Edmunds Driver Gets Kick Out of Chevrolet Volt Test Mule
By John O'Dell April 30, 2009
Financially struggling General Motors Corp., interested in getting as much positive press as it can these days, is making a rough draft of its Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid available to automotive journalists for limited test drive sessions at the company's research center.
InsideLine's Daniel Pund took a spin the other day and found it to be "more of a progress report than a final assessment."
GM, which has a month to get everyone signed on to its recovery plan if it wants to avoid a government-forced Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, has pinned a lot of its future on thesuccess of the Volt and other alternative fuel vehicles
The car the journos are testing is a modified Chevrolet Cruz (it uses the same platform as the Volt, which isn't slated for production until the end of next year) fitted with the present generation of the Volt's extended-range electric drive system (right).
The test car shows, Pund writes, that "as far as we can tell, development seems to be coming along nicely."
What he tested, he says, is very much "an electric car" with the smooth, quiet operation and impressive low-speed torque that characeterizes same.
Although techniocally a hybrid, the Volt only uses its internal combustion engine to generate electricity when the batteries, initially charged from the commercial power grid, are depleted.
And GM supplied a "mule" (auto-speak for a test car that uses a different body or platform than slated for the the production model) with fully charged batteries and never let Pund push it to the point that the gas engine/generator kicked in.
You can read of his adventure with the Volt mule at InsideLine, and watch our Volt test drive video of the test drive right here.
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