The Atlantic boasts a lengthy article on the Chevy Volt containing some pretty eye-opening revelations from author Jonathan Rauch. "And how, I ask [Volt chief engineer Andrew Farah] over coffee early one February morning in Detroit, is it going… The car, he says, is 10 weeks behind the original schedule. Any more slippage, and the 2010 deadline will be history. Even if no more time is lost, he will have only eight weeks to test the underbody, the car's structural base. Is that enough time? He answers indirectly. In some cars, he says, testing the underbody can take a year." And the mood permeates the entire program: "At the end of February, when I returned to the technical center, the picture looked different. December's ebullience had given way to a sense of strain that was evident even to a tourist. 'We currently are at the limit of our stretch,' one senior battery engineer told me." None of this seems to bode well for the timely arrival or reliability of what is arguably the most advanced automobile ever offered for sale in the U.S. Or for the company that's attempting to pull the miracle out of its ass hat.
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This is what happens when the leaders of the company are not engineers and make outlandish and impossible promises. What will happen is Lutz and Waggy will pressure their engineering staff so heavily they will “cheat” on tests in make results quicker and acceptable leading to a less finished product – like most GM cars rushed to market b/c it’s management doesn’t understand engineering – just sales #s, golf scores, and their paychecks.
Heard an ad for the Volt on the radio this morning. “Imagine driving 40 miles without a drop of gas.” Imagine creating an ad about cars that are already on lots with BIG SALE! written all over them. That would make sense, though.
The overweight-by-400 lbs Solstice is proof that GM can take a brilliant concept and rush it to market before it is done. The “engineering” on the convertible top looks as if it were subbed out to some retired British Leyland engineers.
Somehow, the Corvette team seems immune to this kind of pressure. Perhaps they’re allowed to sit out there in the Kentucky grasslands and just keep polishing the pearl. At least we can be thankful for them!
Is it time to start a TTAC pool on the final crap factor in the Volt? How many ways might it be measured?
The Vette is engineerd in Michigan, and manufactured in Kentucky. They have the same deadlines as everyone else. I’m sure that using known engineering commodities eases their task.
They’re jumping into the unkown here a bit. Even Bill Gates probably isn’t privvy to all the nuts and bolts of MS products. He can’t be.
Some people react badly when the stress of deadlines is placed on them. Are GM’s engineers so coddled by low expectations that they can’t actually handle a deadline to complete their work?
I love how they keep going on about this car. It’s a prototype, the battery technology doesn’t exist. There is no reason to believe it will ever go on sale.
In a few years, they’ll send out a press release that the Volt program itself is paused, but lots of the technology will be going into real production vehicles.
Meanwhile, Toyota and Ford are cranking out hybrid cars on actual dealer lots and in actual customers’ driveways.
Great article, thanks for posting it. If anything it makes me even more interested to see if GM call pull this off. The Volt project has been described as a “Moon Shot” and it sounds like the Volt team believes it is. It’s a make or break project for GM, high risk, high reward.
I found the below paragraphs very interesting…gives me hope that these guys are actually going to pull it off. Will it make the 2010 deadline, who knows? It’s going to be a fun ride!
“On the other hand, GM is not the company it was in the 1980s and 1990s. “There’s a generational change in GM,” Maryann Keller, who has tracked GM since the early 1970s, told me recently. “There’s a generation of managers who never knew the rich GM. These are people who are bruised and battered. These are the kind of people who can make change.” (And the worm turns: Toyota is now run by a generation that has known only success.)
GM, once notoriously smug, today is a hungry company. Its executives and engineers will recount, at the drop of a hat, the great technologies and cars that GM has fathered. They want some of that glory back. They know the world expects them to fail, and that makes them all the hungrier. “The empire strikes back,” is how one executive sums up the Volt’s effect on morale. “
“John Kennedy didn’t say, ‘Let’s go to the moon and, you know, we’ll get there as soon as we can,’” Wagoner said in a recent interview in his office, atop a high-rise in Detroit. “I asked our experts, ‘Guys, do we have a reasonable chance of making it or not?’ Yes. ‘Well, then, let’s go for what we want rather than go for what we know we can do.’”
