There are two things that are really easy to understand about electric vehicles - aside from the don't-need-no-gasoline part. One, they have all their torque available from zero RPM. Two, they're quiet. Number one means that EVs are fast off the line (see: Tesla Roadster) and that could mean that, once electric motors and batteries are the powertrain of choice in the racing industry, everything we think we know about what a race sounds like could change. CNN describes the possible future this way:

Imagine a sun-swept Texas afternoon in 2015. After the roar of a ceremonial flyover, a Texas Motor Speedway crowd of 200,000 rises to its feet in anticipation of NASCAR's signature moment.

The celeb du jour grabs the microphone and bellows, "Gentlemen, start your engines!"

As the fans join in a full-throated cheer, 43 of the world's best drivers reach down and press a button. What follows is unprecedented: pin-dropping silence, save for 43 small clicks.

If NASCAR goes electric, CNN wonders, will fans stick around? Do they love the roar or the engines or the speed at which the cars move? Will they be satisfied with one but not the other? NASCAR isn't exactly at the forefront of automotive greenery (although it is thinking about it), but a U.S.-built Volt might be good enough to change some hearts and minds, no?

[Source: CNN]

There has been a fair bit of discussion and controversy in the last couple of weeks on the interwebs about the exact nature of the powerflow and battery charging in the Chevy Volt. Back in July GM's Larry Nitz discussed how the charge sustaining mode would work. As with parallel hybrids the battery is generally kept between about 35 and 85 percent charge. That means when the battery reaches its "depletion" point it still has a significant amount of charge left. The range extender has less power output than the the electric drive motor is capable of (100 hp vs 150 hp) but it has enough output to work in most day-to-day driving conditions. The range extender doesn't normally try to charge the battery fully as that is deemed to be less efficient and more costly than holding the battery at the minimum until the car can be plugged in. For the times when more power is needed such as acceleration or hill climbing some of the reserve battery power is available to be used. The battery can be drawn down below the "depletion" point to about 25-30 percent. When this happens, a combination of regenerative braking and some surplus power from the range extender will bring the battery back up to the minimum. A video after the jump shows the various modes and the power flow.



[Source: General Motors]

Following Friday's report of the agreement between GM and CARB on the status of the Volt, the Automotive X Prize took stock of the deal and issued its statement on the possibility of a 100-MPG rating for the highly-anticipated car. While praising what GM is doing with the Volt, the X Prize also recommended that the EPA, "consider adopting MPGe as a unit of measure that would more accurately reflect fuel consumption of alternative energy vehicles, and we welcome further discussions with them on this topic." We all know that one of the X Prize's big challenges is how to rate the many different fuel/energy types in the cars that will compete in the $10 million contest, and AXP executive director Don Foley said in a statement that, "Reliance on an MPG standard alone will soon be outdated and will not accurately reflect the need for higher fuel efficiency." More details after the break.

[Source: X Prize]

Ever since the Chevrolet Volt appeared as a concept last year, debate has been hot and heavy over exactly what it is. Although many call it a hybrid because it has a battery and an engine, GM prefers to call it an extended range-electric vehicle (ER-EV). That poses a problem for GM when it comes to emissions and fuel economy testing. With its 40 mile electric only range the Volt could complete the US06 test cycle that is part of the current EPA test regimen without ever running its engine. So far this doesn't sit well with the EPA which considers the Volt a hybrid and expects it to complete the test cycle with a charged battery. GM and the feds have been going back and forth on this for months. Reports out this morning on Bloomberg and the Detroit Free Press indicated that GM and the EPA had reached an agreement that would potentially see the Volt as the first car classified with a 100 mpg rating are erroneous. We called spokesman Rob Peterson to get the scoop, and it turns out that GM has reached an agreement with the California Air Resources Board, (CARB) on a unique classification for the Volt. Peterson told ABG that this classification would reflect the Volt's true capability, essentially treating it as an EV. According to Peterson, "the classification helps us to optimize the Volt for what it does do, instead of being put into the category with a normal hybrid." This will potentially allow GM to run the Volt with the planned charge sustaining mode rather than having to run the engine to fully recharge the battery at the end of the test.

