General Motors

  • wind farm

    General Motors [NYSE: GM] stock might be up for initial public offering today under the same stock symbol as before, but the company is trying hard to show that it's not the same company in many respects. "We'll do that by demonstrating that GM is doing things differently," said CEO Dan Akerson, introducing a $40 million Clean Energy Initiative that will, over the next year and a half, focus on smaller, community-based environmental projects throughout the U.S. GM's own stimulus back to communities? The initiative—in addition to driving consumers to consider GM's most efficient new...

  • Buick eAssist Hybrid Technology
    GM Mild Hybrids: If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again

    The 2011 Chevrolet Volt has gotten all the attention lately, including a narrow second-place finish in our GreenCarReports 2011 Best Car To Buy award, but General Motors also has a significant hybrid-electric vehicle program. While its full-size Two-Mode Hybrid trucks have had mixed success, the...

  • 2010 Chevrolet New Sail, sold in China
    GM To Show All-Electric Car Next Year...In India, Not Here

    While General Motors is focusing its U.S. electric-drive efforts solely on the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, a range-extended electric car, elsewhere in the world it's experimenting with full battery electric vehicles. Now the company has said it will unveil a Chinese-built electric subcompact in the Indian...

  • GM and SAIC transmission
    GM To Develop Compact Engine And Dual Clutch Transmission With SAIC

    General Motors is calling on Chinese partner SAIC to help develop a new downsized gasoline engine family and an advanced dual clutch transmission, one of the first major developments between the two automotive giants and surely not the last. The new engines, which will be offered in displacements...

  • Bright IDEA plug-in hybrid delivery van, prototype
    Not-A-Big-Surprise Dept: Bright Confirms Switch to GM Engines

    When GM Ventures announced it would invest an unspecified amount of money into startup hybrid truck-maker Bright Automotive, several of us noted that the prototype Bright Idea delivery van used an 2.0-liter engine and transmission from a Dodge Caliber. The announcement two weeks ago from General...

  • 2009 Chevrolet Malibu Hybrid
    GM Confirms Return Of Mild Hybrid Models In 2011

    With the demise of Saturn, GM was left with only one model featuring its mild hybrid system, the 2009 Chevrolet Malibu Hybrid sedan, but sadly even that green vehicle was dropped from the automaker’s lineup this year. GM is planning to bring back its mild hybrid models, however, and according to...

  • Bright IDEA plug-in hybrid delivery van, prototype

    General Motors announced today that it will invest in startup Bright Automotive, which hopes to start final production engineering of its Idea plug-in hybrid delivery van design later this year. GM Ventures, the automaker's venture investing arm, already provided funds to Bright this week; formal agreements are to be signed later this year. It seems unlikely that the old, bureaucratic, pre-banktuptcy General Motors would have done the deal in that order. Bright Idea: lightweight, high-efficiency van Based in Anderson, Indiana, Bright Automotive unveiled its design for a plug-in hybrid light...

  • 2010 GMC Sierra 2500HD 2WD Ext Cab 143.5" SLE Air Vents
    GM Greens Its Auto ACs With Greenhouse-Gas-Friendly Coolant

    Among the many substances emitted by autos back in the "good old days" were the refrigerant gases that would leak from older auto air conditioners. Freon, also known as R-12, was replaced starting in the early 1990s with R-134a, which did less damage to the ozone layer. Now concern has expanded to...

  • Jay Leno
    2011 Chevy Volt Doesn't Impress Leno; World Yawns, Ignores Him

    Talk-show host and comedian Jay Leno has long been known as a car fan and collector. And car companies often play nice with him to get their products onto his show. While GM worked with Leno on his EcoJet green sports car in 2006, the company is hardly a patsy. Leno told the Detroit News that the...

  • 2011 Chevrolet Volt
    Remember the 2011 Chevrolet Volt's 230-MPG Claim? Forget It.

    Almost a year ago, General Motors launched a little marketing campaign connecting its 2011 Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car to the figure "230 mpg." As we pointed out at the time, they were basing that projection on a proposed formula for fuel usage patterns that made a lot of assumptions...

  • 2010 GMC Yukon Hybrid
    Two-Mode Hybrid System: GM's Larry Nitz on Lessons Learned

    The Two-Mode Hybrid system for large sport utilities and trucks hasn't exactly set the world on fire. In 2006, General Motors, Daimler and Chrysler (then a single company) announced a partnership, soon joined by BMW, to develop the Two-Mode Hybrid system for large rear-wheel drive vehicles. But...

  • 2010 Chevrolet Silverado Hybrid
    GM Sells 570 Hybrid Pickups To Phone Company, Jubilation Ensues

    Last year, General Motors sold about 7,200 of its full-size hybrid SUVs--but just 1,600 hybrid pickup trucks using the same system. So the company took the unusual step last Friday of issuing a press release to announce that it had sold 576 of Silverado Hybrid pickups in one fell swoop. The buyer...

