2011 Chevrolet Volt Prototype First Drive

If General Motors has been doing its job, you already know about the 2011 Chevrolet Volt.

You know it combines an electric motor and a four-cylinder gas engine in a way that's significantly different from the hybrids currently on the market. You know that GM says the extended-range electric car will travel 40 miles on pure electric power, and if you are like a large percentage of Americans, you know that you could conceivably drive the Volt to the office every day and never use any gasoline.

You might even know that if the Chevy Volt isn't ready for its targeted introduction in the last months of 2010, the American people might never forgive General Motors, such are the high expectations that GM has created for this new plug-in hybrid.

But what you do not know is that the 2011 Chevrolet Volt will lay an acceleration ass-whoopin' on a brand-spanking new Chrysler Town & Country (the Cadillac of minivans), which will get to smellin' like it's on fire afterward. Trust us on this one.

Driving Into the Future
If this particular test sounds as if it was conducted under less than a strictly scientific methodology, well, it was.

You see, the vehicle we've driven isn't exactly the 2011 Volt, per se. It is an engineering development car, charmingly referred to in technoid-speak as a "mule." It wears the body of a Chevrolet Cruze (Chevy's recently introduced world car that will replace the Cobalt) and a set of very snappy black steel wheels. Its interior is a chopped-up version of the Cruze interior, with a wide central tunnel to accommodate the Volt's lithium-ion battery pack (the hand brake lever had to be relocated between the two front seatbacks, about shoulder high if you're Danica Patrick's size). According to Enterprise Rent-A-Car, our Town & Country is stock.

Also, our drag strip is the road around the manmade pond at GM's Michigan Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. And it was raining. Oh, the van also had an unsecured videographer pointing his camera out the tailgate, which did not, for a variety of reasons, conform to SAE standards.

And finally, we're not sure that our competitor in the minivan knew we were racing him.

Government Mule
According to GM, the real 2011 Chevrolet Volt will be quicker than this test mule. Jon Lauckner, vice president of product development, who is riding along in the right seat with us, chooses not to answer directly how much cruising range would be squandered should a driver decide to indulge in such juvenile antics as this drag race.

If you're getting the idea that this drive of the Volt is more of a progress report than a final assessment, you would be entirely correct. Typically, we like to wait until a car has the correct body and a price tag before passing judgment.

So, as far as we can tell, development seems to be coming along nicely. Or at least the Volt in its pure-electric mode is a smooth and mostly quiet thing. It feels, in other words, like an electric car. Incidentally, it feels not totally unlike the prototype for the upcoming pure-electric Nissan we drove the day before.

GM made sure that the Volt mule's batteries had plenty of juice for us, so the gas engine never fired up during our drive. How these two powertrain elements act in concert with one another (and what real-world electric-only range turns out to be) will be the ultimate test of the operational aspect of the Volt. So we'll have to wait on that.

In any case, there's something about the acceleration of an electric car that always feels effortless. It's not, of course. Just ask Lauckner's team or the guys who worked on the EV1, the original GM electric car, or any of the other carmakers or backyard dreamers who've given the electric car thing a run.

Still, without the surging noise and vibration of a gas engine under heavy load, the 2011 Chevrolet Volt simply doesn't feel as if it's fighting inertia. It feels somehow as if it's free of the laws of physics. That the Volt doesn't carry a conventional transmission and accumulates speed in a sustained whoosh instead of the tension-release cycle of accelerating through a geared transmission also gives it a sense of Newtonian ease.

Electronica
Just because there is no gas engine rat-a-tatting away under the hood of the Volt mule, doesn't mean it operates in silence.

In fact, the lack of engine noise tends to accentuate and amplify every other noise. So even at our modest top speed of about 50 mph, there's a constant "sushh" of air working its way around the Cruze's A-pillars and outside mirrors. The real Volt body, which spent more time in GM's wind tunnel than any product in the company's history, will quell some of that wind noise, says Lauckner.

The production-ready, low-rolling-resistance Goodyear tires that our mule wears hiss persistently on moist roads. This may or may not end up being the case when production begins, depending on the sound-deadening package (and a thousand and one minute items) that the Volt brings in its final form.

The electric motor also makes a high-pitched whistle under acceleration and Lauckner promises that it has already been identified and will be banished from the production car.

The Science of Handling
Our drive route on the campus of GM's Tech Center has the shape and nearly the exact proportions of an Olympic-size swimming pool. So our testing of at-the-limit handling is of the sawing-madly-back-and-forth-at-the-steering-wheel-while-driving-on-a-straight-road variety.

By all rights, the Goodyear tires should be Eco-squealers when asked to do anything but roll straight forward. And maybe they will prove to be. We simply don't know. The mule does not carry Volt-specific suspension tuning. But the basic suspension setup is correct, with MacPherson struts up front and a torsion beam out back. The electric-assist steering and electrohydraulic brakes are likewise the correct basic units.

And the whole package feels well calibrated already. Abrupt steering inputs are met with greater-than-expected response from the car. The front end doesn't just wash away and the body roll is well snubbed. The Volt might prove to be something better than simply an automotive hair shirt.

The battery pack might add about 300 pounds to the weight of the vehicle compared to a Cruze, but because it's mounted low in the chassis and between the front and rear wheels, the weight distribution and center of gravity of the Volt will certainly be more equitable than the Cruze.

Volt Limited
There's so much left to know about the 2011 Chevrolet Volt that what we've written above is as much as we can say at this point. We don't know pricing. We don't know if the car will debut on time. We don't know if the buying public will embrace it as something beyond the hybrids they've known. Not even GM knows for sure what GM's future is going to look like.

But zinging along in this thing among the Tech Center's international-style architecture as designed by Eero Saarinen — buildings erected during the height of GM's worldwide power and influence during the 1950s and still considered by the American Institute of Architects as the outstanding architectural project of its time — gives us hope.

We are less optimistic about the longevity of the Chrysler Town & Country we rented.

Edmunds attended a manufacturer-sponsored event, to which selected members of the press were invited, to facilitate this report.