SXSW lures new GM hybrid into town

AUSTIN (KXAN) - Try to remember the day, back in elementary school, when you got sent to the principal's office for being bad, and then redeemed yourself by exhibiting something really cool on show-and-tell day. That's kind of how it was at Highland Mall Monday when General Motors Corporation trotted out its new Chevy Volt.

The hybrid electric/gasoline car, in the final stages of development, stands to bolster GM's image, following a rough couple of years that included bankruptcy court, a government bailout and the resulting majority ownership by taxpayers.

Since the taxpayers do own most of the stock, it would stand to reason that they would take an interest in what GM is up to, even if it did not involve a car that will deliver 100, 200 or even more miles per gallon when it finally hits showroom floors in November or December.

Unlike other hybrids already on the market, the Volt is designed to travel forty miles on its electric engine, using a rechargeable battery. Then a gas-powered engine takes over, but rather than powering the car directly, the Volt gas engine starts recharging the battery so that the electric engine can keep on chugging. That can make figuring out the Volt's mpg numbers a bit hard to pin down.

"What is gas mileage on or fuel economy on a vehicle that goes 40 miles electrically and then goes, you know, another 300 miles on gas, but you're a commuter that has a 38 mile commune to and from work, or you're one that has a 52 mile commute?" asked GM's Director of Global Energy Systems, Britta Gross.

Government regulators are still wrestling with that question and until they come out with a classification that works later this year, the entire issue is up for argument.

One thing's for sure, though, as GM's Volt Power Train Development Engineer Trent Warnke points out: "One thing about this car is, if you plug it in every day and you have a short commute, you don't care what the price of gasoline is."

Also still up in the air is the issue of how much it will cost to save money on gasoline with the Volt. Some estimates put the price tag at $40,000, offset by a $7,500 federal income tax credit, but GM won't set a price until a few weeks before the car becomes available, leading some to speculate the company is waiting to see if an expected run-up in gas prices this summer might make the car more desirable. The company says that's not true.

"We want to make it affordable, obviously that's a real big goal," said Gross. "We're not in it to make money on the first generation. You're in it to make it so appealing that you know you have a generation two and a generation three of this vehicle to come. So it's really important to set that right and it's not to our advantage to price ourselves out of the market."

GM sent the car and a bevy of officials to Austin because the SXSW Interactive Conference seemed like a good place to brag about the Volt.

"This is a very great product to show off at SXSW because it's very technologically advanced," said Warnke. "There's a smart phone application that goes along with the vehicle. It works through OnStar; it communicates with the vehicle and it allows you to do a lot of really cool different things with the car. You can do stuff as simple as lock and unlock the car or you can do stuff even more complex like change the charging schedule of the vehicle."

The charging process, meanwhile, is quite simple: You just plug an electric cord into the car and any household outlet. To take advantage of the highest savings, though, you would have to do that after every use of more than 40 miles.

If the Volt stands to change the world of automobile transportation, though, it might change the world of General Motors just as much.

"I've been on the program for about three years," said Gross, "through the really bad industry times, with market sales down for every auto maker for several years in a row and then certainly the GM issues. But I can tell you that working on this program was like this magnificent bubble of optimism. And throughout the entire period, we were not distracted, we were not involved in the restructuring, it went on around us, and we were just asked to keep our heads down, focus on the end game and it was just to get this job done and get this vehicle on the road. It's too important, it's too creative, it's too smart to let thing do anything but just excel when it hits the market at the end of this year."