General Motors has been speeding down the track like a train with a purpose. What is GM’s purpose? To pay out all of their outstanding loans and invest for a better tomorrow. General Motors Chairman and Chief Executive confirmed today that General Motors has made payment on the $5.4 billion loan (2 billion of the loan was already paid) to the U.S. government, $700M of which was interest. Ouch. This payment was made five years ahead of schedule and illustrates GM’s progress since declaring bankruptcy last July. General Motors has also been able to repay loans to the Canadian and Ontario governments totaling $1.1 billion (in addition to the $400 million already paid). How’s that for progress?
Over the course of a number of months we’ve been bombarded by Chevrolet with photos, videos, and even a detailed description of the Chevy Volt.
By the sheer amount of time and money being invested on this car, you would think that it should, at the very least, already be in the production stages, right?
Well, as it turns out, developing such a car takes longer than any of us ever expected. Yet, despite the slow-rolling of the Volt, Chevy has remained pretty steadfast in their commitment to making the Volt a reality and their latest piece of good news seems to be a step in the right direction.
According to Chevrolet, the first pre-production Volt recently rolled out of the company’s production facility in Hamtramck, Michigan.
Just so we don’t get ahead of ourselves, we have to point out that the car is a pre-production model, which is pretty much a glorified test car to determine whether the Volt is up to par to the enormously high standards General Motors has given it. But even if it is a ‘pre-production’ model, the mere fact that something finally rolled out of the assembly line leads us to believe that the Volt could very well end up out on the road one day.
For some people, the work life becomes too toxic to the point that they’d do anything to get out of their jobs, even resorting to screaming at their bosses just so the company has a reason to let them go.
But that’s not the case for one Murray Butler IV, who probably has one of the best gigs in the world – at least according to him.
Butler is one of those rare kinds of people who not only enjoys the work he does, but even compares it to like “being in Disneyland.” So what exactly does he do?
By now, a lot of us have probably been hammered with lectures and tutorials about the idea of electric cars and how it’s going to revolutionize the auto industry in the future.
One of the most visible proponents of electric cars has been General Motors and with the Chevrolet Volt, the auto conglomerate has the ideal car to show everyone the merits of EV driving without compensating for performance and reliability.
But for every one of us that know about electric cars like the back of our hands, there are probably hundreds – maybe thousands – that still can’t tell the difference between standard vehicles and those that run on electricity.
So, in a PSA round-about way, GM decided to release a video showing exactly how the Chevy Volt works. Don’t worry; if you’re watching this for the first time, it’s not as complicated as it looks. GM did a smart thing in keeping it simple. After all, you can’t teach someone new tricks without having to explain it in as easy a way as possible first.
By now you would’ve figured that General Motors would go through great lengths to promote the mettle of the Chevrolet Volt. Having previously done a water trough test, GM decided that maybe the Volt should be subjected to yet another test, this time, of the scorching variety.
To ensure that any part of the Volt would not be subjected to warping or sagging when exposed into hot weather, GM turned up the knob on the old pressure cooker to see just how the Volt handles being in the figurative spotlight.
In this video, the Volt is being given a solar heat test, with temperatures reaching as high as 200 degrees Fahrenheit. If you don’t know your conversions, 200 degrees Fahrenheit is twice as hot as the boiling point so you can be rest assured that if there’s any part of the car that couldn’t stand the heat, this test would show it.
