Volt Birth Watch 171: Weber Bails

Frank Weber, the man in charge of GM’s electric vehicle line, will be leaving GM for a senior leadership at the soon-to-be-sold (or not?) Opel. Weber previously worked on Opel’s development of GM’s global mid-size (Epsilon II) vehicle line, before becoming the head of GM’s electric vehicle development program in March 2007. Weber is the second senior executive in GM’s global electric, hybrid and battery development organization to leave in a month, following Bob Kruse’s departure at the end of September. And as with Kruse’s exit, the sound bites coming out of GM seek to portray the loss as no big deal. “There is a huge difference in the Volt program from when I came here,” Weber tells Bloomberg. “The entire organization has inhaled what we do here.” In reality though, Weber’s defection makes the introduction of the Opel Ampera (as the Volt will be known in Europe) even more difficult than it was already shaping out to be.

The Volt’s technology can not be entrusted to either Magna, which develops EVs for GM’s competitors (like Ford’s Focus EV) or Magna’s partner Sberbank, which would be likely to sell the intellectual property to a Russian automaker (GAZ). Weber says his role will be to act as a liason between GM (which will have a 35 percent stake in new Opel) and the new company’s owners, putting him directly in the middle of the Opel sale’s biggest challenge: sharing IP and development capacity between all of Opel’s stakeholders. In any case, the trained engineer will not be working on further development of the Volt. And as a second executive abandons GM’s EREV moonshot, it seems pretty clear that the program has major shortcomings that execs don’t want to be associated with. After all, New Opel is hardly a sure thing itself.