“In the 1970s, when gas prices rose, GM proved incapable of building a decent small car. In the 1980s, when the Japanese redefined quality, GM failed to respond, because its brands were competing against each other instead of the imports. In the 1990s, when minivans and SUVs took off, GM was caught unprepared. In the early part of this decade, it decided hybrids were too unprofitable to pursue, leaving a gap in the market that Toyota, with its Prius, brilliantly and mercilessly exploited. By the time GM recognized its blunder and launched its own hybrids, Toyota dominated the field.”
“The PR guys want something more sexy and dramatic, a singular point for our message. This issue of the environmental image was hurting the company substantially.” Playing it safe looked paradoxically more dangerous than taking a gamble.”
“In February 2006, Lauckner pulled together a brainstorming team that included, unusually, a public-relations man, Chris Preu
A company the size of GM should not be putting all its eggs in one basket or doing hail mary’s and moon shots just to stay in business. With their size is should be simply sustainability and small but consistent improvements over time. Nope GM spent the last 20 years making profits on SUVs as their only focus and everything else was basically junk (with some exceptions) – Management and the BOD were living large on dividends and overpaid salaries.
Business 101 tells you that keeping a satisfied customer is #1 – these people you spend little money marketing and convincing as the product they own speaks for itself and they wind up selling others on their experience creating free factual advertising.
Pissing off a customer with a poorly built piece of crap loses that customer forever and the amount of time / money GM has to spend to “win” them back is a lost cause. These are the majority of customers in the marketplace – those that won’t go back. GM’s other strategy is winning over new customers with no GM experience but who are satisfied with their current vehicle (Ford / Toyota / Honda) is also very expensive and will have little results.
GM’s management is so ignorant to this fact that their sole focus should be on stopping the customer defections – this company had a 50% market share at one point…30% 8 years ago and now they are going under 20%. GM put themselves into this mess – and will cry until the Fed bails them out. I’d think we should put Waggy and the gang up to a nice public trial – get some of their “irate” customers telling them off as to how they’ve been treated. We all know that Waggy and the gang are insulated from almost all criticism and that’s the way they like it.
Great article, thanks for posting it. If anything it makes me even more interested to see if GM call pull this off. The Volt project has been described as a “Moon Shot” and it sounds like the Volt team believes it is. It’s a make or break project for GM, high risk, high reward.
Forgive me but I fail to see the ‘high reward’ part. Say they sell 50 K per year – they would have to lose money on each one to do this. And, um, it’s not like they can afford to lose money on anything. Costs don’t come down overnight on these things – it would take them 4-5 years to get “Gen 2” costs. So now we’re talking 2017 before anything close to high volume (or break-even business case).
Meanwhile, Toyota will sell 250K Priuses, Honda will sell 250K hyrbid whatevers, and we will sell 10 Malibu mild hybrids.
And please save the ‘halo vehicle’ claims.
Forgive me but I fail to see the ‘high reward’ part
If you can pull off the Volt Program and make it a success in terms of producing a viable EV with a gas assist:
1. You become much more attractive to partners, investors, and the federal government for increased investment, capital and grants
2. You change the perception of your company by the public at large.
3. You have a technology which leapfrogs the competition, which can be incorporated into other vehicles, both more and less expensive than the Volt.
For instance, if you have a 40 mile battery, a 20 mile battery is a piece of cake and you could roll out a $25K car that gets 20 miles EV range, and 50 MPG combined, while selling the Volt as your “upscale” vehicle.
My two cents, obviously predicated on the company remaining solvent.
