Editorial: Between The Lines: GM's Volt Development Spin Cycle

As rumors filter in about GM’s Volt battery program, the faithful must be experiencing a certain amount of restless discomfort. After all, it’s not like this couldn’t be seen coming. Let’s just say that when I asked at SEMA last October the guys from A123 Systems (then bidding on the project) about the Volt battery development program, they took full advantage of the fact that SEC silent periods don’t forbid eye-rolling. Though non-verbal communication can (and in this case, did) speak volumes, we like to get our facts in writing. Which, thanks to the truth-proof wall surrounding the Volt’s development, usually means going through GM’s PR-exercise interviews with reliable Volt boosters and mining them for some kind of meaning. And hey, there’s an interview at Volt cheerleader HQ gm-volt.com which suggests that the Volt’s battery development is being rushed. And engineers are complaining to blogs? Fancy that!

GM-volt.com’s Lyle Dennis sat down with GM’s head Volt honcho Frank Weber for a sanitized-for-your-protection update on General’s moon-shot gambit. So what is happening right now, according to Weber?

We have been using the winter for winter tests . . . Now what’s happening is the true development work that you say OK this is the temperature of the battery, and this is the temperature of the system, and this is what happens when you are plugged in, etc. There are parameters that we call calibration, you have the basic software functionality on those cars defined, and then we start to calibrate it looking at the temperature and when to we start it, what is the true power of the battery at a certain temperature, etc.”

Any of this sounding intelligible or reassuring yet? This is supposed to be GM’s chance to thrill the credulous faithful, and the best Weber can come up with is “start to calibrate?” Don’t worry, it gets worse.

“What you know is what the behavior is for the cars that we are testing, and then you make an assumption for how a component will behave over time and how it will behave under the same situation in several years. This is what we call accelerated testing. This gives you some indication of durability. The piece that is tricky and interesting about the battery is to do a really accurate extrapolation of the true behavior. For a mechanical part this is very simple. For a mechanical part you can replicate its lifetime and find out when it will break. The battery is electrochemical and its more difficult to make those extrapolations. This is part of the learning we have to do, battery learning between the battery supplier LG and us. By the way this is still the element of risk. This is also why we are unable to get the car out any sooner. It is those things that have to be developed now with the components that are representative of the production vehicle. There is no way to do this any faster.”

If GM would just admit that the “late 2010” launch date is toast, this wouldn’t even qualify as spin. But then we don’t exactly live in a world where you can just say “it’s complicated, we don’t know when it will actually be done, now where’s my NSFWing bailout” is it? Or is it? I digress.

In a separate post, Lyle Dennis predicts public test drives this summer, putting faith first in spite of more damningly ambiguous talk, this time from GM’s John Lauckner. Saying “we need an experience where people say ‘Wow’ this is really something special,” Lauckner reveals that GM has “laid out all of the concepts that we want to use and written a lot of the preliminary code,” for the Volt’s “software-driven” driving experience.” Concepts. Preliminary. Wow. Lauckner continues:

“I would say that conceptually we’re most of the way there if not all of the way there, but there’s a lot of work to be done still to make sure that the whole thing operates seamlessly. [GM has to] love this thing a little bit to make sure that you not only get it that it actually works but you get it working in such a way that its completely intuitive. We need the time with the car and we need the time over a wide variety of conditions to simulate certain things, so that we can see just exactly how the car is going to behave and what sort of information the driver is going to get to make sure everything works in as seamless a way as we can possibly make it.”

Love your own product? Really? You’re only going to be asking $40 grand for the thing. And though both executives note its importance, time is the one thing GM doesn’t have. Weber reveals that the engineering freeze on the first true Volt prototypes or integration cars will occur “within days,” and that these integration models will be built and tested sometime later this year. If GM could simply let its executives just say what they hint at (conceptual, preliminary, this thing takes time) and let the “late 2010” date slip, their troops on the ground might not be grousing that the battery system is an “epic fail.” Instead it’s being rammed through and damn the torpedoes. This won’t end well.