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Success with automotive consumers depends not only on products but also on public opinion. Some well-engineered products have turned into public relations disasters.

General Motors had a leadership position in the development of electric cars some years ago with the EV-1, a battery-powered, two-seater that gained a small but devoted following before the program's termination in 2003.

That led to the 2006 documentary film titled Who Killed the Electric Car?, which trashed General Motors and the oil companies and the government and consumers for letting the EV-1 fail. Just like with Where's Roger? (Michael Moore's first film and another anti-GM documentary), the General was portrayed to the public as the villain.

GM is back with a new electric car called the Chevrolet Volt as part of their E-Flex strategy to develop a family of electric vehicles.

The company has determined that the electric cars are needed to build some reputation with "green" consumers. Toyota has a big lead in that category because of the proliferation of their hybrids.

The Volt is a battery-powered electric vehicle for short-distance travel that is equipped with a small three-cylinder gas engine and generator to recharge the battery. The four-door sedan is based on the Chevy Cobalt compact vehicle architecture.

The always quotable Bob Lutz, GM's vice-chairman, recently expressed his personal opinion on global warming — "It's a crock" — yet remains the champion of the E-Flex program.

He says GM is developing new kinds of cars because it makes business sense, not because of any environmental pressure.

The controversy has kept the Chevy Volt in the news and Mr. Lutz has promised to get it into the showrooms by 2010. The man with the most hands-on responsibility for making that happen is Tony Posawatz, GM's vehicle line director for E-Flex systems.

He says 78 per cent of commuters in the United States travel 40 miles (64 km) or less each day and the Volt will cover that distance on an overnight plug-in recharge at home.

Vaughan: I think I can figure out what E-Flex means.

Posawatz: E is for Electricity. Flex is for flexibility about where the electricity comes from, whether it comes from the power grid or comes from an engine-generator set or whether it comes from hydrogen and is converted to electricity.

There's a lot of innovation required and General Motors is really uniquely positioned to do a car like this — we have the EV-1 in our history, we have fuel-cell leadership in Equinox vehicles in a test fleet right now, we have lots of variants of hybrid vehicles. We believe this all comes into play.

So GM didn't kill the electric car?

It's resurrected.

If you're going electric, does that mean that all the hydraulics come out? Are you going with electric steering and electric brakes and electric everything?

Many of the components are going to be electrified.

With the Chevy Volt concept vehicle, we've got 60 kilowatt-hours of energy on board. This is going to allow customers to go 46 kilometres electrically. When you have that capability on board, you want to use it.

Let's talk about batteries. It seems to me everything works off that. Batteries have been the problem in doing vehicles like this; are the batteries locked in?

We have two competing suppliers that we're working with for the E-Flex and the Chevy Volt. General Motors does a lot of different batteries in our hybrid program. And so we continually scan for the best technology.

We created a place in the vehicle to put prismatic, high-format, high-energy batteries. And if the technology continues to improve, we anticipate this architecture we set up will give people more driving range.

And we've seen encouraging signs for the two batteries we have on tap.

So the space where you put the batteries is locked in. But what about the controllers and the software to integrate all these things? Don't you have to know what batteries you're going to use first?

Yes and no. We have so many talented controls engineers who have done the hybrid vehicles — the Malibu, the Vue — and we even have guys from the EV-1 program working on this to make it run seamlessly.

Is this a real project or a public relations exercise?

We are spending plenty of money and, as the vehicle line director who has the leadership responsibility for the project, I had the good fortune of starting with the concept car and I got the arm put around me by Bob Lutz, who said it's a good concept car but we want to do something more.

I've followed the vehicle from the concept and now have a couple of hundred full-time engineers working on everything from battery development to tuning this engine-generator set, getting the stationary generator very, very efficient, and working on the exciting style we want to bring to the Chevy Volt.

In 2010, when this Chevy Volt comes out, are you going to sell 100 of them, 1,000 of them? Is this really a production car?

If you listen to my boss [Bob Lutz] or read the newspapers — and our team does regularly to check on what the status of the program is …

To see what Maximum Bob is saying …

… and he's been such a tremendous supporter of the program and he has run a battery company, too.

We've labelled this vehicle a Chevy for a reason. That's General Motors' global brand and it's a brand we signify is within people's reach — it's affordable.

Certainly the technology is expensive, but we anticipate to sell tens of thousands and hopefully grow beyond that because that's how you satisfy a lot of customers and make a big impact on the environment.

Michael Vaughan is co-host with Jeremy Cato of Car/Business, which appears Fridays at 8 p.m. on Business News Network and Saturdays at 2 p.m. on CTV.