GM’s electrified past, present and future

With the first Chevrolet Volt’s reaching their customers, General Motors recalls the path towards the brand’s first electric production vehicle and acknowledges the importance of earlier projects that never made it to the markets.

General Motors had been developing alternative drive technologies starting in the 1990s with the EV1, Two-Mode hybrid SUVs and pickup trucks as well as the fuel cell Chevrolet Equinox, which are today incorporated into the Chevrolet Volt.

Even across different drive technologies, hydrogen-powered fuel cell, battery charged from the grid or recovered kinetic energy from a hybrid drive system, the electric propulsion systems share many common features, hence the improvement of one system benefited all others at the same time.

And not only the technology development alone created synergy effects across models, but also the involvement of the same engineers who had contributed to the evolution from the very beginning, such as Chevrolet Volt chief engineer Andrew Farah.

What explains today's commercial success of the Chevrolet Volt is, that a market for hybrid and electric vehicles actually exists. As former EV1 chief engineer Jon Bereisa puts it: "The band is back together - only this time there are fans."

And the benefits are not limited to the alternative drive systems, also the traditional internal combustion vehicles are becoming ever more efficient by using energy systems initially developed for electrified vehicles.

Jamie Hresko, vice president of Global Powertrain Engineering, sees GM profiting from these developments in the long-run: “Throughout GM’s first century, internal combustion engines were the heart of the company’s products. GM engineers are now using the lessons learned over the past two decades to make electric propulsion and energy storage systems a core competency for the next century.”