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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I was wandering the GM Heritage Center with Jaguar designer Ian Callum (yes, a write-up of that interview is coming), when a Cadillac PR man took me aside and offered to have me flown down to Los Angeles to “check out” this new CTS Coupe. My initial reaction was surprise that the offer was made at all. My second was to explain that I couldn’t possibly accept airfare. TTAC has a strict disclosure policy, and our Best and Brightest would doubtless take a dim view of any coverage made possible by an OEM picking up an airfare tab. Especially if I actually like the car, I explained, such a disclosure would create understandable skepticism. Paying TTAC’s way will always be self-defeating. Still, I thought, LA isn’t that far. I remained tempted to make the trip on the TTAC tab, right up to the point where I realized that by “check out,” Cadillac did not mean “drive.” An invite arrived, clarifying that this was an “opportunity to see the car before the LA Show and to visit with Bryan Nesbitt, general manager of Cadillac and Clay Dean, director of design for Cadillac.” No thanks. I saw the CTS Coupe before the LA Auto Show… in a Cadillac advertisement. Thanks for the invitation, Cadillac… but TTAC needs to drive something to drag itself away from the keyboard.

No, General Motors is not paying back the taxpayers, nor will it ever fully… it’s more like a partial refund. That’s not exactly fresh news around here, but the Grey Lady called wanting the breakdown. So here it is. Just don’t ask how they misspelled the byline.

China’s car sales can’t go on forever growing at a 50 percent to sometimes 100 percent clip, auto execs agree at the Guangzhou auto show. All are convinced that the growth will continue next year at a more – what’s the buzzword?- sustainable rate.

The Guangzhou auto show opened today. In case you’ve never heard of Guangzhou, it is a city of around 10m (nobody knows for sure,) and the main manufacturing hub of the Pearl River delta. Formerly known as Canton. About 30 percent of China’s GDP is produced in the South. The opening of the show prompted some major announcements. Here are some of them:
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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.

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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“Without any doubt we knew fundamentally that [a merger with GM] would work, but only if it was a collaborative effort. Frankly, there was a possibility to create something that would be extremely competitive… unfortunately, it did not happen.”

Nissan/Renault honcho Carlos Ghosn reflects on the GM merger that might have been. When asked if he was happy that the merger hadn’t gone through, Ghosn replied “when you see the disaster and the waste of energy and skills and talent, nobody can be happy.” But was he talking about GM or the failure to merge with them? And since Ghosn has us in a reflective mood, isn’t it fun to imagine how a GM-Renault/Nissan merger might have played out?

Automotive News [sub] reports that GM will rush out its $4.9b restructuring plan for Opel in December, as it seeks to ease worries on the continent about the fate of the troubled division. “Our plan is very similar to Magna’s. I don’t think it’s worse,” GM’s Nick Reilly told reporters near Opel’s largest plant in Zaragoza, Spain. Reily has said that as many as 10,000 jobs and 20 to 25 percent of Opel’s production capacity could be cut in the restructuring. Though Reilly refused to indicate where cuts could take place, he did say that GM would not transfer production from Zaragoza to Eisenach in eastern Germany, as Magna had planned to do. He also previously implied that British government loans could prevent or mitigate a planned 800-job cut at Opel’s Vauxhall operations in Britain.

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When Pontiac’s infamously retina-searing Aztek pops up in popular auto industry analysis, it’s usually as little more than a throwaway punchline. So credit Thebigmoney.com‘s Matthew DeBord for trying to leave the Thesaurus entry for “ugly” out of a recent piece dedicated entirely to one of the great modern styling miscalculations. Unfortunately, his admirable restraint serves only to further a wholly unsupportable thesis:

GM needs to remember the Aztek, because it represents the kind of risk-taking design that the post-bankruptcy firm will need to go forward. The temptation for the New General will be to copy successful market formulas, rather than try to define new market segments.

