GM's Volt Program = $700m

Tuesday, December 29, 2009
GM to invest $700m in Volt rechargeable electric car  
 By Richard Kessler for Recharge News
"GM is spending $336m to upgrade the Hamtramck plant; $202m for a new plant in Flint, north of Detroit, that will build 1.4 litre engine-generators; $43m for a plant in Brownstown Township outside Detroit that will manufacture battery packs; $37m for a camshaft and connecting rod plant in Bay City, north of Flint; and $27m for GM’s Tech Center in suburban Warren, a Detroit suburb, location of Volt’s battery laboratory."
Here is the full text of the entire article, in case the link goes bad: http://www.rechargenews.com/regions/north_america/article200963.ece 

GM to invest $700m in Volt rechargeable electric car General Motors will invest $336m in a Detroit-area assembly plant, bringing to $700m total investment in eight Michigan facilities to begin mass production of the rechargeable Chevrolet Volt electric car in late 2010. Related Stories GM is spending $336m to upgrade the Hamtramck plant; $202m for a new plant in Flint, north of Detroit, that will build 1.4 litre engine-generators; $43m for a plant in Brownstown Township outside Detroit that will manufacture battery packs; $37m for a camshaft and connecting rod plant in Bay City, north of Flint; and $27m for GM’s Tech Center in suburban Warren, a Detroit suburb, location of Volt’s battery laboratory. 

“We expect the Detroit-Hamtramck plant will be the first facility in the U.S. owned by a major automaker to produce an electric car,” says Jon Lauckner, vice president of global product planning. Michigan has approved $135.2m in tax incentives for those sites and others. 

The state has the highest US unemployment rate at 15.2%, largely a result of the depressed automobile industry that has resulted in thousands of layoffs in the past 18 months. The Volt is an electric car designed to drive up to 40 miles on electricity without using gasoline or producing tailpipe emissions. When its lithium-ion battery is depleted of energy, an engine-generator seamlessly operates to extend the total driving range to about 300 miles before refueling or stopping to recharge the battery. Richard A. Kessler Published: Tuesday, December 8 2009
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GM puts $336m into Volt plant

Wednesday, December 09, 2009
GM to invest $336 million in Volt plant General Motors Co will invest $336 million in a Detroit-area plant to produce its heavily anticipated Chevrolet Volt electric car beginning next year, the No. 1 U.S. automaker said on Monday.



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At Home with Bob Lutz

Friday, August 14, 2009
We went to Detroit recently to see Bob Lutz.  In these turbulent times, we wanted to know how the Vice Chair of GM was getting along. We found Bob smoking a cigar on his Segway.   Which was definitely my favorite visual of the trip. Lutz lives in a spread that can best be described as “bucolic,” in a quietly lovely suburb outside of Detroit. This was not the land of the $7,500 homes we’d been reading about. 

The Lutz farm boasts not one but two garages for his collector cars, a couple of barns for the horses, a collection of dogs and a pair of swans who had just hatched their cygnets (I wouldn’t have known what to call them, but Bob delighted in stumping our entire crew). It was a nice way to spend a morning. Bob didn’t emote too much over the state of the car industry and Detroit as a whole, but, surprisingly, his wife did. And in a moment aside she told her husband how nice it was going to be to have him at home for a while ( this was during Bob's brief "retirement"). 

We then met our honorary crew member Chelsea Sexton out at GM’s car testing grounds. She was in town for a little business and a little fun—test driving the next Volt mule. If Chelsea’s ear-to-ear grin was anything to go by, the Volt seemed to be progressing fine. We then caught an “informal chat” between Chelsea and Tony Posawatz at GM’s tech center. Tony actually seemed more relaxed than the last time we’d seen him, possibly, one could speculate, because he was still employed. We took Chelsea on a ride on the People Mover to get her reaction to the downsizing of the company she once belonged to and her test drive of the Volt. 

The beautiful art deco buildings, some in the process of falling down, provided a colorful backdrop for our up-and-coming-activist. Since we only had two days in Detroit, we weren’t able to do much more sightseeing, but we did meet Bishop Ellis, who heads Greater Grace Temple and famously held a “bailout” service for the auto industry in his mega-church with SUVs at the altar.  Although our crew are mostly heathens, I think that we were all moved by Ellis’s words. 

After our interview at the church, we did a drive through neighborhoods in eight, seven and six-mile roads, finding more people sitting on their porches as we moved down the numbers. As bad as things are reported to be, the people we saw and talked to seemed to be generally in decent spirits, and though we found a “For Sale” sign on nearly every block, we didn’t find very many next door to each other. But my brief phone call with former New York Times reporter Charlie leDuff -- who spoke of a Detroit where forgotten bodies were found in abandoned buildings -- left me sure that the Detroit story was much bigger than we had the resources to cover. There’s always next time.
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