Electro-Shock Therapy

[atlaw4u]

With the Chevy Volt, General Motors—battered, struggling for profitability, fed up with being eclipsed by Toyota and the Prius—is out to reinvent the automobile, and itself.

Jonathan Rauch - July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly

Last year, while he was working in Germany as an engineer for General Motors, Andrew Farah got a call from a senior engineer in Detroit asking him to come home.

Why? A car. A special car.

Farah had heard about it, of course. The Chevrolet Volt was the automotive sensation of 2007, a new kind of electric hybrid that GM was proposing to have in showrooms in late 2010. Farah had advocated a similar design years earlier, so he didn’t need to be sold on the idea.

Still, he hesitated. GM had called him because of his deep experience with battery-driven electric cars. In the 1990s, he had worked on GM’s EV1, an all-electric technological masterpiece that had done so poorly commercially that GM wound up crushing the cars amid a hail of public condemnation. Farah had been fiercely committed to the EV1, and he was not about to relive the disappointment.

“Hell, no,” he said. “I’ve been on programs like this before. They’re not real.”

“No,” came the reply. “This one is real.” Farah asked to talk to other senior executives, and they concurred. So, in the spring of last year, he took one of the hardest jobs at GM, and became the Volt’s chief engineer.

And how, I ask over coffee early one February morning in Detroit, is it going? It is 6 a.m., and Farah, who is 47 and has angular features and prominent black glasses, is rushing to make a 7 a.m. meeting. The car, he says, is 10 weeks behind the original schedule. Any more slippage, and the 2010 deadline will be history. Even if no more time is lost, he will have only eight weeks to test the underbody, the car’s structural base.

Is that enough time? He answers indirectly. In some cars, he says, testing the underbody can take a year.

GM, he tells me, is taking an industrial organization designed to grind out incremental improvements and repurposing it for a technological leap. “I spend 20 percent of my time being a psychologist and counselor,” he says. “I tell people, ‘Yes, there’s a lot of risk. And, yes, that’s OK.’

“It’s not a program for the faint of heart.”

‘They’re Making a Huge Mistake’ … [Read More]

[gflippin]

In generator mode, the car will drive hundreds of miles on a tank of gas, at about 50 miles per gallon.

What's all the hype with this project?

Greg

[phoebeisis]

50 MPG MEANS 8 CENTS PER MILE- PRETTY CHEAP- most cars cost 20 cents per mile. However it will have 40 miles of all electric range. It costs about 12 cents for 1000 watt hrs; 1000 watt hrs will push this car about 6 miles or 2- cents per mile. You get to drive the first 40 miles for 80 cents instead of the $8 it costs most folks.

You will get 10X the FE of the average 20 mpg car.It is like getting 200 mpg!!!

Most folks don't drive more than 40 miles/day, so the VOLT is a 200 mpg car!!

Charlie

[Jaral]

Furthermore, well-designed electric drivetrains will be quiet, nearly vibrationless, smellless, not requiring nearly as much maintenance (no oil to change), cheaper to build and repair, last longer, and cost less than a gasoline engine. They use 0 energy when the car is stopped, and only enough to spin a couple bearings when the car is coasting (no need to shut off the engine to glide). They do not have pumping losses and can be quite efficient at part-throttle. The extreme low-end torque of an electric motor will mean that average cars can tow significant weight without difficulty, although shorter range.

If it were not for poor battery technology, electric motors are so superior in nearly every way to gas motors for automobile usage that the gas motor would be as outdated as the steam engine.

[Ophbalance]

So basically, they've taken what's good for locomotives, and downsized it for cars .

[c0da]

I wonder what this thing really looks like. So far the only working version I've seen had the body of an old ford contour. YUCK!

[Earthling]

The risk is enormous because it all depends on the battery, which does not exist yet, and there isn't enough time to test whatever battery they choose. It's too risky for Toyota at the present time, which is why they aren't making the plug-in Prius.

I hope it works out, but it could be a disaster, especially if it goes into production and the batteries fail, or go up in flames.

Harry

[phoebeisis]

The only downsides to the Volt are cost and it is a bit "different".

It really isn't much more complicated than a normal ICE car. It does have an electric drive motor, but it doesn't have a complicated automatic transmission, so it is a wash there. A normal ICE car also has a ice driving a generator (alternator). The normal ICE has lots of "stuff" driven off the ICE, and this makes it really complicated and busy under the hood; the alternator, ac compressor, power steering, brakes, cooling fan are all driven(mainly mechanically except for the brake booster) off the ice. In the volt they will all be driven by electric motors which don't require a belt and pulleys.

The 500-800 lbs of battery pack is partially offset by the loss of a 400 lb ice and 150 lb AT.

GM will hit a home run with this car. They can eventually morph into a whole lineup of electric vehicles. The only thing it probably can't do is heavy long distance towing and hauling . It would take a lot of battery weight to do that. It should work fine for UPS type city vehicles with 3000 lb loads. They have plenty of room and suspension/frame strength to carry the extra battery weight.

Maybe someday big over the road trucks will be electric. They could run in a dedicated interstate lane with overhead wires to carry the power. They could have a battery pack for off interstate use.It would be a quick replace battery pack with maybe 15 mile range weighing 1500 lbs or so.A fillup would be a forklift robot removing/replacing the pack.

In the USA we have HUGE electricity potential- wind.coal.nukes. Once the batteries are energy dense enough we will be able to use them for road trips etc. I'm about to spend $600 for fuel to drive 3000 miles in a 5000 lb vehicle. Electricity could easily do it for $120 if I used 333 watt hrs per mile.

We are a lucky country; our coasts and huge size means we have lots wind potential.

I'm optimistic,
Charlie

[Robert Lastick]

Originally Posted by Earthling

The risk is enormous because it all depends on the battery, which does not exist yet, and there isn't enough time to test whatever battery they choose. It's too risky for Toyota at the present time, which is why they aren't making the plug-in Prius.

I hope it works out, but it could be a disaster, especially if it goes into production and the batteries fail, or go up in flames.

Harry

Hi Earthling;

I seem to remember reading here that Toyota is now testing its PHEV in Japan. I seem to remember that they were going to at first market it with regular Nickel batteries and then when the lithium ion battery was perfected, they would make it so thye battery could be switched. They were looking to launch it sometime in 2009.

Has that been scrapped?

[Robert Lastick]

To me this article shows in painfull detail the caliber of the management at GM. It is without a doubt dismal.

For all those trying to understand the dynamics of poor management and what it can do to a company, GM is the text book.