The Chevrolet Volt can very nearly be boiled down to a single a function: range extension. The Volt’s gasoline range-extender is the car’s major technological advantage over other electric vehicles like Nissan’s Leaf, promising consumers freedom from the terror of range anxiety. But how does it actually work? TTAC’s Volt Birth Watch has long asked the question, and GM has assiduously prevented journalists from describing the Volt’s transition from initial EV range to “generator mode.” Until now. The NY Times‘ Lindsay Brooke recently took a pre-production Volt for a spin at the Milford Proving Grounds, and files this report on the generator mode experience:

It takes a few laps of Milford’s twisty, undulating 3.7-mile road course to deplete the remaining eight miles of battery charge. With the dashboard icon signaling my final mile of range, I point the Volt toward a hill and wait for the sound and feel of the generator engine’s four pistons to chime in.

But I completely miss it; the engine’s initial engagement is inaudible and seamless. I’m impressed. G.M. had not previously made test drives of the Volt in its extended-range mode available to reporters, but I can see that in this development car, at least, the engineers got it right.

Or did they?

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“In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation,” goes a famous line in the Great Law of the Iroquois, “even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine.” Though TTAC tests the thickness of GM’s skin on a daily basis, GM is ahead of the seven-generation game. The Detroit News reports that GM’s engineering staff are already working on the Volt’s third-generation hardware, although previous iterations are still being used to collect data. Meanwhile, the major challenge remain getting everything road-ready for a 2010 launch, a goal that will be reached… “barring any last minute problems.” “I did place a lot of faith in the battery companies, who said they could have them ready,” admits Bob Lutz. Oh, and there’s still one other major obstacle to overcome: the cost. Test vehicles cost “over $250,000” per vehicle to build, and a major focus of the testing process has been reducing the build cost. And despite the earlier Volt-as-sports-sedan rhetoric, the top attained speed in testing is 107 mph, although engineers say it will likely be limited to 104 mph. Though that’s faster than most EV early-adopters will take their Volts anyway, it’s also only about 15 mph faster than the much-cheaper Nissan Leaf EV, a vehicle that the Volt will have to differentiate itself from considerably to earn its estimated $10k premium over the non-range-extended EV.

Autoweek apparently got an interview with GM vice president of global vehicle engineering and former chairman of Holden, Mark Reuss. Apparently, because their write-up takes a light hand with the quotation marks, using them to fill in the gaps between the author’s breathless interpretations of the topic at hand: Chevrolet’s SS line.

From 1960s Chevelles to modern Camaros, speedy Chevrolets have always been indentified with two letters: SS. But does the tradition-laden performance designation have a future in the new General Motors, which is under pressure to cut costs, make money and meet stricter fuel-economy regulations? “Absolutely,” Mark Reuss, GM vice president of global engineering, told AutoWeek. In fact, the SS line could be better–or at least more clearly defined. Reuss envisions cars outfitted on a case-by-case basis, rather than somewhat generically adding horsepower and red-letter stitching to Chevys across the board. Or as he put it, “Not trying to peanut-butter SS for everything.”

And though the intent of Reuss’s proclamation was clearly to encourage, the SS brand may be one of GM’s most-damaged. Here, for your viewing pleasure, are a few of the reasons why.

Earlier this week Chrysler talked about taking real steps to improve its quality. Today it’s GM. Mark Reuss, GM’s head of engineering, had this to say to the Detroit Free Press:

Reliability has been the Achilles’ heel of GM for my entire career,” he said, promising he would focus the company’s engineers around the world on fixing the problem. “It gets down to an individual engineer’s ability to find a problem and leadership’s ability to fix it,” he said, adding that too many GM engineers have been reluctant to point out problems because they were afraid they’d get the blame rather than praise for catching the mistake before customers suffered.

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Well, we’ve already been warned that GM’s 4Q cash burn and financial results will be worse than the just-released 3Q results; now we have another reason why. Even though GM has been averaging just over $4,000 per vehicle in incentives, a traditional Red-Toe-Tag sale has been planned for year’s end, reports Automotive News [sub]. As in years past, the answer lies in shoddy inventory management. GM’s Susan Docherty explains:

All of our efforts will be to sell down our remaining 2009 inventory. We’ll have a little bit of carryover of that into the first quarter of 2010, but the objective is to keep our inventory somewhere between 425,000 to 450,000 units. I’d rather have very slow, incremental movement up [in market share] than the peaks and valleys we saw all over 2008 and of course in the first six months of the 2009 calendar year

Wait, there were peaks to go along with all the valleys in 2009? More to the point, how does Docherty’s desire for organic growth square with the decision to spike sales at year’s end with as-yet non-specific financing and cash incentives? The real irony is that GM is having an easier than expected time moving its remaining 10,000 Pontiacs and 8,000 Saturns; The Red Tag event is for Chevrolet, Buick-GMC gets the “Holiday Event” and Cadillac will hold a “Seasons Best” sale. Non-stop incentives on “core brands,” goes against much of the “sell the product, not the deal” rhetoric coming out of GM post-bankruptcy. And unless holiday sales blow up, the profit-sapping incentives will help justify GM’s 4Q loss warnings. The turnaround still has yet to show itself.

