The Volt, Chevrolet’s Prius-fighting petrol-electric hybrid, is coming to Australia.
Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chairman for product development, confirmed to
Wheels at the recent New York motor show that the car would be engineered in left- and right-hand drive. He also said the car would be sold here.
“[the Volt] is being engineered in left-hand drive, right-hand drive and it’s being developed to meet all safety standards and pedestrian requirements,” Lutz said. “In other words worldwide requirements have been taken into account. In other words, it will be sold, I’m sure, in Australia.”
Lutz reiterated GM’s 2010 target for the hybrid’s launch, and explained the first Volts will be sold in California to meet that state’s electric vehicle mandates, then rolled out in Washington “for political reasons”.
The silver-haired, gravel-voiced executive reckons 2011 will be the year the first right-hand drive versions are shipped overseas and he expects the car to go on sale in Australia in 2012.
Lutz also offered an insight into the engineering hurdles still facing the Volt’s development team, but said a suitable lithium-ion battery isn’t one of them.
“The individual cells aren’t going to be a problem, the engineering problems come in when we have to organise all these several hundred individual cells into a big T-shaped battery pack,” Lutz said. “Getting all that hooked up in series and in parallel and making sure that the cooling tubes go to all the right places and that the coolant actually flows through the critical parts of the battery, around the cells. It doesn’t require science or invention, it’s just engineering.”
Lutz then helpfully outlined production numbers, claiming initial production will be kept fairly low to ensure the battery manufacturers can keep up with demand. He said production will then quickly ramp up to at least 60,000 units per year.
With the Prius selling around 180,000 units last year, GM will be keen to try and reach 100,000 sales per year in the first few years of production.
Despite saying that the Volt will be the highlight of his distinguished career, GM’s product czar also offered a refreshingly candid insight into the car industry. “[Petrol-electric hybrids] make no sense economically,” he said. “In a greater sense, if you run the numbers of what the additional costs are versus the fuel savings, they don’t make any sense. It once again proved that the automobile business is not about hard facts and rational decisions, it’s mainly about emotions.”
Battery packed
One of the biggest development headaches has been perfecting lithium-ion batteries that are sufficiently robust and heat-resistant for mass-production. It’s the chemical makeup of the lithium compound that’s had engineers scratching their heads. The li-ion batteries popular in laptops and mobile phones are lithium cobalt oxide, which have inherent heat soak, or ‘thermal’ problems. But what many people don’t realise is that lithium can be combined with virtually any other compound on the periodic table so it’s down to finding a suitably stable combination. GM has a Korean manufacturer working with lithium manganese, while an American company is scrambling to develop lithium nano-phosphate batteries. Both versions will be used if the respective companies can meet GM’s deadline.
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Lotsa Lutz