It almost never gets credit for this, but the Chevrolet Volt set the paradigm for every modern plug-in hybrid vehicle. Introduced for the 2011 model year, the Volt offered 40 miles of all-electric driving, enough to cover the daily transportation needs of the vast majority of Americans. On longer drives, a 1.4-liter four-cylinder gasoline engine would kick in, powering a generator to replenish the battery. You could refuel at any gas station, never worry about battery range, and recharge when you arrive back home—all while charging with a standard wall outlet.
And we can all thank an auto executive who helped deliver some of America's fiercest gasoline-powered performance cars for bringing it to life.
When it debuted, the Volt defined a category of one. Even Toyota, the indomitable hybrid juggernaut of that decade, was left scrambling to throw together a plug-in hybrid Prius to compete with Chevrolet. That’s exactly how Bob Lutz wanted it.
“People say, what's your favorite program that you ever worked on in your whole career? If I had to pick one, it's the Chevy Volt,” Lutz told InsideEVs.
It’s an impressive claim coming from Lutz. Over a career that included executive positions at BMW, Ford, Chrysler and GM, Lutz shepherded more high-performance vehicles to production than just about anybody. He was pivotal in launching BMW’s M division and hatched the idea for the original Dodge Viper.
As vice-chairman of General Motors from 2001 to 2011, Lutz presided over an enthusiast-car renaissance, ranging from the Nurburgring record-setting supercharged Cadillac CTS-V to the jaw-dropping C6 Corvette ZR1, the sport-sedan benchmark Chevy SS and the Miata-sized Pontiac Solstice and Saturn Sky.
In spite of a resume that would be the envy of any executive who also calls themselves an enthusiast, the relatively humble, fuel-efficient Volt remains Lutz’s favorite achievement.
“It was like watching your own obituary unfold.”
Lutz came up with the Volt to prove that GM could compete toe-to-toe with Toyota. In the mid-2000s, the Japanese automaker was riding high. The Prius was not the first hybrid on the U.S. market, but it was by far the most successful, earning Toyota a nearly faultless image in the mainstream press as a green-car champion.
General Motors had no such shine. “We were the big bad company getting rich by forcing Americans into full-size pickup trucks and SUVs,” Lutz told InsideEVs. “Everybody thought we were a greedy gas-guzzler producer, a technological laggard, and it was affecting our sales, especially among educated people.”
And this problem wasn’t just limited to GM. The Detroit auto industry as a whole was viewed as “a bunch of dinosaurs producing vehicles for other dinosaurs,” Lutz said. “It was like watching your own obituary unfold.”
Lutz wanted a moonshot. He partnered up with Jon Lauckner, then the vice president of product planning at GM. Together, they landed on the idea of building the world’s first production series hybrid.
Unlike the Prius, Lauckner and Lutz’s fuel-saver would feature a battery that drivers could charge at home. With 40 miles of range, GM’s research showed that 87% of American drivers could perform their daily commute on pure electric power. In everyday use, with regular recharging, the Volt could theoretically go days or weeks without burning a drop of gasoline—an efficiency claim that no other mainstream vehicle could match.
“[Lauckner] sketched out the layout using a fountain pen and a piece of paper, and we took it over to design,” Lutz told InsideEVs. “And design was really cock-a-hoop about it because it gave them a chance to do something radically different.”
“They had to tell me about roadblocks they were experiencing in the corporate hierarchy. And I’d say, 'Bullshit, we’re just going to plow through all that.'
At the time, General Motors was all but obsessed with a different sort of alternative energy: hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. The company had built a fleet of fuel-cell Equinoxes, Lutz recalls, “which had about a 200-mile range and cost about 15 or 20 million dollars each.” The fuel-cell believers at GM insisted that the company needed to stay on message, pushing hydrogen over anything battery-powered.
But Lutz faced considerable headwinds in getting the Volt past GM's infamous bureaucracy. Reports at the time say many within the company balked at the idea of another plug-in car after the EV1 debacle.
After what Lutz describes as a “knock-down, drag-out meeting” with then-CEO Rick Wagoner, the Volt was approved, first as a coupe-like concept car, then as a production vehicle. Lutz and Lauckner assembled an engineering team with lots of expertise from GM’s last electrified experiment, the ambitious but doomed EV1. They ran the group like a startup, side-stepping GM convention.
“I attended an update meeting every two weeks,” Lutz said. “They had to tell me about roadblocks they were experiencing in the corporate hierarchy. And I’d say, 'Bullshit, we’re just going to plow through all that.' I was always able to remove the roadblocks and move them ahead.” Soon, the team had a fleet of Chevy Cruze prototypes performing real-world testing on the Volt’s never-before-seen series-hybrid drivetrain. But as with EVs later on, such new technologies drove up development costs as components had to be made and sourced beyond GM's usual supply chain.
Even at this pre-production stage, the Volt was generating controversy. Lutz and Lauckner had decided to use lithium-ion cells for the Volt’s plug-in battery—the industry standard today, but something that had never been attempted by a major automaker at the time. (The Tesla Roadster, introduced in 2008, came out when that company was still a tiny startup; the Li-ion cells it used at the time were adapted from laptop batteries.)
