The state of General Motors’ Chevrolet Volt program has been in flux ever since the automaker gave the program the green light – with top-level executives often contradicting one another about the Volt’s launch date – but it looks as though the wavering is over and the Volt will hit the market in 2010.
GM vice chairman Bob Lutz proclaimed the Volt would make production as planned after an event in Detroit. “I would say there’s almost no reasonable doubt in our minds anymore that this is going to work,” he told Automotive News.
The Volt was originally designed to travel 40 miles on all-electric power and Lutz says GM engineers have “routinely had it to the high 30s, low 40s and they go up hills with it and everything.”
Several rivals have questions GM’s foray into the lithium-ion powered electric car segment by 2010, but it looks as though GM is determined to prove its naysayers wrong. The production version of the Volt is expected to bow later this year at the Paris Motor Show.
