To paraphrase an old saw, "The electric car is dead; long live the electric car." What might be the single most important piece of news to come out of the Detroit auto show this week is that the very company accused of killing and burying the electric car is bringing one to a dealership near you—probably before the end of this decade.

Among the many concepts announced at Detroit and covered by everyone, the Chevy Volt has probably gotten the most attention. In the waning hours of the show's press days, just before we left town and headed to the airport, we happened by the GM stand to get a closer look at the Volt. There we had an interesting conversation with one of the concept car's critical creators, its chief engineer, Tony Posawatz.

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He made it abundantly clear that GM has leapfrogged over the current (no pun intended) favorite car of environmentalists, the plug-in hybrid. The Volt is an electric car (click here to see animation of how it works). But while it can be recharged overnight via a wall-outlet, like the plug-in hybrid, the Volt's battery pack can be recharged while the car is driving. It carries its own on-board generator. As it sits, this is an electric car with a theoretical range of more than 600 miles.

While the generating system shown in the Volt at the show relies on a small gasoline engine, future versions will have small diesel engines and others will rely on a hydrogen fuel cell to recharge the batteries. But all of these concepts run off battery power. This is the rebirth of the electric car.

It's that battery pack, by the way, that differentiates the Volt's drivetrain from your basic diesel/electric locomotive, which uses a diesel engine to drive a generator that drives an electric motor—there's no electric storage device such as a battery pack. That's why the locomotive's diesel is always running—and at optimum speed. A system like that in a car wouldn't do too much to lower fuel consumption and greenhouse gases. A small internal combustion engine that runs only when and for as long as needed is much more efficient. And a power source, like a battery pack, can deliver large wallops of short-burst energy for getting going quickly from a stop—something your basic locomotive can't do.>

So in one fell swoop, GM may have relegated plug-in hybrids obsolete before they even became widespread. Unfortunately, the Volt faces the same hurdle as every electric car before it: better batteries. —Don Chaikin


Bob Lutz, General Motors' vice chairman of global product development, introducing the Chevy Volt Concept at the 2007 Detroit Auto Show. PHOTOGRAPH BY JIM DUNNE (CLICK TO ENLARGE)

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