GE to Buy 25,000 Electric Vehicles

By PAUL GLADER And MICHAEL RAMSEY
November 12, 2010, WSJ, Purchases, Through 2015, Will Convert Much of Company's Fleet to Green Cars

Reuters
GE says it will buy 12,000 Chevrolet Volts, a model of which is shown above, as part of a move to boost the electric-car market.

General Electric Co. said it will buy 25,000 electric vehicles by 2015 to use in its fleets and those of its fleet-services business, converting at least half of one of the world's biggest vehicle fleets to mostly electric.

"By electrifying our own fleet, we will accelerate the adoption curve, drive scale, and move electric vehicles from anticipation to action," said Jeff Immelt, GE's chairman and chief executive, in a statement Thursday. He said electric vehicles could deliver up to $500 million in revenue for GE in the next three years through sales of its WattStation electric-car recharger and other products.

The company will initially buy 12,000 Chevrolet Volts, made by General Motors Co., starting in 2011. GE said it will then add other electric vehicles to its fleet as other car makers expand their offerings. The company said it is in a "strong position to help its 65,000 global fleet customers convert and manage their fleets."

GE plans to buy 1,000 Volts next year and 2,000 to 3,000 per year after that through 2015, GM said. The purchases will comprise a significant portion of GM's early Volt production. The car maker has said it plans to build 10,000 Volts in 2011.

A GM spokesman declined to say if the company now intends to build more Volts, but signaled that may be the case. The GE purchase "won't reduce the number of Volts available to the public," he said.

GM has said it will start delivering the Volt to retail customers by year's end. It is designed to travel 25 to 50 miles on an initial charge before a gasoline-powered generator kicks in and makes electricity to drive the wheels. The car has a total range of about 300 miles.

GE's announcement leaves room for the conglomerate to buy the 100-mile-range Leaf electric car from Nissan Motor Co. as well as the Ford Motor Co. Focus electric expected in 2011 and Toyota Motor Corp.'s RAV4 electric, due in 2012.

GE's plan would be the largest purchase of electric vehicles in North America so far as the Fairfield, Conn., company seeks to jump-start an industry from which it could benefit. EVs are a growing interest for GE, which is trying to shrink its finance division to 30% of its profit and expand its industrial divisions, particularly in clean technologies.

The company has said it will invest $10 billion in the next five years in products such as wind turbines, vehicle batteries and electricity-grid technology.

GE's purchase could help car makers such as Nissan, Ford and GM more quickly attain the higher volumes needed to lower the cost of producing electric cars—a linchpin in wider adoption of the technology, said Sam Ori, director of policy for the Electrification Coalition, an organization of companies that is promoting electric vehicles.

Nissan has the capacity to build 50,000 Leafs in each of the next two years. That will rise to 150,000 in 2013 when a new plant is finished in Tennessee. All of the other companies making electric vehicles are pegging much lower production volumes.

Other U.S. fleet owners have made smaller commitments. Enterprise Rent-A-Car plans to buy 500 Leafs and 100 electric cars from Coda Automotive Inc. Frito-Lay said it will buy 176 Smith Electric Vehicles delivery trucks. Johnson Controls Inc., which makes electric-car batteries, plans to buy 20 electric Fords.

But GE's purchase is dwarfed by the commitment of start-up Better Place—a partner of GE—to buy 100,000 of Renault SA's Fluence Ze electric cars for Israel and Denmark. Better Place plans to do battery swapping for drivers who have expended their charge.

GE, which makes 30% of the world's power-generation equipment, estimates it could make 10 cents for every $1 of electric vehicles sold. To further that it has made a number of investments and launched partnerships with companies backing electric cars.

GE plans to work with Better Place to develop standards, finance batteries and help fleet- electrification programs. It has a 10% stake in U.S.-based lithium-ion battery maker A123Systems Inc. after investing $70 million.

The company has said it would build, with government assistance, a $100 million plant near Albany, N.Y., to make batteries for hybrid locomotives and for use in boats, mining trucks and cars. GE is also investing $100 million to build a research and manufacturing facility outside Detroit to focus on things like wind turbines and electric- vehicle technology.

—Sharon Terlep and Nathan Becker contributed to this article.
Write to Paul Glader at paul.glader@wsj.com and Michael Ramsey at michael.ramsey@wsj.com

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703848204575608323321329514.html

Chevy Volt Impresses - from David Pogue NYTimes

A review of Chevrolet's newest electric / gas car from David Pogue of the NYTimes.

November 11, 2010, 1:28 PM

The Volt Recharges My Batteries

The instrument panel in the Chevy Volt illustrates how many more miles you’ll get out of the battery — and then, once it’s exhausted, out of the gas generator.

I’ve been fascinated by the Chevy Volt since the day I heard about the concept.

Which is this: it’s an electric car without the short range of electric cars.

Usually, when your electric car’s battery dies, you’re dead on the road. You have no choice but to tow it, or wait hours for it to recharge.