The agreement with CARB gives GM a bargaining chip in its talks with the EPA, but Peterson cautions that the automaker and the federal agency "still have a long way to go" to finalize any agreement. The Volt may yet get that magic 100 mpg rating, but it's not there yet.


[Source: General Motors]

At an event in Flint MI today, GM CEO Rick Wagoner and Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm were on hand to officially announce that GM will be building its new 1.4L direct injected four cylinder engine in the city in new facilities on the campus of the Flint South Powertrain plant. GM will be spending $370 million dollars erect a 552,000 sq ft plant and tool it up. The company will start building the new factory immediately and full scale production is set to start in early 2010 in preparation for the North American launch of the Chevy Cruze. The Flint factory will also be the exclusive source of the range extending engines for the Volt. The plant will use 300 flexible machining and assembly stations so that a variety of four cylinder engines can be built without retooling. GM is planning to double global production of small four cylinder engines (1.0L to 1.4L) between now and 2011 and expects one-third of its North American volume to be fours by that time. The 1.4L is an all new engine that will produce 140 hp and 148 lb-ft of torque. We'll have more information on the 1.4L later today after a technical briefing.


[Source: General Motors]

General Motors made its case to a Detroit City Council committee on Wednesday in a bid to get some property tax brakes for its Hamtramck assembly plant. The Poletown plant is where General Motor is planning to build the Chevrolet Volt beginning in late 2010 and GM told the council that the new production vehicles there would add 550 jobs to the facility. In return for creating those jobs in the city, GM is seeking $136 million in property tax relief on the improvements over the next 25 years. The plant already employs 1,944 people who build the Buick Lucerne and Cadillac DTS. GM is planning on spending $336 million on the plant over the next two years in order to swtich over to the new, smaller ER-EV Volt. The full council is expected to vote to approve the abatements by sometime next week.



[Source: Detroit Free Press]

Bob Lutz is a smooth talker. Trust us, we've seen it time and time again as he's been working on making the Chevy Volt a reality. Still, Stephen Colbert can fluster pretty much anyone, including GM's Vice Chairman of Global Product Development, and it's a lot of fun to watch. Lutz was on the Comedy Central's satirical comedy show The Colbert Report last night and had to pause a few times when the faux right-wing Colbert asked him surprising questions. For example, isn't the Volt just an admission that global warming is real and why he didn't call the car the Chevy Gore. When Colbert asked Lutz if the Volt will get him laid, Lutz's answer is that the woman he'll attract will be the very nice, no-makeup types. Also, in case you were wondering, you could charge the Volt off of the outlet in a Hummer. Just so you know. OK, I won't spoil too much more; check out the video after the jump. Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

[Source: Comedy Central]

Over at the RenCen yesterday, AutoblogGreen sat down with Britta Gross, GM's manager of Hydrogen and Electrical Infrastructure Development and Strategic Commercialization, and Mark Duvall, program manager at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), to talk about how the Volt - actually, how millions of Volts and other plug-in vehicles - could change the way electricity is thought of in the U.S., and what the automaker and utilities are doing today to get ready for the day when it's normal to plug in your car.

Gross said that GM is working with dozens of utilities to figure out how to best sell the public on plugging in a car. AutoblogGreen readers might be anxiously counting down the days until their garage becomes a fueling center, but there are a lot of people who just don't get what plugging a car in might mean, and we could all use a bit more information, no? The major automakers have a long way to go before everyone knows what PHEVs are and how to best use them. Duvall said that it's not just the batteries in the Volt, but also what might happen to li-ion automotive batteries after they're used in cars that presents a real opportunity for consumers and utilities for energy storage from wind, solar or just nighttime power. It was an interesting talk, and you can listen in here (21 min):



For more from Duvall, click here.

Ahh, the blogger round table. At GM's Centennial celebration yesterday, GM chairman sat down with a group of bloggers to talk about - what else? - the Volt. Lutz took questions about the car and gave a upbeat assessment of where the overall program is now; he didn't even knock wood when he said that the battery testing has not given them any problems - guess he's not superstitious. One thing that Lutz said would help GM sell more Volts would be government incentives, specifically $7,500 incentive for each person who buys one. By the looks of it, the he won't quite get that amount.

