Car Chute

Published on Sunday 20 May 2012 04:14

You may run out of power, but you won’t run out of steam with the Ampera, although finding the cash to buy it could prove a problem, writes Frederic Manby

VAUXHALL’S Ampera is the bravest move yet in the very gradual transition to modern electric vehicles. Why so brave? Well, the cheapest costs almost £30,000 which is a stack of money for a car which can only seat four people and even on Vauxhall’s figures will manage 50 miles at the most on a battery charge. It then takes four to six hours to recharge, depending on your charger. That will cost hardly anything in juice, to around £1, depending on your power tariff.

The plus side is that you are pollution-free using the battery, escape the annual road tax and various company car taxes, because this is an electric vehicle. Even the Nissan LEAF is cheaper and does twice the mileage per charge, and can be boosted much more quickly when it has gone flat. Renault’s Fluence ZE version of the LEAF is cheaper still because you hire the batteries rather than buy them with the car but sways too much when cornering.

The LEAF went on sale in the UK a year ago. Even with the coveted COTY accolade of European Car Of The Year, it has sold less than 700.

The Ampera by General Motors but badged here as a Vauxhall (and the very similar Chevrolet Volt) have won this year’s European COTY gong. Vauxhall expects to sell 2,500 to 3,000 Amperas this year, rising to a target of 5,000 next year.

Why Vauxhall’s optimism? Because unlike the LEAF and Fluence ZE and all the other electric cars, the Ampera and Volt are extended-range vehicles. They have a 1.4 petrol engine alongside the double electric motor unit under the bonnet. When the battery goes flat – after just 37 miles on the test route chosen by Vauxhall – the petrol engine fires up and puts enough charge into the battery to keep going until the petrol runs out – say an extra 270 to 300 miles depending on how you drive. The transition is seamless. The only way you can tell is when the battery mileage symbol

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BOCHUM/BERLIN, Germany (REUTERS) – The head of German carmaker Opel, under pressure from parent General Motors (GM) to end losses, refused to promise workers at its plant in Bochum on Monday that their jobs would be safeguarded after 2014.

The plant, located in the rust-belt Ruhr region devastated by coal mine closures, is expected to shut after the company chose to build the next generation of its popular Astra compact in Britain and Poland where wages are cheaper.

Unions say around 45,000 jobs are linked to the factory but a weak economy has hit car sales in Europe, forcing manufacturers to confront high fixed costs and a capacity overhang that GM says equates to 10 plants.

Germany has had few major plant closures in the last four years and shutting Bochum could become an issue in next year’s federal election.

Workers had been hoping Opel chief executive officer (CEO) Karl-Friedrich Stracke would shed light on the company’s plans, but he said a mid-term business plan for GM’s European operations would not be submitted to the supervisory board until June 28.

‘There is no decision for Bochum beyond 2014,’ Mr Stracke said in a 20-minute speech at a closed-door meeting with staff, as workers booed him.

Many workers at the four-hour meeting wore yellow shirts emblazoned with Opel’s lighting-bolt logo. Some waved banners saying: ‘Death in stages.’

‘Stracke does nothing but beat around the bush. We’re fed up to the back teeth,’ one worker said as he stormed out of the building.

About 100 journalists followed the event from the parking lot outside the plant. Sheets of black cloth were used to prevent them from looking inside the meeting hall.

Speculation that Bochum would close intensified after GM said last week that it would halt Astra production at Opel’s main plant in Ruesselsheim, Germany, making the car only in Britain’s Ellesmere Port and Gliwice in Poland.

GM lost US$747 million (S$952 million) on its European operations last year, and rumours regularly surface that it may resume efforts to sell Opel. A plan to sell the company three years ago caused a public outcry in Germany.

‘Demand for Opel vehicles across Europe plunged 16 per cent in the first three months of the year,’ said Dr Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, director of the Centre for Automotive Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

He

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DETROIT (REUTERS) – General Motors (GM) will start a second shift in July with 600 workers at the Lansing, Michigan, plant that will make the new Cadillac ATS sedan, the company said on Tuesday.

The ATS when it launches in late July or August will be the smallest and least expensive Cadillac offering and is a direct challenge to leading sellers among small luxury cars, the 3-Series from BMW and the C-Class from Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz.

In addition to the ATS, existing production of four versions of the Cadillac CTS will continue at the Lansing Grand River plant, which used to also make the phased-out Cadillac STS.

GM said the ATS will begin showing up at United States (US) dealers by August. Prices for the compact four-cylinder model will start at US$33,990 (S$43,000) including destination charges. A turbocharged engine model will have a base price of US$35,795 and a six-cylinder 3.6-litre engine model will start pricing at US$42,090.

The new shift was first announced by GM in October 2010.

The new workers will all be so-called entry-level workers on the GM-United Auto Workers (UAW) union two-tiered pay scale. The new hires will receive hourly pay of nearly US$16, compared with about US$29 for veteran assembly workers at GM plants.

The second-tier pay is to rise to about US$19 per hour over the four years of the labour deal signed between the UAW and GM last fall.

