Excerpt from Detroit Free Press:

Chevy Volt Electric CarGeneral Motors drove a stake through the notion that environmentally friendly electric cars can’t also be fun and sporty in a brief test drive of the company’s Chevrolet Volt powertrain this morning.

A fast, smooth blast from zero to 70 m.p.h. on the roads within the GM Tech Center in Warren proved the car can be electrifying as well as electric-powered.

The Volt is on schedule to go on sale in November 2010, GM vice chairman Bob Lutz said.

GM has about 35 test vehicles on the road equipped with the electric motor and lithium-ion batteries that will power the Volt. Those development cars have the body of the 2011 Chevrolet Cruze compact, which uses the same architecture as the Volt.

GM will put 80 Volts with the production car’s sleek and futuristic body on the road beginning in June.

The test vehicle ran with smooth, quiet power, but driving it felt reassuringly like getting behind the wheel of any new car. That’s a key goal for the Volt program, GM electric vehicle chief Frank Weber said.

“People must understand that you don’t have to give anything up to drive an electric vehicle,” Weber said. “This is something you will really like and enjoy.”

The test car’s electric motor provided immediate torque for acceleration most sporty small cars would envy.

The Volt is designed to cover about 40 miles on electricity stored in the big lithium-ion battery pack that runs down the center of the car. For longer trips, a 1.4-liter gasoline engine will kick in to recharge the batteries. Unlike hybrids, the engine never drives the wheels.

The onboard generator frees the Volt of the drawback that crippled previous electric cars: range. While an electric vehicle without a generator must stop and recharge when the batteries run low, the Volt has an essentially unlimited range, and should be able to cover 500 to 600 miles on the combination of battery power and a single tank of gasoline.

Contact MARK PHELAN: phelan@freepress.com or 313-222-6731.

From GM-Volt.com

These are very interesting questions. About a year ago we worked through them and here is where we are...

1. Customer access to High Voltage
The customer will have no access to high voltage. In fact, if the customer accidentally takes some action that might get them close to high voltage (e.g. disconnects a HV connection) then the system will cut off that voltage up stream of the potential breach. As with all systems, “nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool”, but we have a number of layers of HV protection for the customer, the service technician, and the vehicle assembler.

2. “Jump” Start
We had also wrestled with this issue on the EV1. Answer there was no jump start of any kind, but the EV1 had a different electrical architecture that offered other remedies. For Volt the answer is a bit more conventional. Yes, we have a 12v battery. It is not a typical automotive “flooded” lead, but a sealed “acid starved” type.... and it is capable of providing enough power to jump start another vehicle.

Chevrolet's Electric Car Site .