General Motors embraces plug-in cars — again
By Jeff Green
Bloomberg News
Monday, January 8, 2007
DETROIT
General Motors is embracing electric vehicles again, this time with a model that gets its initial charge from a home outlet, as part of a campaign to gain on Toyota Motor, a leader in advanced automotive technology.
The GM Volt, which is still in development, uses an onboard engine to recharge the batteries after the primary charge from the outlet is exhausted, Bob Lutz, a vice chairman of GM, said. The vehicle would travel 40 miles before tapping the engine, which could be powered by gasoline, diesel or other fuels, he said.
The Volt prototype adds another model to GM's $1 billion-plus gamble on unproven technology. The GM chief executive, Rick Wagoner, is also investing in autos that run on ethanol and hydrogen instead of gasoline in a bid to leap ahead of Toyota and other rivals as buyers look for better fuel economy and government regulators push to curb auto pollution.
"Increasingly, it's an issue of domestic fuel versus a dependence of foreign sources," said Mike Duoba, a research engineer at Argonne National Laboratory of the U.S. Energy Department, who is leading an effort to set mileage standards for hybrid cars. "Using a plug-in model can dramatically reduce petroleum use."
GM, the world's largest automaker, displayed a prototype of the Chevrolet Volt on Sunday at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. The automaker, which has lost $13 billion over seven quarters, was not saying when it will begin selling vehicles using the Volt technology.
The biggest obstacle is a lithium ion battery that can last at least a decade and have the reliability drivers expect from current gasoline models, said Denise Gray, the newly appointed director of the GM hybrid battery program.
The new GM models would be superior to its last electric car, the EV-1, because the onboard engine can be tapped for long trips, giving it a maximum range of about 640 miles, Lutz said. The EV1 could travel about 60 miles to 90 miles, or 97 kilometers to 145 kilometers, before it needed to plugged in and recharged.
A decade ago, GM invested more than $1 billion on the EV-1. It abandoned the technology because of the car's expense and its need for frequent recharging.
GM would not say how much it was spending on the Volt. It has said it planned to spend $1 billion to develop fuel cells and is also a partner in a $1 billion effort with DaimlerChrysler and Bayerische Motoren Werke to develop hybrid gasoline-electric engines.
Plug-in hybrids like the Volt recharge when the vehicle is not in use and switch to gasoline or some other fuel when the batteries are drained. Standard hybrids, led by the Toyota Prius, use a battery and electric motor to supplement a gasoline engine, cutting down on fuel consumption and pollution.
Total U.S. hybrid sales in 2006 were 253,652, or 1.5 percent of the 16.6 million new light vehicles sold last year. Hybrid sales rose 22.5 percent last year, while overall U.S. light vehicle sales fell 2.6 percent.
Hybrids will remain a niche portion of the U.S. auto market for the near future, accounting for about one million sales annually, said Eric Fedewa, an analyst at CSM Worldwide in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
"We see every automaker with some sort of hybrid vehicle program, and the plug-in is just another weapon in the arsenal," he said.
GM plans three hybrid-electric versions of its Saturn Vue, including one that plugs into an outlet, Wagoner has said. |
