Recharging the Car

On January 7, 2007, General Motors unveiled a concept for a new kind of electric car, one that carried a small engine to drive a generator and keep it going after the battery ran out of juice. After having destroyed most examples of its previous electric car, the EV1 and inspiring the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car?", many observers where skeptical that GM would ever build the Chevy Volt.

Despite that skepticism, GM executives including Bob Lutz and Jon Lauckner pushed the company's board to approve it just three months later and the engineers, designers and suppliers went to work seven days a week for the next three and a half years to make it a reality.

Despite a global financial meltdown, numerous technical hurdles and GM going through bankruptcy, by December 2010, the first production Volts were in retail customer hands. It was more expensive than originally hoped but it worked and largely met the original specifications.

Throughout the Volt's gestation the author chronicled the work on the websites AutoblogGreen.com and Autoblog.com and has now compiled those stories along with related articles about the response of other automakers into "Charging into the Future"