Will The Chevy Volt Rejuvenate General Motors?

He stands all day, bent over noisy machines, cutting giant sheets of steel and feeding them into monster-sized presses so powerful the concrete floor rumbles beneath his size-16 feet.

This is how Steve Prucnell builds cars.

In 22 years, the parts haven't changed much. A car's a car. But then another project came along, something totally different.

After decades of building hundreds of cars -- everything from Corvettes to Saturns to Silverados -- Prucnell took a giant leap into the future, joining the team that built test models of the Chevy Volt, General Motors' new electric car. It's a high-risk, high-profile venture and Prucnell is understandably nervous.

Maybe it's the 13 foreclosure signs that popped up on his street. Or turning 50 in a struggling industry. Or working for a company that needed a $52-billion loan from the U.S. Treasury to stay alive. Whatever the reason, Prucnell is keeping his fingers crossed, hoping America is ready for a new kind of love affair -- battery included.

The Volt could help usher in a new generation of electric cars, but there's more at stake here than a technological breakthrough: The fate of GM and its workers. The future of a beleaguered state. And, maybe, in some larger sense, the image of all U.S. autoworkers, eager to prove they have what it takes to compete on the global stage.

The moment of truth is coming, and Steve Prucnell feels the pressure.

"If this doesn't fly, what's left for GM?" he asks, his 6-foot-6 frame hunched over while taking a break in the union hall near the GM Tech Center. "Wall Street is going to say, 'We knew they couldn't dig themselves out of the hole.'"

There was, Prucnell says, a different vibe building the Volt. It wasn't just the intense scrutiny from above. It was the anxiety down below, on the shop floor.

"I don't want to say that we worked harder on this," Prucnell says. "I think we worked a lot smarter. I mean everybody was on their 'A' game. It wasn't, 'No, that's good enough.' It was, 'We want to make sure we're perfect.'"

"We know the Volt is the last hurrah for GM," he adds. "It's either do or die."



Source: Automotive News