Currently, there are some 835 hourly and 136 hourly workers working one shift at Lansing Grand River. The new hires will mingle with the veteran workers on a single shift and by July the plant will have two shifts with new and veteran workers on each one, GM said.

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MELBOURNE, Australia, May 20, 2012 — /PRNewswire/ — One of the world’s trusted motoring club partners, Club Assist, has unveiled a WORLD FIRST with the “Lithium Mobile EV Charger”. The lithium-powered charger is the first clean, green, Level 2 EV charging solution for emergency roadside assistance.

The solution developed by Club Assist is an innovation that offers quicker, smoother and quieter roadside battery charging assistance, with a development which is the most environmentally friendly solution to hit the market to date.

The unit is being launched at the LEV and EV Forum Drive Day in Melbourne on Monday, May 21.

The new “completely green” and “extremely compact” solution can give a standard electric-powered car, enough charge in 10 minutes to sustain a driving distance* of 5 to 6 kilometers, designed to allow the vehicle to travel to the nearest permanent charging point for a full charge. (*The driving distance is in accordance with the State of Health and State of Charge of the EV battery system pack. This EV charger provides greater flexibility by being available in either a skid mounted or small sized trailer mount. )

The technology is now ready to go to market and Club Assist can potentially roll it out around the world to more than 68 motoring club organisations.

According to the unit’s designer, Club Assist’s Bob Gell, the Lithium Mobile EV charger is a natural evolution of the existing technology and makes a stronger case for the growing use of electric vehicles, along with their many already acknowledged benefits.

“Developing this solution from its inception has been a very rewarding experience for me and the support I received from Club Assist has been instrumental in getting this solution to market,” he said.

As a member of Club Assist’s Product and Technical Development team, Bob Gell said the development of the Lithium Mobile EV Charger was just another example of Club Assist’s determination to provide its motoring club partners with cutting edge solutions to a continually changing transport landscape.

“Our ‘what next’ approach has helped us bring revolutionary solutions to market in the past such as the ‘standard’ Mobile EV Charger. The Lithium Mobile EV charger is the next logical evolution in ‘green’ roadside assistance for electric vehicles.”

Club Assist CEO and Executive President, Stuart Davies hailed the new product as a major step forward in reinforcing the reality that electric vehicles were not just cars of the future, but a viable alternative for many motorists, here and now, around the world.

“For many years we have very proudly offered our club partners, innovative and pragmatic solutions to help

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Extended range EVs cover 40 million miles in U.S. on electric only

General Motors has announced that North American Chevrolet Volt owners have saved the equivalent of 2.1 million gallons of fuel, roughly the amount you’d find on a supertanker.

The numbers are based on real-time data gathered by OnStar, the onboard system that provides navigation, communications, security and emergency service notification if the car is involved in a collision. It also allows GM to gather data about how the car is being used – slightly big brother-ish, but that’s another story. The system can also tell when the car is running in pure-electric mode, and hence, not using fuel.

Chevy’s PR machine got to work with a calculator to come up with some eye catching figures. That 40 million miles of pure electric motoring is equivalent to 167 trips to the moon or 1606 journeys around the earth.

Chevrolet also reckons that Volt owners have saved about $8 million as a result of all that pure-electric motoring. According to the figures, 60% of the time Volts are being driven in pure-electric mode, which GM says is exactly how the company envisioned the car being used.

Looked at on its own, a savings of 2.1 million gallon looks like a really big number. But to put it in perspective, figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration tell us that in 2010, America consumed 363 million gallons of gasoline every single day. So 2.1 million gallons would be little more than eight minutes worth of the daily gasoline demand.

Still, that’s one less supertanker to worry about and for those having an extremely slow day at work, Chevrolet has put a rolling ticker on its Volt website. You can watch real-time daily driving statistics, which show electric miles driven, total miles driven and gallons of gas saved – http://www.chevrolet.com/volt-electric-car/

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The next-gen Holden Commodore will be sold in the United States.

Holden will export its big sedan to North America, in reasonably grunty form, to be re-badged as the Chevrolet SS. The Commodore will take on America’s showrooms, as well as the NASCAR Sprint Cup.

It will be the first time in the last 17 years that Chevy will offer a rear-wheel-drive sedan for sale in the United States, and it was born in Melbourne, not Detroit.

The VF Commodore, which has not yet been launched, will sell in limited numbers wearing the iconic SS badge towards the end of 2013. When the legendary Daytona 500 rolls around, the Aussie-bred SS will be taking on the 200-lap NASCAR race.

Rumours of the NASCAR Commodore have been circulating for some time, but Holden’s new export deal is far larger than first expected.

The company, without unveiling too many secrets about the new Commodore, talked up “innovations in light weighting and fuel efficiency” for the current VE model’s replacement. How far that will go is a mystery, but it’s highly unlikely to dip into four-cylinder turbo territory.

Clever money would not be on GM shedding cylinders and adding hairdriers, as Ford has tried with its new EcoBoost Falcon in hope of dragging sales away from mid-size machines by giving good fuel economy without sacrificing the rolling real estate of a large car.

