June 25, 2009, 12:11 pm

Chevrolet Volt Hits Road, Ahead of Schedule

John F. Martin for General Motors The first preproduction Chevrolet Volt on the road in Warren, Mich.

From our colleagues at the Wheels blog:

The Chevrolet Volt made an appearance this week. It wasn’t a concept car, and it wasn’t a test mule (in the body of a Chevy Cruze). This time, it was the real thing.

Well, sort of. Andrew Farah, the chief engineer on the Volt, took the first preproduction model out for a spin on Tuesday in Warren, Mich. And he wrote about his experience on the G.M. Fastlane blog.

As to be expected, there’s a lot of rah-rah-zip-boom-bah in the post. Mr. Farah doesn’t speak much to how the test drive went. But he described the current preproduction process that the Volt was undergoing:

These vehicles are being built by our Pre-Production Operations (PPO) organization in Warren — the birthplace of all G.M. cars and trucks in North America. We’re producing a few Volts per week now, but we’ll quickly ramp up to 10 per week and will have approximately 80 preproduction vehicles built by October.

Most of these vehicles will be used for testing and validating the production intent design as well as developing the final vehicle software and controls — we’ll also use them to tune the vehicle’s overall driving experience. Some of these Volts will have very short lives as they’ll be used in safety and structural integrity testing.

G.M. calls the Volt an extended-range electric vehicle because its electric motor is powered by a lithium-ion battery pack for up to 40 miles. After that, a gas-engine charges the battery to keep the electric motor running.

When G.M. filed for bankruptcy earlier this month, there were some questions as to whether the company would be able to stick to the timetable it had previously established for the Volt. G.M. has targeted the end of next year for the Volt’s release.

Mr. Farah, who will give a live chat on Thursday at 4 p.m., said that the Volt was ahead of schedule by around two weeks. “We’ve already discovered a few small tweaks we need to make, but nothing out of the ordinary for this stage of development,” he said.