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General Motors’ concept is to equip the Volt with a tiny gas-powered generator that can power the electric motor even after the battery’s dead. It’s sort of like a reverse Prius: instead of having a gasoline-fed car assisted by a battery, it’s an electric car assisted by gasoline.

It’s a huge gamble and a huge challenge. Three years ago, I interviewed Bob Lutz, General Motors’ vice president of product development, about how difficult the Volt project was. Especially developing a battery that can last 10 years (it’s warrantied for eight), work in blazing heat and freezing cold and have enough capacity to power the car for 40 miles a day on electricity alone. (That, says G.M., covers the driving needs of 82 percent of Americans.)

Mr. Lutz’s rosy price predictions (“nicely below $30,000”) didn’t quite come true—the final car’s base model actually costs $41,000, and extras like leather seats and backup camera can drive the price up to $44,500 or so. (The company hinted to me that the price may drop once the early-adopter/early-green types have snapped up the first batches. Also, you can get a $7,500 hybrid-car tax credit.)

Otherwise, though, Mr. Lutz’s 2007 vision remains largely intact—including the part about releasing the car before the end of 2010. G.M. hopes to deliver the first orders in December to people living in seven areas: California, Washington, D.C., Michigan, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Austin, Tex. In the next 18 months, it will expand availability to the rest of the country.

This last weekend, I spent three hours driving the Volt through New York and Connecticut. The driving entailed things as diverse as the snarls of New York Marathon traffic chaos, highway pedal-to-the-metal stuff and suburban side streets.

The center console is very techy, and very confusing.

The car is a good-looking compact, although it’s much more conventional-looking than in early prototypes. But inside, it’s pretty radical. The center console is hard plastic, with touch-sensitive words like Time, Config and Back. It’s very techy (and very confusing).

The battery is an enormous, 300-pound, T-shaped affair on the floor. It’s disguised by central storage consoles, but it goes all the way to the back of the car, even separating the back seats. In other words, this car seats four, not five.

The instrument panel is an LCD screen, complete with a green leafy ball that rises or falls depending on the efficiency of your driving. Brake or accelerate too hard, and the little orb leaves its comfy center zone. The screen also clearly illustrates how many more miles you’ll get out of the battery—and then, once it’s exhausted, out of the gas generator.

When you get home, of course, you’ll want to plug the car in overnight to recharge. For $500, plus installation, you can get a 240-volt recharging stand installed in your garage; it rejuices the battery in about four hours. Or you can plug the car into a regular outlet, which takes 8 to 10 hours. The special charging cord has a built-in flashlight that helps you see as you plug it into a socket just ahead of the driver’s door.

A recharging stand that you can get installed in your garage will charge the battery in about four hours.

I won’t kid you: it’s a fun and fascinating car to drive. It’s not what you’d call a dragster; the Volt goes 0 to 60 miles per hour in 9 seconds. But it’s incredibly quiet, even when the gas engine kicks in. And as with any electric, accelerating is a blast. The torque is completely different from a gas car. The push back into your seat is immediate.

Once I’d used up the battery, the gas kicked in. What’s a little weird is that you can hear the soft sound of the gas engine running even after you take your foot off the accelerator. That’s because the engine runs to produce electricity, not to turn the car’s wheels. It’s a little power plant that runs independently of your acceleration.

The Volt recharges its own battery when you brake, thanks to regenerative technology that translates the car’s momentum back into electricity as you slow down. On a Prius, this kind of brake feels no different from conventional ones; on the Volt, I could sense a difference when the regeneration was taking place. There was a slightly different feeling when the regular friction brakes kicked in, which happens when you brake hard.

A few other cool touches: in the top center of the dashboard there’s a bright indicator that lights up green when the car is charging and flashes when the charge is full. It’s placed there so you can peek out your window or garage door and know, just by glancing through the windshield, the status of the charge.

This is cool, too: you can monitor the car’s charge on an iPhone app. You can even warm up the cabin using the app, by remote control, so that it’s toasty on winter days when you’re ready to drive. (A button on the keyless entry fob can also trigger the warming-up.) How does that work? The Volt connects to the cell network. It comes with five years of free OnStar, the service that connects your car to GM operators for roadside assistance and things like remote door-unlocking.

I have no idea if the Volt will take off and become popular. If so, it will take years—both because of the initial price and because of the low production (10,000 cars in 2011). I also have no idea what the Volt’s true miles-per-gallon rating is. It’s such a departure from regular cars, and even hybrids, that the Environmental Protection Agency hasn’t yet figured out how to measure it. (On battery power, the M.P.G. is nearly infinite. On gas, it’s around 35. On average, it’ll be—what, 75? 150?)

But I love the concept, I love that it’s stodgy old General Motors that’s zigging in this direction and I love that it finally brought this thing to market. I guess you could say that the Volt electric car has me energized.

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/the-volt-recharges-my-batteries/?ref=personaltechemail&nl=technology&emc=cta2