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This according to the National Taxpayer’s Union report “The Auto Bailout: A Taxpayer Quagmire,” authored by Rochester Institute of Technology Professor of Economics, Thomas D. Hopkins. That number includes the $52.9b taxpayer “investment” in General Motors, as well as GM’s portion of the GMAC bailout, which brings GM’s taxpayer tab to over $60b. Chrysler’s GMAC-inclusive bailout bill totals $17.4b, or $7,600 per vehicle, based on estimated 2009/2010 sales. Don’t believe that GM or Chrysler will match their projections over the next twelve months? The NTU estimates that total government support for the auto industry comes out to $800 per taxpaying American family. These numbers do not include the Cash for Clunkers program, likely future bailouts of GMAC (projected at a further $2b), or Department of Energy retooling loans (ATVML). These numbers also do not reflect the very real possibility that GM, Chrysler and GMAC could continue to drain taxpayer money post-2010. “For each year of survival beyond 2010,” the report warns, “the burden per vehicle would decline [Ed: but not disappear] – so long as no additional government funding is provided.”

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The Senior Counselor to the U.S. President for Manufacturing Policy; and Leader on the U.S. Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry, Ron Bloom, was utterly clueless.  He told Reuters that the Obama administration supposedly was just as flabbergasted by GM’s sudden reversal on the Opel deal as Angela Merkel and the rest of Germany was. That they supposedly were not consulted. And that this is just divvy, because it “underscores the independence of a new board put in place to safeguard the U.S. government’s investment in GM.” Isn’t Teflon wonderful?

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Ron Bloom, the defacto head of the government’s auto restructuring task force (or what’s left of it), tells Reuters that the government wants to hurry up a GM IPO in order to get out of the “investment” as soon as possible. And as we’ve predicted, this means taxpayers will be getting the fuzzy end of the lollypop.

Private markets would like to see us exit this investment, and I think they will be more comfortable if we’re on a sustained path out the door than if they think we’re going to try to market time it to maximize return.

And really, why would taxpayers expect any kind of a return from $50b dumped into one of the most prolific wealth destruction machines in recent economic history? So when will this IPO/giveaway take place?

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Looks like GM may have done some creative accounting after all – at least according to Swedish Government and their consulting firm KPMG. As we’ve reported the last couple of days, Saab’s rescue has been hanging by a thread due to questions around the company’s financial situation prior to the start of the financial crisis. Saab needs the EU to approve the Swedish Government’s guarantee of an EIB loan to Koenigsegg group if the deal is going to go through. If Saab, during the summer of 2008 – when the financial crisis started – were not in sound financial condition, the EU cannot, will not, approve Swedish government’s guarantees to the EIB loan, and the loan will not be granted. And reports from di.se yesterday almost laid that possibility to rest, with reports that GM had lost $ 5.100,- on each Saab-car sold during the last 8 years. Now, as commentator dlfcohn and others at ttac, as well as several commentators at di.se have pointed out, creative accounting can be useful in major corporates i.e to avoid taxes in tax-heavy countries. This, apparently (at least according to Swed.gov’t/KPMG) was the case with GM/Saab.
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For Monday, November 23, EU Economy Commissar Günther Verheugen invited all EU Economy Ministers to come to Brussel to attend an Opel summit. GME’s new chief Nick Reilly will also attend, reports Unternehmer.de. The idea behind the meeting is anti-competitive: “The Commission is strictly against any bidding war with subsidies,” Verheugen said. Any government help for GM and Opel will be subject to intensive scrutiny from Brussels. Verheugen doesn’t want to rule out government help, as long as EU rules are not broken.

Don’t read too much into this meeting.
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Volkswagen wants to unseat Toyota as number one by 2018. When they announced that strategy, it was widely discounted as Wolfsburg hubris, and as a goal so far out that nobody will recall nine years down the road that the goal has ever been set. Or as the saying goes in Wolfsburg: “In 2018, I’ll be retired.”

A few days ago, The Guardian reported that in the first 9 months of 2009, Volkswagen/Porsche made 4.4 million cars whereas Toyota made 4 million. Which ignited speculations that VeeDub may have reached its elusive goal 9 years early. Then the usual count of apples and oranges ensued, and after the joint ventures with minority stakes were included, Toyota nosed ahead.

Everybody calm down. Volkswagen is years away from overtaking Toyota, reports Das Autohaus. Surprise, surprise, arch rival GM is nipping at Toyota’s heels.
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