“Can you sense the nervousness?” asks Frank Weber, chief engineer on the General Motors extended-range battery car, the Volt. “There’s a new sense of the future together with a slight panic.”
Weber thinks that the next 10 years in the automobile industry are going to be simultaneously exciting and very unpredictable. Why? Electricity, that’s why. Continuing to build fossil-fuelled vehicles for 98 per cent of our road transport needs “is not a sustainable option”, says Weber, but the options for incorporating electrical power are myriad – and that’s where the problems begin.
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“We will have to understand and learn to judge what is real and what is not,” says Weber, referring to some of the more outrageous claims made for petrol/electric hybrids and pure battery cars, particularly when it comes to range and longevity.
The Volt goes on sale in the US in November next year priced at $40,000, with a European version called the Vauxhall (Opel in the rest of Europe) Ampera following in 2011. GM wants to be producing millions of cells eventually and claims to be already working of versions two and three of the Volt.
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