If the Volt ever makes it to production(I’m with Justin on this one I don’t think it will see the light of day) it will be a collasal failure because they rushed it to market and the compomises they had to make to get it there. They have already gone public about wipers and other issues they are going ot have to bandaid up to get the thing out on time, what about the stuff they aren’t telling us, and the things everyone knows are sure to happen as they get closer to the deadline. Cutting corners is going to cost them and it will be the only way to hobble something together in time. They do it on conventional cars with longer lead times, the Solstice was a good example. What is going to happen to sales 6 months after their Tesla-like launch when the public finds out the car is compromised and overly expensive, people will start choosing the safer bests, because there will many more to choose from.
I feel another Aztek coming. I have a feeling it is going ot look exactly like that 2010 Cobalt in testing with some gussied up shinny plastic trimmings to make it look futuristic, like the difference between Chevy and Buick.
Alex Rodriguez :
June 26th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Great article, thanks for posting it. If anything it makes me even more interested to see if GM call pull this off. The Volt project has been described as a “Moon Shot” and it sounds like the Volt team believes it is. It’s a make or break project for GM, high risk, high reward.
There’s no reward for GM. GM will sell the Volt at a loss, probably a huge loss (IE, it might cost GM $40,000 or so to make each Volt which they will turn around and sell for $20,000-25,000, for a loss of $15,000 or more per Volt sold (or, they sell it for their costs ($40k), and sell so few that they will eat the development costs, which is just as bad)). Now, if they had Toyota’s bank account, they might be able to take losses for a few years, reduce costs and increase sales to the point where the losses might be eliminated. But GM right now can’t afford another program that is guaranteed to lose them billions of dollars.
As noted in this article, it is getting GM quite a bit of attention. People, uneducated about what’s really going on with the Volt project, are all about it. I just had a conversation the other day with another auto enthusiast (not nearly as much as me and he’s a GM diehard). I said how GM really fell off the boat with fuel economy and smaller vehicles. His comment, “But, they’ve got the Volt coming in 2010.” So, a lot of people know about it. But, so very few know and understand the whole picture and the major complications and testing that PR and Lutz seem to be overlooking. The general public that are also enthused about it also seem to think it will be available to everyone. IF it is released, I can’t see it being in a large enough number for a number of years. Which brings things full circle to why the Toyota/Honda/Ford, etc. hybrids are so successful.
Wow this is full of statements making me feel like this is vaporware city….My personal favorite is a quote by that battery consultant about the battery being developed.
“Its life is unproven, and unprovable in the short time GM has allotted”
Does anyone still wonder why GM gets ripped on by the best and the brightest of TTAC?
“The empire strikes back,” is how one executive sums up the Volt’s effect on morale.
Wow, that’s a bad analogy. The Empire were the bad guys, and they were eventually defeated because they underestimated the Ewoks.
Wow, that’s a bad analogy. The Empire were the bad guys, and they were eventually defeated because they underestimated the Ewoks.
I totally forgot that, the Empire fell, they didn’t succeed. So maybe it is a good analogy for what is really going to happen.
I think that some of the engineers on the Volt project are praying for the Second Coming in 2010, as it’s a more likely event than the Volt going on sale.
Does anyone here remember watching the space shuttle blow up in the 80’s? The engineers at NASA were telling their management that everything was OK even when the O-ring supplier was screaming “Stop the launch!” They did that because their management wouldn’t accept any other answer.
How much do you want to bet that GM is functioning much the same way right now?
TrueDelta will report on the Volt’s initial reliability four to six months after it goes on sale. And then have an update every three months after that.
If the cars are reliability, we’ll know that fairly quickly. And if GM does a rush job, we’ll know that as well.
http://www.truedelta.com/reliability.php
netrun: it can be very much like that…
I’d be satisifed if they didn’t try to leap frog the competition but just concentrated on continuous improvements to their existing productions without any more big promosies about fuel cells and battery cars until they have them ready to sell.
Let them build a really good compact that gets a solid 40 mpg, looks good and lasts.
I really like the G6 but the economy according to a friend who drives one is really poor – like mid-20s – about what my 9 year old CUV gets.