More likely is that the SS, in keeping with its roots, will be more about muscle – although a mix of six and eight cylinder variants would cover more marketplace bases, in much the same way Ford has with its Mustang range.

This global GM love-fest could also bode well for New Zealand and Australia to see factory right hand drive versions of models like the Camaro. It was generally seen as a potential threat to Commodore sales and Holden’s two-door Monaro coupe filled the market gap for a while.

Whether or not the Commodore/SS line-up will use variations on Holden’s current mix of engine sizes remains to be seen. There is some impressive iron already available across GM’s parts bins – and the former Pontiac toybox could work out very nicely – but as emissions restrictions tighten up, so does displacement.

Holden engineering boss Greg Tyus talked up the company’s “proven expertise in developing and manufacturing rear wheel drive vehicles”,

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• Next-generation model to be built in the UK
• £125 million of investment
• 700 new jobs with more expected in supply chain

The future of the Vauxhall manufacturing plant at Ellesmere Port in Cheshire has been secured by its parent company General Motors (GM).

From 2013 the plant will build the next-generation Vauxhall Astra, a contract which will run into the early 2020s. It will be the lead plant of only two building the model in Europe.

Around £125 million pounds will be invested into the plant, any many jobs which were in doubt, have now been secured. There will be around 700 new direct jobs, with several thousand more expected in the motoring industry supply chain.

Vauxhall Chairman and MD, Duncan Aldred, said: “This is great news for the Ellesmere Port plant, our employees, the local community, our suppliers, the Vauxhall Brand and the UK. We have been able to develop a responsible labour agreement that secures the plant’s future.

“This is assisted by the government’s industrial strategy, increasing its focus on the manufacturing sector and creating ideal ground for companies to build up long-term investments.”

Check out our Vauxhall Astra video review:

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Ultimately, Boules said, full autonomy might be possible. The benefits are in
easing congestion, eliminating traffic lights and conventional road
junctions, as cars will guide themselves through while avoiding traffic, and
the reduction of weight as these “crash-proof” vehicles will not need
crash-safety structures. The adoption of the fully autonomous car, he
admits, “is further off”, but could be seen in the next decade.

He dismissed claims by Volvo and BMW that the current standards of global
positioning will need to be more accurate to enable such systems. “We don’t
have to wait for the military to take the lock off GPS,” he says, “as
three-dimensional digital maps, when they arrive, will be more than accurate
enough.”

Boules added a shrewd insight on the participation of Google in driverless-car
research, which has been ascribed as publicity for its research into
three-dimensional digital maps. “3D maps will take a lot of resources to
create,” he says, “but you need to remember what people might do in their
semi-autonomous cars. One thing they might do is search the internet.”

In other words, Google frees up drivers to, er, use Google. Sounds like a plan.

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General Motors Co will build the next generation of its Astra compact in Britain after workers at its factory in Ellesmere Port, northwest England, overwhelmingly agreed to a new labour deal, leaving its plant in Bochum, Germany in danger of closure.

The U.S. carmaker said it would invest 125 million pounds ($199 million) in the Ellesmere Port plant, where assembly of the new vehicle will start in 2015.

Britain’s Unite union said 94 percent of those balloted voted in favour of changes to working conditions and that some 700 jobs would be created at the plant, securing its future until 2020.

“It’s almost certain that one of GM’s German plants will now be closed, probably the plant in Bochum,” a source close to the negotiations said.

GM, which sells under the Vauxhall brand in Britain, is expected to halt production of the Astra, its most important model, at its main plant in Russelsheim, Germany, making the car only at Ellesmere Port and at Poland’s Gliwice plant from 2015.

The source added that some production of GM’s Chevrolet marque could be shifted from Asia to Europe, with Russelsheim the likely beneficiary. This would leave the Opel factory at Bochum as the most likely site to be closed.

The decision is one of the most dramatic so far as Europe’s carmakers look to restructure or consolidate in response to more than four years of falling demand and profits.

Many factories are running at partial capacity – analysts estimate automakers have cut some 3 million cars, or 20 percent, from their production lines – and still producers struggle to sell their wares.

Opel made a loss of $750 million last year.

The UK deal means an extra third production shift will be added at the Vauxhall factory to ensure 24-hour a day running, as well as the introduction of weekend working to guarantee the factory works at full capacity.

FOUR-YEAR DEAL

The source added that production at the plant, whose sole product is the Astra, would initially rise from 140,000 cars a year to 160,000, with the potential to hit around 220,000.

Workers agreed a four-year pay deal including a pay freeze for two years, followed by rises of around 3 percent for the next two years, the source added.

“We have been able to develop a responsible labour agreement that secures the plant’s future,” Vauxhall Chairman Duncan Aldred said in a statement.

“This is assisted by the government’s industrial strategy, increasing its focus on the manufacturing sector and creating ideal ground for companies to build up long-term investments.”

There had been speculation earlier this year that the plant could miss out on investment by GM because it sources most of its parts from Europe and exports the majority of

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