Holden’s first Volt on PR duty

The first Volt is here, far removed from the multiple teething problems GM is experiencing with it in the US
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Holden took delivery of its first Volt the week before last and, unsurprisingly, immediately dispatched it on a PR tour of duty with an appearance last week at the RACV Energy Breakthrough event in Maryborough, west of Melbourne. The newcomer assumed red flag duties with a parade lap of the ‘Holden Track’, ahead of a raft of human-powered concept vehicles developed in schools across the state.

With its ‘revolutionary range-extending electric drivetrain’, Holden modestly places the Volt ‘among the most technologically advanced vehicles anywhere in the world’. It is, they say in their release ‘Holden's very own energy breakthrough’.

As part of its sponsorship of the RACV event, the company furnished it with 22 employees as mentors helping more than 6000 students and schoolteachers from 170 Victorian primary and secondary schools to work up their own human-powered vehicles.

The Maryborough event gave participants the chance to showcase eco-friendly drivetrain ideas and concepts.

Having the first Volt in Australia there gives students useful exposure to the most advanced developments in motoring technology, Holden’s Director of Energy, Environment and Technology, Richard Marshall, said in a statement.

“We want to get them thinking of ways to use alternative technologies and alternative fuels to develop future-friendly vehicles. It would be great if some of the students here today were inspired by it and eventually came to us designing and engineering cars of the future,” he said.

Meanwhile, back in the US, all has not been going exactly to plan for the Volt, with argy bargy and recriminations flying back and forth over the question of its incendiary habits.

After a battery fire incident in a car used in official National Highway Traffic Safety Administration crash tests, the Volt is now under the kind of scrutiny all auto makers dread.

GM attributes the problem to a break in the coolant line, from which coolant leaked on to wiring in the car’s high-voltage battery pack, crystallising, short-circuiting the battery and sparking fire. It didn’t go off immediately after the crash, but three weeks hence in the NHTSA holding yard in Wisconsin.

With two more such incidents in November, details of the first fire, which happened in May, leaked to the media. The company swung fast into damage control mode.

“First and foremost, I want to make this very clear: the Volt is a safe car,” GM chief engineer for EVs Jim Frederico said in a statement. “We are working co-operatively with NHTSA as it completes its investigation. However, NHTSA has stated that, based on available data, there’s no greater risk of fire with a Volt than a traditional gasoline-powered car.”

“Safety protocols for electric vehicles are clearly an industry concern. At GM, we have safety protocols to de-power the battery of an electric vehicle after a significant crash.”

Hidden just beneath the surface there is an accusation directed towards the NHTSA’s crash testers of failing to adhere to those protocols by leaving damaged cars without discharging their batteries.

With 6000 Volts already on US roads, the company is working on a remedy for the problem. It hasn’t yet announced a recall, and no maker wants it to go to that, but if it’s the only way, as is likely the case here, GM will do it. For Volt buyers worried about their cars, the company is organising replacement conventional vehicles until the problem is sorted to their satisfaction, and for those beyond consolation it’s set up a buyback scheme.

In the spirit of the Japanese official who drank decontaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant to prove it’s just fine, CEO Dan Akerson has told US media he plans on buying one of the repatriated Volts for his wife. "There is no question in my mind that the Volt is safe. We are doing everything we can to make sure that it is even safer," he told media last week.

But there’s more to the Volt’s problems than just fires, as The Wall Street Journal reports this week.

Sales have not met expectations, partly thanks to logistics and dealer supply problems, but mostly thanks to high expectations born of hyperoptimistic forecasts, according to former vice chairman Bob Lutz, the man credited with making the car a reality. Lutz told media this year's 10K unit target expressed ambitions well beyond the production ramp-up. “It should never have been announced,” he said.

Beyond that, much of the sales shortfall – and the hoo-haa about battery fires – can be put down to the Volt’s progress on the standard consumer acceptance trajectory for new technologies. “The issue is not that the Volt battery is more dangerous than a tank of gasoline or pressurised gas, but that it is less familiar,” wrote Jim Greenberger, head of battery industry trade association NAATBatt, on the website of an independent sustainable energy group called the The Energy Collective. “The public understands what happens when a tank of gasoline ignites and... feels sufficiently empowered in order to accept the risk.  That is not the case where the risk involves a new technology that consumers feel they do not yet fully understand.  That is where we are today with lithium-ion batteries.”

Where we also are with lithium-ion battery powered cars, of course, is somewhere up near peak, pre-economies of scale pricing – the kind of pricing only an early adopter could love.

Even reduced by the $7500 government tax incentive, the US$41K sticker price doesn’t scream ‘come and get it’. The Chevrolet (aka Holden) Cruze, on whose platform the Volt is based, doesn’t achieve the Volt’s electric power-only 95mpg equivalent, but with a 42mpg highway cycle, it beats its 40mpg engine-on figure – and it starts at $16,720. You have to save a lot of fuel to make up that kind of margin – and the Volt’s cause is not helped by a drop in fuel prices over the course of the year.

In its current form, the also fails to qualify for the high occupancy-vehicle (HOV or car-pool) lane use in California, the country’s biggest car market. The range extender doesn’t burn cleanly enough. Access to HOV lanes – essentially transit lanes reserved for cars with multiple occupants or so-called Clean Air Vehicle status – has provided a major buying incentive for west-coasters, especially in the congested metro areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Wall Street Journal notes that sales of Toyota’s now well established Prius dropped when it no longer qualified as new technology. GM is tweaking the engine to get it below the ultra-low emission threshold to qualify as a Clean Air Vehicle.

So need Australian potential buyers worry? Not at this point, as Holden officials have assured local media. The Volt is only due for release here towards the end of 2012. If GM hasn’t got the problem sorted by then, the problems it experienced in 2009 will pale by comparison with what it faces in the future.

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