GM's journey from Volt to Bolt

DETROIT -- Ten years ago, General Motors was in deep trouble.

Yet then-CEO Rick Wagoner took the stage at the 2007 Detroit auto show with his usual stoic confidence. On the other side of the wall was the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid concept car that was as much about proving that GM still had a bright future as it was about guzzling less gasoline.

"This isn't about science projects," Wagoner said after unveiling the Volt. "This is about creating cars and trucks propelled in an efficient manner that people really want to own. And that's the way we're going to win."

The Volt didn't keep GM out of bankruptcy (or save Wagoner's job), and consumers didn't embrace it the way GM had projected. But it did set GM on a decadelong path that culminated in last month's launch of the Chevy Bolt, a battery-powered car that presages a future with self-driving, emissions-free vehicles that consumers might share rather than own.

GM's journey from the Volt to the Bolt mirrors the dramatic shifts and lessons for the entire auto industry over the course of that decade. The fact that the Bolt runs on electricity is now only part of its story: Its greatest legacy may lie in its ability to help GM navigate a future in which automakers that fall too far behind can become obsolete.

The Bolt arrives as automakers race to acquire technology startups, align themselves with ride-hailing companies and battle Silicon Valley for software-development talent. Many of the news conferences that kick off the Detroit show next week will focus on that mobility frenzy rather than traditional vehicle debuts.

In this new world, Google's newly formed Waymo unit plans to show off a self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivan on Sunday in Detroit. But Fiat Chrysler, whose past auto show stunts include crashing Jeeps through windows and herding steers through downtown streets, has nothing new planned for Detroit this year; it's debuting an electric Pacifica at the CES technology expo this week in Las Vegas instead.

The Bolt, whose half-ton battery can store enough juice to travel an estimated 238 miles before recharging, became real on Dec. 13, when the first three buyers drove away in them from Fremont Chevrolet in California. The location for those first deliveries was highly symbolic. When Wagoner rolled out the Volt concept, GM was building Pontiac Vibes in Fremont, at a factory it jointly ran with Toyota Motor Corp.

Today, Tesla Motors uses the same plant -- cast aside by GM, along with Pontiac, in connection with its quick-rinse bankruptcy -- to churn out $80,000-plus electric cars favored by celebrities, and a crossover with overengineered falcon-wing doors. Tesla, a company that built its first vehicle just nine years ago, has collected more than 350,000 deposits for its upcoming Model 3, which has similar specs to the Bolt's. Unlike the Model 3, though, the Bolt is already here.

How much of a lead GM has on the Model 3 is unclear; Tesla says the Model 3 will arrive around midyear, while some analysts are betting on late 2018.

Even before the Bolt starts shipping to most states, GM is positioning the car to play a more central role than the Volt in its business. The Michigan plant that builds the Bolt is to start assembling an autonomous test fleet of them this month. Ultimately, GM wants self-driving Bolts to ferry passengers around cities via Lyft, the ride-hailing service in which it invested $500 million last year.

Autonomous cars were pure fantasy when GM was developing the Volt (as were the ride-hailing services that would have to wait for the iPhone to be invented). But the Bolt was designed from the get-go to be GM's platform for validating and advancing that technology.

"When I look at General Motors, and I look at our size, our strength, our technological capability, I feel there's no reason why General Motors shouldn't be on the leading edge of defining the future of personal mobility," CEO Mary Barra said in a November interview. "There was good work that started with the first-generation Volt and now with the second-generation Volt. Now, this technology platform that is propelled with a battery really puts us in the position of demonstrating we're technology leaders."

GM took four years -- a period that featured a crippling recession, the bankruptcy filing that Wagoner had been desperate to avoid and a $50 billion government bailout -- to get the Volt from the auto show stage to dealerships. It flopped.

Consumers were confused about how it worked, or whether they'd get stranded with a dead battery. The government's 33 percent ownership stake in GM when the Volt launched in December 2010 turned the car into a "political punching bag," as then-CEO Dan Akerson said during a congressional hearing after three Volt batteries caught fire during safety testing. (The fires didn't help endear the Volt to car shoppers either.)

Akerson, new to the auto industry at the time, had boldly predicted GM would sell 60,000 Volts a year. That's more than it managed in the first three years combined, even at a price that meant GM lost money on each one.

Within the company, though, the Volt was no failure. It delivered what Old GM had promised, and it gave New GM a big leg up over much of the industry on battery technology. GM needed less than two years to take the Bolt -- employees are instructed to call it the "Bolt EV" to avoid confusion with the Volt -- from concept to production.

Ford Motor Co. has said it's working on an EV with a 200-mile range, but the car is believed to be more than two years away. And Toyota, which was ahead of everyone on hybrids, is just coming around to the idea of fully electric cars playing a big long-term role for the industry.

"Without the Volt, we would not be able to do the Bolt with confidence," Bill Wallace, GM's director of global battery systems and hardware engineering, said during a tour of GM's battery lab last month. "With the Gen 1 Volt, we had to literally invent the process from nothing. We had to invent the lab. We had to hire the team. We had to invent the tests. With Bolt, we knew a lot more, but we were trying to move a lot faster, and we're asking a lot more out of the battery."

The Bolt finds itself in a more receptive environment than the 2011 Volt, though it's still no slam dunk.

EV technology today is far cheaper, more proven and less mystifying to consumers, but low gasoline prices have hindered demand and charging technology still isn't conducive to long trips. And after President-elect Donald Trump takes office in a few weeks, it's unknown whether a $7,500 federal tax credit and other incentives that put the Bolt and other EVs within reach of more consumers will remain.

GM has been careful not to reveal sales projections this time, but analysts have estimated anywhere from 30,000 to 80,000 a year as reasonable. Even at the low end of that range, it would surpass the Volt's peak. Tesla, on the other hand, is reportedly targeting annual Model 3 production of at least 400,000 by 2018.

GM officials are visibly confident in the Bolt's prospects, but they acknowledge that the market for such cars is uncertain.

"Customers are the ultimate validation," said Darin Gesse, product manager for the Bolt. "We can't control gas prices. We can't control what Trump will do."

As much significance as the Bolt carries, its launch has progressed more like the introduction of any other car than with the Volt. That's a reflection of the technology being closer to the mainstream and the fact that GM isn't depending on the Bolt to be its salvation.

For the first-generation Volt, considerable specialized assembly work had to be done off the line, slowing the process. The Bolt just rolls through GM's Orion Township, Mich., plant, interspersed with Chevy Sonic subcompact cars. At the point where workers attach gasoline tanks to the underside of the Sonics, an autonomous cart arrives with a battery and precisely hoists it into position under each Bolt.

Like the Volt, the Bolt is believed to be a money loser for GM, though analysts said the amount is likely less than the $9,000-per-vehicle figure recently reported by Bloomberg. The car does carry benefits in the form of credits under federal fuel-economy standards, but GM knows that's not a reason for anybody to buy one. One notion confirmed over the past decade -- and shown by Tesla's rise -- is that vehicles such as the Volt and Bolt need to have all-around appeal, not just innovative technology packaged in the form of a compliance car or a science project.

"On each car we had a recipe for what we wanted to do. As the market has evolved, our recipe has evolved," said Pam Fletcher, GM's executive chief engineer for autonomous vehicles and electrification. "But what hasn't changed is we have to make "gotta-have' cars. We have to make people want them."