  • GM logo, with cash

    Cars are quickly become the new connected devices. Equipped with voice-command, streaming media centers, navigation displays and more, the newest line of vehicles out of major automakers are borrowing more from computers, the web and mobile technology than ever before. Now, riding this wave of rapid change, General Motors — a company still seemingly recovering from its bankruptcy — has launched its own venture capital arm. Called General Motors Ventures, this new entity will be distributing $100 million to smaller companies developing groundbreaking automotive features, starting on July...

  • Replaceable cartridge oil filter used in Ecotec engines fitted to 2011 Chevrolet Cruze
    2011 Chevy Cruze Green Oil Filter: Everything Old Is New Again

    Sometimes a "new" green idea is actually just the way we used to do things, before disposability and convenience became primary consumer values. Consider the "cartridge filter" that GM touts on the Ecotec engines fitted to its new 2011 Chevrolet Cruze. Instead of a one-piece metal cannister that's...

  • First 2011 Chevrolet Volt built on production tooling at Detroit Hamtramck plant, March 31, 2010
    2011 Chevy Volt Marketing Theme Emerges: An EV for Road Trips

    GM has been talking about the 2011 Chevrolet Volt for three and a half years now. After absorbing an enormous amount of Volt propaganda, we've learned that subtle shifts in message can be important. A conference call yesterday revealed what we suspect will become a main marketing message for the...

  • 2011 Nissan Leaf prototype
    Covering Electric Cars: Is It Really THAT Hard For the Media?

    If you pay attention to the so-called mainstream media, you could be forgiven for thinking that electric vehicles are alien technology, rather than cars with plugs. Though happy to cover natural disasters; governmental coups, and the latest celebrity gossip, pretty much any reporter seems...

  • 2010 Chevrolet Silverado
    GM To Invest $890 Million In Making Its V-8 Engines Save Gas

    Going green on the road may involve smaller engines, electric cars, and clean diesels, but it also requires making all engines far more fuel efficient. To that end, General Motors will announce this morning that it will invest almost one billion dollars in five separate plants to build a new, far...

  • 2011 Chevrolet Cruze Eco
    Special Brands for Small Turbo Engines: GM To Follow Ford?

    Used to be that turbos were used in performance cars, from the Saab Turbos of the late Seventies to BMW's current range of twin-turbo sixes. These days, the little air pumps more often make smaller engines perform like bigger ones to give fuel economy. In brief, a turbocharger uses exhaust gases to...

  • First 2011 Chevrolet Volt built on production tooling at Detroit Hamtramck plant, March 31, 2010

    The 2011 Chevrolet Volt took another step last week in its long and highly publicized gestation, with the first complete vehicle rolling off the production line at GM's Detroit Hamtramck assembly plant. On Wenesday, March 31, the first model of the mass-produced electric car built in North America in decades rolled off the lines to the flash of cameras. The last-day-of-the-month event came just eight months before 2011 Volts arrive at selected dealerships for sale. The 2011 Chevy Volt, known as an extended-range electric vehicle, offers up to 40 miles of electric range from its...

  • 2010 GM EN-V Concept
    GM's Future City-Car Vision: Autonomous, Electric, Two-Wheeler

    What does personal transportation look like in a new century, when more than 60 percent of the world's citizens live in cities and the number of vehicles on the globe could rise to 2 billion? Would future urbanites accept the idea of moving around in pod-shaped electric two-seaters with only two...

  • 2009 dodge ram pickup 001
    Chrysler Kills Ram Two-Mode Hybrid Pickup Truck After All

    The big green car news from Chrysler yesterday was its announcement that it would build an electric version of the Fiat 500 mini-car for the U.S. market. Win one, lose one, perhaps. The company also dropped a death notice: It has ended development of its Ram Two-Mode Hybrid pickup truck, scheduled...

  • Denise Gray, director of global battery systems engineering, General Motors
    BREAKING: GM Battery Czar Denise Gray Leaves Volt Team For California Startup

    A key member of the small team brought together four years ago to create the 2011 Chevrolet Volt electric car is unexpectedly leaving General Motors. Denise Gray, director of global battery systems engineering at General Motors, will leave the company on Friday, March 5, to take an unspecified...

  • 2010 Chevrolet Equinox LT
    2010 Detroit Auto Show: Lutz Lays Out (Some) GM Plug-In Plans

    Cleaning up a few odds and ends from last week's 2010 Detroit Auto Show brings us to General Motors' future product plans for plug-in hybrids. In the crush of reporters asking questions (known as the "scrum") after a GM announcement, a few more nuggets came to light. GM showed its striking and...

  • Cadillac XTS Platinum Concept
    2010 Detroit Auto Show: Cadillac XTS Concept Revives GM's Plug-In Hybrid Hopes

    Say "luxury hybrid," and very few people think of Cadillac. Sure, the Escalade Hybrid large luxury sport-utility vehicle has been around for a few years, but Cadillac has no hybrid sedans. That may be about to change, if the Cadillac XTS Platinum Concept unveiled this morning at the Detroit Auto...

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