© GM Company/GM Media Archives - 2011 GMC Sierra Hybrid dash display

And you succeeded. The Volt is now out there on the road. How would you evaluate its performance so far? There’s the case of one recent crash test that went awry. Is that significant to you?
The performance is excellent. In fact, the crash test went extremely well. The vehicle passed that test magnificently. The car didn’t roll over in the test, but it was artificially rolled over for five minutes per side by NHTSA [according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration protocol]. And it was probably when it was on its roof, some coolant leaked onto the circuit boards of the battery.
     The car was stored for three weeks with a partially active battery that had never been discharged. Somehow, a short was created by the liquid getting onto the electronic circuit boards, and the vehicle burned. But it’s a stretch to say that a totaled vehicle that is left for three weeks represents any kind of a threat to its occupants. [Read the statement from NHTSA here.]

And gasoline is flammable as well.
Gasoline is far more volatile, although that was a major engineering effort in the Volt, because it also has gasoline on board – to make sure that under the most severe crash conditions, the gasoline never interacted with the electric power.

I wonder about the prospects for fully electric vehicles that don’t require gasoline like Nissan’s Leaf, and when can we anticipate that the costs might come down?
Both are going to happen in the next ten years. The cost of lithium-ion batteries is going to go down by a factor of three, and the storage capacity