Chevy Volt: The Future Is Here

You'll find a lot of pages devoted to the new Chevy Volt here on MT.com and in the December issue ofMotor Trend. That's because the Volt is one of the most significant automobiles to come out of Detroit in the 60-year history of this magazine. Few cars have been as anticipated -- or as controversial -- as this compact Chevrolet.

Before we go any further, let's be clear what the Volt is not. It is not the automobile reinvented. It is not the savior of General Motors. It is not going to stop polar ice caps from melting, preserve the Amazon rainforest, or prevent the Chinese from muscling in on the cheap oil America still takes for granted. Most important, the Volt is not the car of the future. It is merely a car of the future. But it's a damned well-engineered one.

We've covered almost 1500 miles in Volts over the past few weeks, subjecting them to all sorts of duty cycles -- everything from stop-start city driving to flat-out 100-mph test-track blasts -- in an effort to unmask the car's fatal flaw. So far we haven't found one. Our testing confirms the Volt delivers on the promise of the vehicle concept as originally outlined by GM, combining the smooth, silent, low-emissions capability of an electric motor with the range and flexibility of an internal combustion engine.

We've also discovered that, despite GM rhetoric to the contrary, the Volt is basically a clever take on a plug-in hybrid. But as Markus also points out in his "Technologue" column, there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, in his view, the way GM connects the internal-combustion engine and the two electric motor/generators is superior to the solution Toyota is proposing for its 2012 Prius Plug-In hybrid.

Technical editor Kim Reynolds has compared data from our Volt experiences with that from our monthlong test of a prototype Prius Plug-In and concluded the Chevy not only outperforms the Toyota under all conditions, but is way more efficient in the duty cycle both vehicles were primarily designed for: short, urban trips. If the Volt has a weakness, says Reynolds, it's that GM may have made the battery bigger and more powerful than it really needed to be for that duty cycle. Assuming industry standard costs of $500 per kilowatt/hour, the Volt's battery is at least $6500 more expensive than that in the Prius Plug-In prototype.

Unlike most of the products out of Detroit over the past 30 years, the Volt is not a catch-up car, or a me-too car, or a car of zero interest to consumers outside the United States. This Chevy delivers a unique, breakthrough driving experience that is globally relevant. The Volt's plug-in hybrid architecture will almost certainly be developed and used in future GM products around the world. It could be the corporation's most significant new powertrain since the small-block V-8.

Which leads us to the controversial bit: The Volt will probably lose money. A highly experienced auto engineer who's overseen numerous new-vehicle development programs in his long and distinguished Detroit career has crawled around the Volt and reckons there's about $2 billion worth of development in the car. He says Volts probably cost GM $40,000 apiece to build. Those numbers are just his best guesses -- he's not a former GM guy, and GM's not about to tell us whether he's right or wrong -- but they're informed guesses.

Ten years ago, the Volt program would never have made it past the GM bean counters, who would have argued the development dollars were better spent on a new pickup truck that would generate fat profits. Today, there are probably many average Americans wondering whether it's right a taxpayer-owned GM should be building a money-loser.

I think it is.

Having American taxpayers support American industries is nothing unusual -- for example, we routinely hand over $10 billion to $30 billion of taxpayer cash in the form of subsidies to American agribusinesses every single year. More important, though, I believe keeping the Volt alive in spite of the economics will prove a smart move in the long term, because the investment in the technology that drives this car is also an investment in the future of automaking in this country.

Long-term thinking is what made Japan's automakers such formidable competitors. And it's what the Chinese automakers are doing right now. It's about time America started playing their game.