Edmunds First Look: 2011 Chevrolet Volt

[Bartek Sikorski]

The Volt Makes It Halfway Home

You might have heard that General Motors unveiled the production version of some car called the 2011 Chevrolet Volt at the company's recent centennial celebration. But that's not entirely true.

It would be more accurate to say that the unveiling of the much-ballyhooed Volt is GM's centennial celebration; such is the significance of this vehicle to the ailing company. Also the Volt as presented is not precisely the version of the plug-in electric car that will go on sale in November 2010 (God, GM and lithium-ion batteries willing).

In fact the car that Bob Lutz drove onto the stage at GM's headquarters in downtown Detroit isn't really the Volt that we and the world have come to know, either. Thanks to its inherent appeal and GM's grand publicity push, the image we all have assigned to the name Volt is that of the comely little two-door coupe with the long hood and the big wheel flares from the 2007 Detroit Auto Show. So different is this "production" version that GM's publicity machine has been directed to stop using pictures of the concept car.

GM is only about halfway between the unveiling of the concept nearly two years ago and the sale of the first, true production Volt about two years from now. Nevertheless, GM has already set much of the Volt's engineering and design specifics in stone.

The "No Compromises" Compromise
Back in early 2007, GM's bull-moose car guy Bob Lutz told us, "[T]he Chevy Volt proves another important point. Environmentally conscious cars can actually look good, too! This is a 'no-compromises' design." Here Lutz was referring to the concept-car version of the Volt, of course.

The look of the four-door sedan intended for production carries a couple of the concept car's details, but it's been compromised to serve the demands of the wind tunnel. Given that GM has been determined to build a four-door car about the size of the Toyota Prius or the upcoming Honda Insight, it shouldn't be a huge surprise that all these cars share some basic aero-dictated characteristics. All have vaguely slug-shape silhouettes. All feature a short and rounded nose, an arched roofline and a tall butt. The Volt's blocked-out front grille is an oddly conventional (and functionally useless) design detail in a car that's supposed to be unconventional.

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