I really want an Astra 3-door and have not written the idea off but will have to drive one. The reviews give it average scores. They say it has an agricultural feel to the engine and tranny. Of course their expectatations and mine might be very different. I mean they prob spend driving BMWs and Mercedes or Audis. I pend time driving an 11 years old compact or a 9 year old CUV and both have over 150K miles.
(IE, it might cost GM $40,000 or so to make each Volt which they will turn around and sell for $20,000-25,000, for a loss of $15,000 or more per Volt sold (or, they sell it for their costs ($40k), and sell so few that they will eat the development costs, which is just as bad))
Does it make a difference? They said they would sell 10,000 of them in 2011. If they lose 10K per vehicle that’s a tenth-of-a-million dollars. I know GM is in dire straits, but $100,000 won’t kill them.
The selling price for 2011 depends entirely on the message that they’re trying to sell. There will be at least 10,000 people willing to pay 40K just to stick it to the oil man, but is that the price point that GM wants to create in the public’s mind? (They may end up losing that price differential to the aftermarket as a result.)
nonce, Check your math. 10,000 units * $10,000 loss on each unit is $100,000,000. It still won’t kill GM (probably) but it will hurt (certainly).
—
Alex Rodriguez on rewards: “3. You have a technology which leapfrogs the competition, which can be incorporated into other vehicles, both more and less expensive than the Volt.”
This “reward” is entirely ephemeral.
Toyota can build a Volt by removing parts from the Prius and adding a bigger battery. They know how to build an RE-EV, if they want to. Ditto Honda.
Their 2001 Rav4-EV, using battery technology dissed by GM and its fan club, achieved 100+ mile range and many are still in use today. They have God-only-knows-what running around the streets of Japan right now.
The Volt is a rathole into which GM is pouring money. If you consider that functionally similar vehicles are on the road today and have been for 11 years, the hybrid vehicles that GM is building in 2011 should be mature, effective, low-cost, built in volume and profitable. The Volt is none of these.
The idea that GM is “leapfrogging” anyone who has a functioning hybrid on the road today is ludicrous.
Hello Alex Rodriguez,
I might be wrong, but I personally can remember a long string of revolutionary game changing GM product roll outs that did not fly, and this was largely while GM was a force to recon with. Corvair, Vega, Caddy V-8-6-4, Fiero, Saturn, Olds diesel V-8, the X-cars. I rather expect the Volt to the the last of the line.
This is a great article… I hope it gets expanded to book length, someday.
The passage that Frank Williams chose to excerpt, about underbody testing, was pretty interesting, especially after one reads this passage from the last page of the article:
In late March, at the New York auto show, I checked back in with Andrew Farah, the Volt’s chief engineer, and asked for an update. “Still just as bad as before,” he said. When I mentioned that another executive had said the underbody was a well-proven design that didn’t need much testing, he shot me a look of disbelief. “There’s a big gaping hole down the center of this car where the battery goes.”
For “another executive,” one could substitute “some clueless executive.” I hope he’s in charge of something where he can’t do any harm.
Busbodger says:
They say it has an agricultural feel to the engine and tranny. Of course their expectatations and mine might be very different. I mean they prob spend driving BMWs and Mercedes or Audis. I spend time driving an 11 years old compact or a 9 year old CUV and both have over 150K miles.
Good point, as an old farmer there is nothing wrong with an agricultural feel to machinery, it’s what we love about it. I too am used to driving older vehicles, my newest is an ’03 Matrix AWD with 137,000 + miles on it. Next down is a high mile ’00 Expedition.
On the Volt, it would be great to have GM make this work. I’m no real fan of their vehicles, not even the ‘Vette, but I don’t want to see them fail either. For my commuting use I would have to have a range of 100 miles or so, the projected 40 for the Volt won’t get it.
KixStart, you’re absolutely right. I was lying in bed last night and realized I screwed up big in my post.