First Drive: Chevy Spark Electric Vehicle Prototype

First Drive: Chevy Spark Electric Vehicle Prototype:
Filed under: EV/Plug-in, Chevrolet, AutoblogGreen Exclusive
Why This Little Car Previews Big Things For GM







General Motors representatives handed out a lot of press releases in Sausalito, CA this week as part of GM's Electrification Experience. There was one about the company's plans to sell 500,000 vehicles with "electrification" by 2017. There was one about GM's work with ABB on reusing advanced vehicle batteries in grid storage applications (see also this). There was one about the motor in the Chevrolet Spark EV. And another about the battery. We'll talk about some of this information, but you can read them at the end of this post. What was much more interesting were two things that can't fit onto pieces of paper*: the GM's new fullthroated embrace of vehicles with plugs (whither hydrogen, whither biofuels?) and some lightly camo'ed electric Spark prototypes with the keys in them.



The message of the Electrification Experience was very obviously how GM's success with the Chevrolet Volt is guiding the company's fuel economy efforts. One can quibble about missed sales targets or too-high prices, but the fact remains that the Volt is the best-selling plug-in vehicle in the U.S. right now, and it has given GM a strong position from which to move forward in the fast-changing automotive landscape. As they wrap up their second year of sales, plug-in vehicles are far ahead of where regular hybrids were after their second year a decade ago. And, as Mark Duvall of the Electric Power Research Institute pointed out, 12 percent of all plug-in vehicles in the US were sold in October. The Volt stood at the top of that list.



The phrase "learnings from the Volt were 'sprinkled liberally'" was repeated a lot, referring to how the lessons from that project are being used withing GM. As we said earlier, Mary Barra, GM's senior vice president of global product development, said during the event that GM's future "focus" will be on plug-in technology, and at the EE, GM certainly presented its future as something other than "more car than electric." It's always been clear that this anti-EV message, the way GM first advertised the Volt, would prove inconvenient at some point. The surprise is how soon that day has come for GM.
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Chevy Spark Electric Vehicle Prototype originally appeared on Autoblog Green on Fri, 16 Nov 2012 18:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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