From the brink of extinction to an electrifying future? GM may just havefound the answer in the Volt. BIJOY KUMAR Y
The car you see on this page is very important. It is important for the future of General Motors, it is important for the future of the automotive industry and it is important for each one of you. Because under its skin lies the technology you and me will certainly live to use. It is not an electric toy that will run out of battery before you reach office.
It is not powered by hydrogen which is super expensive to extract despite being abundant and it is not powered by fuel-cell technology that is far too expensive as a mass-production solution.
And neither is it a ‘hybrid’ though it has a petrol engine and electric motors since the said petrol engine is not connected to the wheels at all as it is in the case of Toyota Prius, Lexus LS600h or the Honda Insight. So what is it? Er… immediate future is a nice answer. Read on and you are bound to win friends and admirers at the next coffee station meeting.
If necessity is the mother of invention, then the Volt had lots of mothers. Mounting losses, medical bills of a very large number of ex-employees who needed to be taken care of, a difficult economy that has prompted people to buy Honda Civics (the largest selling car in the US last month) instead of Chevrolet Malibus and sheer conflict between tangible versus possible technology are just some of them.
For the last decade or so, GM has been working very hard to develop its very own fuel-cell platform under the able guidance of Larry Bird and Co. Sure, fuel-cell, like stem-cell, is where the future is but some one deep inside the Renaissance centre HQ of GM realised that GM needs to survive for its fuel-cell project to come to fruition. Alright, that is my theory but one that would find lots of supporters.
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Now that the big picture and the raison d’être of the Volt has been explained, let us try to understand the car better. To begin with, the Volt is the first-ever mass-produced car since the Ford Model T that does not use an internal combustion engine to turn its wheels. Remember, the Prius and Insight Hybrids alternated power between IC engines and electric motors.
As in, these Hybrids started and ran at slow speeds by sucking power from a battery, but the drive shifted to conventional IC engine as speeds increased. This engine also charged the battery pack for future slow speed or city use. The Volt does not do that — it has a very small capacity petrol engine under its hood that always charges a battery pack, which in turn supplies power to an electric motor which in turn turns the front-wheels.
Get that? In short, the IC engine works as a generator. If some of you are thinking of diesel-electric trains out there, bravo, you got it spot-on. In short, this is an electric car with a captive, economical, poweplant that charges it.
The revolution continues on the battery front. Unlike the hybrids that used expensive nickel-hydride batteries the Volt uses lithium-ion batteries that are lighter and quicker to charge.
Connect it to your refrigerator socket and the Volt will charge its batteries in three hours flat and it recovers energy lost during braking and returns it to the battery pack. (Didn’t understand that bit? It is called regenerative braking wherein a motor turns the other way around while braking to charge than dispense electricity and has been in use in hybrids already).
The power generated by the electric motor is equivalent to that of a 2000cc diesel engine (approximately 140-150 bhp) though it will have a top speed of only 160 kph.
The Volt is a plug-and-play car too. On a full charge, the Volt will run just about 64 kilometres only — enough for short commutes within town. But with the “generator” engine working, the range usefully increases to another 400 kilometres. Despite being radical under the skin, the Chevrolet Volt is not an unusual car to look at or by architecture.
The foor door notch-back design is easy to build in conventional plants and accommodates the T-shaped battery pack efficiently. Both the engine and the motor lie at the front and the motor powers the front wheels. The battery pack is housed in the centre tunnel that divides the cabin into two clear segments as in a rear-wheel driven automobile.
Sophisticated textures and appliance-quality, touch sensitive switch gear makes up the interior. And in case you want to impress your neighbour, the LCD display will do the job by giving comprehensive information on the range, battery power and so on. Like any traditional car of its size, the Volt rides on McPherson struts at the front and a torsion beam suspension set-up at the back.
At roughly US$ 35,000, GM expects the Volt to be a hit with celebrities and the like to begin with but the real possibilities begin when the next car based on the Delta platform is ready for launch. So will we get a car with Volt’s DNA or the new Delta platform-based car in India? Karl Slym, the India chief of GM is not ready to give a date.
According to him, the Volt represents a new class of vehicle - E-REV or extended range electric vehicle and he thinks it shows enormous potential for diverse application that will greatly reduce our dependence on conventional fossils fuels. GM, of course knows a bit about mass production of cars, and they think the cost of the battery pack will come down substantially as the numbers grow.
And if that is the case, it won’t be long before we have smaller cars with similar power-trains and longer range for the developed markets. And what better place than the spanking new plant of GM at Pune to build it!
