It's not as if they're just slapping together a car. They don't even have production batteries yet (they've gotten
trial batteries from one supplier, but not from the other one.)
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/01/08/gm-reaffirms-commitment-to-build-volt-by-2010-refuses-to-commit/...
The problem is that Wagoner is the Chairman of a huge public company. As such he has to be very careful about making public commitments to anything. When a product program is still three or more years from production and contains technology that may or may not work, he has to equivocate. People buy and sell a lot of stock based on statements from executives like Rick Wagoner and Bob Lutz. When the things they say don't come to fruition, lawsuits often result.
Wagoner is by nature more conservative than Lutz and has his own style. But even the outspoken Lutz has never actually said that GM "will build" the Volt by the end of 2010. That's the target date and they are putting in all the resources necessary to make it happen. Car makers never actually publicly commit to a Job 1 date until the tooling is delivered and they building pilot vehicles which is usually within twelve months of full production and often much closer. If they were to commit to a November 2010 launch and it slipped to March 2011, everyone would be all over them even though such a scenario would be not all unexpected in such a program.
All that being said, everyone below that level at GM still seems supremely confident that Volt will enter production on or about that time. Jon Lauckner, VP for Global Program Management, GM spokesman Rob Peterson and many others continue to say they expect the car to launch around the end of the decade. Depending on what happens between now and then the Volt be produced "on time" or not, but you won't hear it officially until much, much closer to that time. In the meantime, Lutz also has his say on the http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/archives/2008/01/happy_birthday.html#more|GM Fastlane blog>.
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/01/10/autobloggreen-qanda-the-latest-on-volt-batteries-with-denise-grey...
ABG: Is there anything else you want to share about what is going on?
Denise Gray: Yes, we are running this fast as possible. We got a number of different swim lanes all in parallel, from the cell, the battery pack itself, from electronics to the thermal, to manufacturing. How we are going to manufacture these things at high quantities with reliability and robustness and then we got all of the vehicle work happening, the vehicle control work is happening as well. So, there is a lot going on in order to be able to pull this off.
ABG: That control work is probably one of the biggest aspects of the whole project developing the electronics and software infrastructure to let all these various subsystems communicate and work together to optimize the range and performance and durability of the packs.
Denise Gray: Yes, it is a huge effort, because you got to think this vehicle is going to operate differently than the previous vehicles, a non-EV, a non-extended range kind of vehicle. You think about the typical customer comes in, he starts up as he puts his key in, he turns the ignition, the engine starts up, and things get triggered off that sequence of how the traditional vehicle operates. And, so now with this vehicle things will be different and we're still defining that difference so that we can really optimize the overall electrification of the vehicle. So you've got to twist your mind around a different kind of operating strategy. Your power molding is different now and that will really be a huge task.
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