Over the next few years, here's what will happen with the Volt program: There will be 50 or so Volt powertrains in Chevy Cruze bodies cruising the streets gathering data in the next few months. They are currently building three a week. Next year, about 100 Volts that look like the Volt will be out and about and in 2010 there will be a "pretty huge fleet" testing. Basically, Lutz said, everything's on track for the late-2010 production date.

We also hear how those leaked photos hit the web - yup, GM was embarrassed.

Have a listen to all this a lot more (31 min):

Now that you've had time to digest the look of the production Chevrolet Volt in a somewhat more flattering environment, it's time to have your say. Obviously it changed a lot, but that was a necessity to get this first one out the door and meet the performance targets. The wheels shrunk, the greenhouse grew, and the transparent shoulders are now opaque. But this is now a real and buildable car. You've all been having your say in the comments, now let's get some numbers from a thoroughly unscientific, self-selecting poll. Did Bob Boniface and his team break it or fix it?

The big news of the day is obviously the unveiling of the production Chevy Volt. I mean, this is the car that you should be able to buy in two short long years and a few months. We've been following the development of this car for a long time now (since January 2007, for goodness sake).

But what if we were political pundits instead of bloggers with a thing for cleaner cars? Considering the amount of BS those pundits have spewed here in the U.S. during this seemingly endless presidential race, I can't help but think of how today's Volt reveal could have been, if people like Hannity and Colmes were here with Limbaugh and Olberman. My nightmare imagination runs wild after the jump.

As part of the GM Centennial celebration today, the General hosted an hour-long panel discussion that purported to look ahead 100 years and discover "Future of Transportation," according to my handy-dandy GM event schedule. The panel certainly was an hour long and did feature all of the listed guests, but the discussion rarely ranged past the 20-years-in-the-future timeframe. Still, if you didn't know anything about how the U.S. and the major automakers are going to shift away from gasoline-powered vehicles, it was a good condensation of the current state of affairs into 60 minutes.

Hosted by Joel Makower, co-founder and executive editor of Greener World Media, Inc., the panel also included: John Casesa, managing partner of Casesa Shapiro; GM VP Larry Burns; Don Hillebrand, director of transportation research at Argonne National Laboratory, "Who Killed The Electric Car?" director Chris Paine; and Mark Duvall, program manager of EPRI. The panelists took questions from the audience and from the online community (as the event was streamed live at GM Next). Click past the jump to see what the discussion was all about.

A week after some admittedly bad photos of the production Chevrolet Volt were accidently released on the GM media website, the car itself was officially unveiled this morning as part of GM's centennial celebration in Detroit. Fortunately, the vehicle we saw this morning looked vastly better than the car in the photos we saw last week. Unlike the unapproved shots that made the car look tall, wide and bloated, what we saw today was a far sleeker machine. Aside from some details such as the mirrors, the car actually looks much like the car we saw in the spy photos from the Transformers 2 film shoot.

That means it looks less like a Prius than we thought based on the leaked shots. As we've known for months, the production car had to change in order to optimize the aerodynamics. This had to be done to limit parasitic losses and maximize the car's ability to recapture kinetic energy. The back end is the most obvious carryover from the concept while the front gets the smoother, more rounded look we've been seeing in teaser shots for months. There's more after the jump.

UPDATE: Gallery of live shots added below with more images being uploaded as we speak.

UPDATE 2: Video of the live reveal added after the jump.

Tuesday is the 100th anniversary of the incorporation of General Motors by Billy Durant. In spite of the financial crisis swirling around all three of the Detroit-based automakers, GM intends to take that day to celebrate. Part of that celebration includes the official unveiling of the production design of the Chevy Volt and supposedly some other surprises. Sebastian and I will be on hand live in Detroit on Tuesday, but you can follow the events in a live webcast at GMNext.com. Several more on-line chats with GM executives will be taking place throughout the day including Jon Lauckner and Bob Lutz. Get a preview of what's coming in the video after the jump and stay tuned here on Tuesday morning as we bring you live photos of the Volt and more.

[Source: General Motors]