As Lutz tells it, Toyota publicly cast doubt on GM’s ability to harness Li-ion in an automotive application, insisting that the Prius’s NiMH batteries were the safe, superior solution. But it turned out GM was actually right here, and ahead of the curve. As of 2015, all plug-in Prius models use Li-ion batteries, and the current fourth-generation Prius is exclusively powered by Li-ion.
The production Volt debuted in late 2010. For the everyday American driver, it offered something never seen before: All-electric driving for the daily commute, recharged nightly via a standard 120-volt home outlet, with a fuel tank you could fill at any gas station. People who understood engineering recognized the Volt as an immense achievement, but the everyday car buyer never fully caught on.
“General Motors did an unspeakably lousy job at communicating the car,” Lutz told InsideEVs. Worse, the Volt suffered from a pointed and malicious misinformation campaign that was deeply tied to political partisanship.
Rush Limbaugh led the charge, pushing the false narrative that the Volt was forced upon General Motors by the Obama administration as part of a government bailout package. “It was the beginning of the conservative anti-electrification movement,” Lutz said. The executive went so far as to email Limbaugh personally.
“I said, ‘Rush, usually I agree with you, but I have to tell you, you’re full of shit," he said."If you want to know whose idea [the Volt] was, it was mine.’ And he basically told me, ‘My narrative is the one that sells with listeners, and it’s the one I’m sticking with.’” Limbaugh was right; the car was a frequent punching bag on Fox News for years, as was the “Government Motors” insult.
David Letterman was at least more accommodating. In a 2009 episode of Late Night that today feels like it’s from an alternate universe, Letterman—with Elon Musk as his guest—lampooned the Volt, calling its 40-mile range “barely enough to get to the mailbox and back.” Lutz demanded equal time, landing himself a spot on the Letterman show where he deftly explained to America exactly how the Volt worked.
Yet reviews of the first-generation Volt praised the car for its seamless transitions from battery to gasoline power, with no perceptible change in driving character. Unlike some plug-in hybrids that came after, the Volt offered the same acceleration and top speed regardless of the battery’s state of charge. Communicating the intricacies of this powertrain may have been too much for GM.
“It was the first time they ever had to introduce a vehicle with this complex technology,” Lutz told InsideEVs. “There was so much focus on the 40 miles [of battery range] that it wasn't sufficiently emphasized, and then the gas engine cuts in.”
Over two generations, from 2011 to 2019, Chevrolet sold roughly 150,000 Volts—roughly equivalent to one very strong quarter of Silverado truck sales. “Here’s where the tragic part comes in,” Lutz told InsideEVs. “General Motors marketing, as you have noticed from the amount of pickup truck advertising, is focused on sales volume and profitability. Obviously, the Volt was low-volume [...] so it basically got no advertising money. If I had been CEO of General Motors at the time, I would have made the Volt the centerpiece of our communications.”
In many ways, the Volt project resembled another ambitious Bob Lutz endeavor: The Dodge Viper, introduced as a concept car in 1989 and put into production less than two years later.
“We did the Viper at a time when Chrysler's reputation was in the toilet,” Lutz said. “Thanks to [then-Chrysler CEO] Lee Iacocca, the Viper team had the wherewithal and the clout to get the message out on the car. Unquestionably, it was a loss program, but this is my eternal argument with the finance guys. They say, we're not going to fund a program that loses money. And I say, how about a program that loses $150 million a year, but fundamentally changes the public's perception of the corporation? The same group would allocate what today probably comes out to over $4 billion for advertising, most of which is money poured down a rat hole. But they won't put their money behind a car like the Volt or the Viper that can fundamentally change the fortunes of the company.”
“I do believe electric vehicles are the future. It's going to be a rocky transition."
Despite the headwinds the Volt faced, Lutz is unfailingly proud of having brought it to production—and proved Toyota wrong. “It certainly steered General Motors on the path to having a shot at selective general vehicle electrification,” he said. “It laid the groundwork. It stretched the limits of what GM was capable of.”
And yet, like the EV1 before it, GM can be accused of dropping the ball on a technology it once pioneered, scrambling to catch up later. The Volt was discontinued in 2019, leaving GM with no plug-in hybrid models on the US market. The automaker recently announced a new plan for PHEVs in the US market, but that won’t be until 2027. Lutz thinks GM will be poised to succeed in the segment.
“I do believe electric vehicles are the future,” he said. “It's going to be a rocky transition. It's probably smart for GM to recognize that the EV transition is not going to happen as fast as everybody had thought, and that maybe for the next 10 years or so, plug-in hybrids are going to be the way to go. All of the accumulated knowledge and technology is still there. They can easily just pick up where the Volt left off.”
Lutz will be 95 when GM’s next crop of PHEVs hits showrooms. Presumably, he’ll still be just as proud of the Volt project that he led.
“Every other car program is a variation of something you've done before,” he said. “They all have a piston engine, they all have a transmission [...] basically, you're just repeating the same thing over and over again, hopefully in better form. But the Volt was all-new. I think the farther on we get in history, the more people appreciate what the Volt did.”
Bob Sorokanich is a freelance journalist based in New York City. He was previously the editor-in-chief of Jalopnik, and before that, deputy editor of Road & Track Magazine. His work can be found in Esquire, Popular Mechanics, Linkage, Car and Driver, and on X and Instagram.
