GM's plan to get the Volt into dealer showrooms by late 2010 is fantastically ambitious because it means developing and getting an entirely new type of car to market in no more time than it takes to build the next model of an ordinary car.

The 40-mile battery is extremely difficult because it requires a very large, sophisticated battery with 300 cells where if any one cell fails the whole battery can stop working, plus complex software and control equipment just to prevent overheating; outside critics argued a 20-mile battery would have been much easier and less risky.

GM's decision to kill its hybrid program in the early 2000s was a far bigger strategic mistake than the EV1 fiasco, because they walked away from the hybrid market just as it took off, letting Toyota become master of the hybrid market and gain an enormous image boost from the Prius despite GM's technology being at pace with Toyota's at the time.

The Volt aims to be the first mass-market plug-in electric car you can drive most of the time without burning gas, achieving this by driving ~40 miles on a battery charge and then using an onboard gas-powered generator to recharge the battery, so the wheels only ever see electricity.

A fuel cell car is really an electric car—it uses hydrogen and a catalyst to generate electricity that runs the car—and recognizing this internally melted GM's resistance to building an electric car, since they realized they had effectively been pursuing electric propulsion all along.

The Volt's design is clever because 75% of days people drive less than 40 miles, meaning most Volt drivers on most days won't need to burn any gas at all.

Electric propulsion is inherently superior to internal combustion for driving feel because an electric motor delivers full torque immediately without going through gears—it is either fully on or off—making it smooth, clean, and quiet; the only problem is the battery.

GM initially conceived the Volt as an 'iPod car'—analogous to how Apple's iPod contained no new technology but repackaged it to reposition the company and change how people think about music—but GM escalated from a ~10-mile plug-in to a 40-mile range to break the public's perceived link between gas tank and automobile.

The EV1 was a technological masterpiece in reduced rolling friction, aerodynamics, battery and internal controls, but it failed commercially because its range (initially 70-80 miles, never above 110) was too short, charging took 8-10 hours, and GM lost money on every handmade unit it produced.

Internal combustion triumphed over electric and steam cars in the early automobile era because gasoline is an extremely energy-dense substance and there was no practical way to store and carry electricity in a car until lithium-ion batteries arrived a few years ago.

The popular story that American carmakers destroyed the electric car to protect gas profits is not the whole truth; GM internally was proud of the EV1, and it was destroyed because lawyers told them liability risk from supporting experimental cars on the street was too high.

A growing view in the car industry since the 1990s is that dependence on gasoline is the growth bottleneck for the industry's future, because it is a fuel that causes global warming, enriches dictators, and has enormous price volatility, so manufacturers want to get off gasoline to remove a constraint on growth.

Tesla's 2005 announcement of an all-electric lithium-ion roadster catalyzed GM's decision, because Bob Lutz argued that if a tiny Silicon Valley startup could produce and market an electric car, it was no longer acceptable for him to hear that GM could not do it.

The zero-emission mandate of the 1990s was misguided because even an all-electric car produces emissions from the power plant generating its electricity, so it merely relocates emissions; moreover the mandate distorted the market by shelving the range-extended hybrid concept (the eventual Volt design) years earlier because it wasn't technically zero-emission.

By 2005-2006 GM's brand had become so damaged that focus groups liked GM cars better when the nameplate was removed, and they liked them less once told they were GM.

The Volt's deeper challenge is not technological but organizational and commercial: changing GM's risk-averse corporate culture and breaking through with a radical new product in a possibly unready market while financially weak, making it much more a business risk than a technology risk.

GM's chronic downfall is not the inability to achieve breakthroughs but its failure of follow-through; the Saturn succeeded with great cars, dealer network and waiting lists by 1992-93, but GM let it languish—folding it back into the bureaucracy, starving it of product, and letting cars get mediocre—because unions and management resisted Saturn's special privileges and it only broke even.

To build the Volt, GM had to shred the car-making rulebook in two key ways: instead of solving the hardest problem (the battery) first and then building the car around it, they pursued real-time invention building car and battery simultaneously; and instead of a secret skunkworks, they went public early so the world would see how hard they tried even if it fails.

GM has a recurring pattern of falling behind and attempting 'Hail Mary' technology passes that fail, exemplified by Roger Smith spending roughly $40-50 billion on robots and high-tech manufacturing for virtually nothing while Toyota won by slogging ahead with continuous incremental improvements and no big technology gambles.

GM is deliberately using the Volt to increase its 'risk-taking metabolism' and force a change in its corporate culture by making the price of failure too high through full public exposure—they know it will be hard and that failure will be public, but the openness is part of the point.