Enthusiasts have been adamant that GM’s decision to sell a police-only version of its RWD global Lumina platform (Holden Statesman) creates a fantastic opportunity for GM to return the Impala to its RWD roots. Such a decision would seem to make sense from a business perspective as well, adding civilian sales volume to what otherwise would be a fleet-only platform. No such luck though. Bob Lutz tells Inside Line that the forthcoming Impala replacement (due in 2014) will be based on GM’s global FWD midsized architecture (Epsilon II). The rationale for this decision appears to be fuel efficiency: Lutz mentions the need to compete with the Ford Taurus’s efficiency achievements as a factor in the decision. By going FWD, GM also hopes to be able to shoehorn the two-mode hybrid system from the discontinued Vueick CUV into a future Impala. In addition to forgoing an opportunity to leverage the Caprice police special architecture, this decision also adds to GM’s epic midsize FWD sedan bloat. From the Malibu to the Buick LaCrosse and Regal, from Impala to the Cadillac XTS “flagship,” GM’s default decision seems to be to base all of its sedans on a single platform, making pricing and content differentiation an ongoing challenge to its product strategy. Vive le sameness!

You might have thunk that car dealers would stop being skunks, what with the economy going thunk and the end of cash for clunk. But noooooooo. If anything, tough times have seen an increase amount of the same old story, same old song and dance down at the car lot. “You pay what we pay is back!” Little Rhody’s Flood Automotive Group proclaimed, before switching to free tires for life. And what of this? WYTV in Ohio reports [breathlessly] that Greenwoods Hubbard Chevrolet brought in the punters by selling used cars for $5. “Denny Denoi, General Manager of Greenwoods Hubbard Chevrolet said, ‘It’s just something that we wanted to do instead of taking some of these older cars to the auction we decided we would just sell them to the people of the Valley.'” That said, “The catch with this $5 car sale is that there were only 3 cars for $5, and those 3 lucky people’s names were actually pulled from a box.” But that’s OK, right? “Denoi said the sale was a success, and that most of the customers left the dealership happy, even though they didn’t get to drive away with a car for $5. ‘There’s [sic] some people who walked away with some great deals and some people who needed some cars that got some good transportation, and for the most part, I think 95-percent of the people are thrilled today.'” I wonder if GM’s new Sales Maven Susan Docherty will take that one national.

GM CEO Fritz Henderson’s promises of independence for Opel made the right noises, but they carefully avoided any discussion of the actual role GM envisions for its German division within its global strategy. The latest updates seem to indicate that GM will keep Opel for its engineering expertise, but that the brand will be subordinate to Chevy’s global ambitions. Henderson delivers the slapdown [via Reuters]:

Opel is a regional brand and I don’t see that changing. That doesn’t mean I’m closed to ideas about how it can be used elsewhere; but the measure of the Opel brand’s success will be Europe, because if you don’t win here all the discussion of exports will be irrelevant

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Ever since Bob Lutz walked down from Mt. Lithium with the Volt’s Ten Specifications, the most potentially expensive and critical one was that the battery pack would have a ten year/100k mile warranty. No longer. Gm-volt.com reports that in a survey of potential Volt buyers, a number of Volt parameters were spelled out, in order to gauge how charged up they (still) are. The battery is described as having an eight year/100,000 mile warranty. That’s really going to help the economics, especially in light of a related announcement where the Father of the Volt preaches: “The Volt technology is very exciting, but costs will have to come down before it can become generalized . . . and US fuel prices will have to rise to world levels, meaning $5 or $6 per gallon.” Exciting indeed, despite being unprofitable for its maker, and un-economical for its buyers. One last detail: the survey also calls out the Volt’s price at “$32,000 to $38,000, after a $7,500 tax credit ($39,500–$45,500 MSRP).

Look at the picture above. Now pretend it’s your rearview mirror. That giant set of batwings is right behind you and gaining; now it pulls into the fast lane. A couple of teenagers grin as they zip by you ass-backwards at seventy miles an hour. The front grille of the ’59 Chevy slowly recedes in the distance ahead. If you spent any time on the roads of Cincinnati around 1969, this may well have happened to you.

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Forty miles without a single drop of gasoline. That’s been the pitch for Chevrolet’s Volt since it was just a concept. And it’s a claim that GM has been hammering hard on in promotional materials, advertisements and to the media. But it seems that the claim deserves an asterisk. Green Fuel Forecast‘s Sam Abuelsamid recently spoke with folks from GM’s Voltec battery development team. In the discussion of the Volt’s thermal management system, an inconvenient truth raises its misshapen head. “If you’re not plugged in and the battery is not conditioned and we’ve got to deal with the elements, right now we’re thinking 0-10°C we won’t use the battery. The more we can use it the better but we’ve got that area of refinement we’ll have to do as we get more of the engines, more of the vehicles, more of the batteries and tune it all up,” GM director of hybrid energy storage systems, Denise Gray tells GFF.

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