THE NEW VAUXHALL Ampera – a.k.a. the Chevy Volt
10-10-2009 Car magazine Nov. 2009 page 29 * By Ben Oliver
If it clears the final hurdles before production begins in 2012, you're looking at the future's most important family car.
ENGINE : AC electric motor, 150bhp, 2721b ft ** TRANSMISSION : Single-speed reduction gear, front-wheel drive ** PERFORMANCE 19.0sec 0-60mph, 100mph, 176mpg, 40g/km ** WEIGHT : 1600kg (est) ** ON SALE : 2012
THE NEW VAUXHALL Ampera - also known as the Chevy Volt - has had probably the most prolonged, public gestation of any car in history. Journalists have been given almost unrestricted access to the project since it was no more than a glimmer in Bob Lutz's gimlet eye. I first found out about it in the basement room of a London hotel in December 2006, when the father of the Volt, GM engineer Jon Lauckner, [that makes Martin Eberhart, at Tesla Motors the grandfather, see above] flew in to brief us on the concept they planned to launch at the Detroit show that January. It was so important to General Motors - and so radical - that it couldn't risk us idiot hacks missing or misunderstanding it in the melee of a motor show.
GM's been telling us all about the Volt ever since, and it's still over two years away from sale in Europe. But we've finally driven one. It's only a mule, with the near-production Voltec powertrain - which the European Ampera and US Volt will share almost unchanged - fitted to a Chevy Cruze body (although the pictures you're looking at show the Volt concept car in action). In true Volt tradition it has only just arrived in Europe, but a few select hacks - CAR included - have driven it, before most of the engineers.
So why, when car makers usually take extreme measures to keep their new models secret, has GM been so open about the Volt? Back in 2006, GM was already deep in the shit, and Lutz, then 'just' 74 and GM's 'product czar', demanded an 'i-car'; a breakthrough product like the iPhone that would show GM could do small and green and innovative and all the other qualities then lacking in its line-up.
Lauckner gave him the Volt. It's an E- REV, or extended range electric vehicle, and GM still hopes it will be the first to go on sale when it launches in the US in late 2010, Europe a year later and the UK in right-hand drive early in 2012. Always driven by its torquey 1so bhp electric motor, it can run electrically for up to 40 miles once its lithium-ion battery has had a full three-hour charge. After that a lA-litre petrol engine cuts in purely to charge the battery, operating at constant revs and allowing it to drive on for up to 300 miles before its
1s-litre petrol tank needs filling. GM reckons that 80% of European drivers do less than 30 miles each day, so they'll drive on tailpip emissions-free electric power at a fifth of the cost of petrol.
Lutz loved it. All the new model secrecy rules were binned; customers, financiers and politicians had to know the Volt was on the way. It proved GM had a future. 'I've never known us talk so openly and so early about a new project,' one GM engineer told us.
But as the recession struck and GM slid into bankruptcy it became more important still. Suddenly, the Volt was the future for GM; central to its recovery plan and to the continued support of the Obama administration, now its biggest shareholder.
In Europe, the same technology is central to persuading someone else to take on GM's loss-making Opel and Vauxhall brands, though GM has recently been signalling that "it may not need or want to sell after all. GM insiders confirm that the rights to the Ampera and its drivetrain are included in the deals currently being negotiated with Magna and RHJ, the two rival bidders, but GM would certainly rather keep it to itself.
It's easy to forget about the car; the technology that underpins it is as important as the politics that swirl around it. If no car has had a more public gestation, few have been burdened with greater expectations in advance of their launch.
But for such an early mule, the car we're trying at GM's Dudenhof test track drives very well. There's no complex start-up procedure: just press the start button, select 'D', and go. Even by the standards of other electric cars the Ampera is very
refined; the gentle whirr you get from the electric motor and power control module in some others is already largely absent here.
It doesn't yet feel as quick as the claimed 9 sec 0-60 mph time, but it does the familiar (to motoring journalists) electric car trick of pulling strongly, silently and seamlessly from standstill. It feels completely within its abilities at the UK motorway limit, with more acceleration readily available; the top speed is limited to 100mph and it will easily keep pace with a conventionally powered hatch.
Our test car was a mule so its handling is irrelevant, but you can feel the impact of the battery's 180kg, both holding back the acceleration and also, mounted low and centrally in the car, keeping the Ampera level under cornering and heavy braking. The latter is regenerative but doesn't slow the car noticeably as soon as you lift off the 'gas', as it does in some other EVs, and there's good pedal feel.
GM's engineers wouldn't let us run the battery down, so we don't yet know what it's like to drive with a petrol engine droning away at exactly the same pitch regardless of what your right foot is doing; the same GM engineers admit that it might take a little getting used to.
And then there's the price. Lutz has admitted that his initial target of $25,000 - was based on taking an equivalent, conventionally powered hatch at around $17,000 and adding eight grand for the battery. The high-spec electric motor, the electrically driven air-con, power steering and braking systems that can't be shared with standard cars, and a thousand other complexities mean GM is now predicting an entry price of at least 40 grand in dollars or euros. You might be able to lease the battery separately, an option it is still considering and which might get the sticker price closer to that original target but which will eat into the running-cost savings.
For such an early test car, the Vauxhall Ampera is impressively engineered. The production car is still two years away. We don't doubt that it will be great to drive, not least because GM is rumoured to have spent over $lbn on it already.
It's money GM can scarcely afford, but neither can it afford for the Volt and Ampera to be anything less than brilliant. A project with cost and price overruns like this but developed under normal conditions of secrecy might have been binned long ago; the publicity the car has generated might have helped save GM, but in turn it has saved the car itself, too.
The Ampera will be terrific, no doubt, but who will be building it - and how many of us can afford to buy it - are issues that have yet to be resolved. GD
contact Obama! 