train wreck. We had to fundamentally start over and we reshaped the vehicle for aerodynamic efficiency and make sure the Volt graphics, the grille and headlights are still there and the dropped belt-line on the side is still there,” he said.

“I think it is still going to be a very attractive car – it is just going to be a slight shock for people who expect it to look exactly look like the show car.”

Mr Lutz said that the Volt would be the highlight of his long career. He admitted the GM leadership team was wrong to not follow Toyota and build its own Prius, and putting his own hand up when it came to accepting responsibility.

“I took the blame for the whole company,” he said.

While the GM product czar still believes hybrids do not make financial sense, he admits GM should have made its own Prius.

“If you run the numbers of what the additional cost is versus the fuel saving, they still don’t make any sense,” he said. “Having said that, it proved once again that the automobile business is not about hard facts and rational decisions, it is mainly about emotions.”

Mr Lutz said his team felt a hybrid project would have lost between $US250 million and $US350 million a year and therefore decided against taking a proposal to the board. “We have been tasked with shareholder value, not destroying it,” Mr Lutz said.

But he claims he would now act differently if he could turn the clock back. “Now that we are smarter, if we could rewind the tape, we would go to the board and say: ‘This is not a profitable proposition, it is break-even at best, in fact it is probably going to lose us money, but it is something we have to do because our number-one competitor is going to do it.

If they do it and we don’t we are going to be seen as environmental laggards and technological laggards and therefore we urge you to say yes to this project even if it is going to lose money,’” Mr Lutz said.

“The board probably would have said, ‘That makes sense, try not to lose too much money, but don’t let those guys get away from us.’”

Known for his fierce opposition to regulated fuel economy standards and his perceived disregard for the green movement, Mr Lutz famously described the climate change argument as a “crock of shit”.

He argues that GM’s push to replace fossil fuels with ethanol made from waste is a far better solution than simply reducing engine sizes and taking similar measures to reduce fuel consumption.

“All of these fuel economy mandates are focused on continuing to use oil, but try to use a little bit less of it, (and) I don’t think that makes a lot of sense,” he said.

According to Mr Lutz , a lot of car owners who have large distances to cover and who cart things around with their families will not appreciate the changes. “They are not going to like the result of everything being scaled down with itty-bitty four-cylinder engines. It is not what people want.

“Now, you could avoid all of that trauma for $120 a car, which is what it takes to convert the fuel system to Flex Fuel (running on 85 per cent ethanol). You could avoid all of that and the world could continue to enjoy their Chevrolet Corvettes and Cadillac Escalades, the utes with their V8 engines, its Ford Falcons, we wouldn’t have to change a thing and we could get the world off oil.”

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