Volvo C30 EV: Swedish City Commuter Headed for U.S.Test - Sales Could Follow

Volvo C30 EV: Swedish City Commuter Headed for U.S.Test - Sales Could Follow

By John O'Dell November 16, 2010

By John O'Dell, Senior Editor

Volvo shed its image as a stodgy builder of boxy cars when it let its designers start experimenting with the French curve drawing templates that came with their art sets. The result was the swoopy 1997 C70 coupe.

A spiritual descendant of that car, the C30 hatchback,  may bring Volvo's next big advance - into the electric age.

The Swedish automaker has packed a nicely done electric drive system and a 24 kilowatt-hour lithium ion battery package into the small three-door hatchback with the all-glass tailgate and is planning  to turn it loose in Europe for sure and possibly, cross your fingers, in the U.S. as well.

Volvo is expected to announce this week - as early as this morning - that in addition to a 250-vehicle test program in Sweden and Belgium in the second quarter of 2011, Volvo intends to build "at least" 1,000 more C30 EVs for expanded testing in Europe, China and the U.S.

Lennert Stegland, president of Volvo's special cars unit, says the company officially remains "iffy" about the small C30's U.S. prospects, but allows that "if the U.S. test results are good" - Volvo will be testing quantitatively for reliability and battery life and qualitatively for user acceptance - then a U.S. model is a distinct possibility.

To begin testing the waters on this side of the globe, Volvo's showing the C30 EV for the first time in the U.S. at the 2010 Los Angeles International Auto Show this week (press days are Wednesday and Thursday, the nine-day public run at the Los Angeles Convention Center begins Friday).

But the automaker invited a handful of journalists to sample the car Monday, all too briefly, in and around the Southern California beach city of Santa Monica, and Green Car Advisor got one of the invites.

We first drove the battery electric C30 hatchback 14 months ago in Sweden, when only two of the prototypes existed. Even in that early stage, we found it remarkably well-balanced and well-put together.

The paint scheme has changed since then, and the interior's a bit more refined (no wires hanging down from under the dash) although not yet in showroom trim, but little else has changed.

That's a good thing.

We were able to spin out a 30-mile drive through Santa Monica city streets and down onto Coast Highway for a run north toward Malibu and found the C30 EV to be spirited, nimble and quite comfortable.

Removal of the front mounted gas engine and transaxel and inspired packaging of the electric drive system and battery packs have enabled Volvo to give the C30 EV a near-ideal weight distribution of 56 percent in the front half and 44 percent in back (the gasoline version carried 63 percent of its weight up front).

The European suspension settings in the prototype we drove might be a bit stiff for some U.S. drivers, but Stegland assured us that the springs could be softened for American tastes (we hope not; softly sprung cars are a taste Americans should lose). As for the rest - the car presents as a nicely packaged four-seat city commuter, exactly as Volvo intended.

The prototype doesn't yet have a driver information system, but Stegland said one is being developed.

It will provide all the info an EV driver needs, he said; "just useful data" like range, state of battery charge and power flow diagrams without the distractions "of things like flowers, trees and ice bears" (we know them as polar bears) that other EV and hybrid cars use to try to reward drivers whose driving habits, and the resulting vehicle fuel efficiency,  improve over time.

The C30 EV uses a simple single-speed transmission with a floor-mounted shifter and  "reverse," "neutral" and "drive" positions.

In "D," the car displays a modest amount of regenerative braking when coasting to a stop.
Flick the lever backward and an "L" pops up on the instrument cluster display (Stegland says it doesn't stand for "low" and will probably be changed in the production version) as the regen system is turned off and the car coasts freely - a valuable attribute on icy roads where a sudden slowing could engender a dangerous spin-out.

It's a pretty streamlined package, a drag coefficient of .28, (about the same as a Porsche Boxter and not bad at all for a sporty hatchback) and on an almost imperceptible downhill stretch of Coast highway it took what seemed like forever but was probably at least 15 seconds to coast from a speed of 30 kilometer per hour down to to 20 kph.      

Stegland said that nominal range is 100 miles, but that Volvo will caution drivers during upcoming road test programs to expect about 70 to 75 miles in real-world driving.

Although the whole electric drive system makes the 3,150-pound car only 220 pounds heavier than the gasoline version, the batteries already weigh in at just over 600 pounds, and Volvo couldn't figure out how to pack any more in without sacrificing performance and passenger or cargo room, compromises it didn't want to make in return for a few more miles.

"It's a city commuter," said Stegland, not a long-haul highway cruiser.

To that end, Volvo has limited top speed to 81 mph - plenty for most cities and suburbs.

The battery cells, supplied by Indianapolis-based battery maker EnerDel - which also supplies the Think City EV's batteries -are flat-packed, or prismatic,  lithium-ion (lithium-manganese spinel, to be exact) cells arranged into 16 modules of 24 cells each. The modules are then bundled into a pair of battery packs - a long, narrow one that fits down the center of the passenger cabin, between the front seats, and a squarish one mounted beneath the back seats.

Volvo chose that arrangement, said Stegland - taking a potshot at an unnamed potential competitor - because it places the battery packs well into the center of the car and away form outer edges that would be crushed in a side collision.

That unnamed rival - Nissan - uses a wide, rectangular battery pack whose outer edges are close to the outside frame stiffeners. Nissan says they're quite safe and have survived numerous crash tests undamaged, but Stegland says Volvo's arrangement provides extra protection for the expensive component.

The Volvo's batteries also are heated and cooled though an independent climate control system while the Nissan's use ambient air.

Stegland says battery heating is especially important in Scandinavia and Northern Europe, where icy cold winters could severely reduce a chilled battery's ability to accept and hold a charge.

Extreme heat - something an EV in desert and tropical climes would have to put up with - can shorten battery life - thus the active cooling system.

All that would seem to indicate that Volvo intends to sell the C30 EV worldwide, and Stegland doesn't deny that the company - recently acquired form Ford by China's Geely Holdings, is thinking globally.

John O'Dell:  is an AutoObserver Senior Editor. Follow @AutoObserver on Twitter.