GM is looking for a big PR push with the Chevy Volt, and their announcement that the new Chevy Volt will get 230 miles per gallon will certainly grab some positive attention for the beleaguered company.

General Motors Co. said today the Chevrolet Volt, its extended-range electric vehicle due out in November 2010, will get an estimated city fuel economy of 230 mpg, or 25 kilowatt hours per 100 miles.

GM will unveil 25 new models between now and the end of 2011, president and CEO Fritz Henderson said during an hour-long webcast this morning.

“When the Chevrolet Volt extended-range electric vehicle rolls off the assembly line late next year, it will be the first mass-production automobile to achieve triple-digit fuel economy, with an expected 230 mpg in the city, or 25 kilowatt hours per 100 miles,” GM said.

The Environmental Protection Agency declined to confirm the figure, which was based on a draft testing procedure. GM said the calculation is based on more than one vehicle electrical charge, since the average driver travels far less than 100 miles in a single day.

“EPA has not tested a Chevy Volt and therefore cannot confirm the fuel economy values claimed by GM,” said EPA spokeswoman Cathy Milbourn.

“EPA does applaud GM’s commitment to designing and building the car of the future: an American-made car that will save families money, significantly reduce our dependence on foreign oil and create good-paying American jobs.”

In recent days, GM had launched a “viral” marketing campaign featuring a green background and a “230″ logo — with a plug in the place of the 0 — to build interest in today’s announcement. Many auto bloggers correctly guessed that the figure was connected to the Volt’s city fuel economy rating.

The viral campaign is another good idea, and it looks like we really might have a “new GM.”

That said, the important story here is we’re seeing a plug-in hybrid that will potentially be a game-changer in the auto business. For a country that imports a ton of foreign oil, it’s refreshing to see real progress on electric vehicles.

Of course, not everyone is impressed, including Nissan.

But at least one competing automaker isn’t convinced. “Nissan Leaf = 367 mpg, no tailpipe, and no gas required. Oh yeah, and it’ll be affordable too,” the folks over at Nissan’s electric vehicle Twitter feed wrote today. About an hour later, they added this statement: “To clarify our previous tweet, the DOE formula estimates 367mpg for Nissan LEAF.”

That’s even more great news. It looks like there will be serious competition here from other automakers, so perhaps consumers will have real choices, and we can make real progress towards a goal of eliminating oil imports.

Ford’s EcoBoost engine will now include a V-6 option.

Ford’s EcoBoosted future has long been known to include a four cylinder option, and now the automaker has finally made some details official during a global product presentation today in Detroit.

Set to hit the market sometime in 2010, the 2.0-liter block will be the first engine in Ford’s EcoBoost lineup to employ a twin-independent variable cam timing system (Ti-VCT). Ford says the engine will deliver 10 to 20 percent better fuel economy than larger displacement V-6s, all while delivering similar power numbers.

The new engine will be produced in Northeast Ohio, and that’s welcome news to a region struggling with the loss of manufacturing jobs, which has only gotten worse with the economic crisis.

After two years of idling, Ford Motor Co.’s Engine Plant No. 1 re-opened Tuesday with the new leaner, cleaner EcoBoost engine.

The cutting edge 3.5-liter engine — which will equip 90 percent of Ford vehicles — is the first V-6 direct-injection, twin-turbocharged engine produced in North America and will be produced exclusively at the Brook Park site.

It’s a welcome sight at a facility that has struggled in recent times.

“This is the engine of the future. We’re really proud that the finest engine makers in the world are right here in Brook Park and the finest engines in the world are right here in Brook Park. With the new designs, there’s a lot of reasons to want to buy a Ford product. It’s a breath of fresh air and in this economy, we need to hear as much good news as possible,” said Mayor Mark Elliott.

Ford is hoping that this will give consumers more options, such as customers who are leaving large, V-8-powered SUVs but need towing capacity, who can now consider the top-level version of the Flex crossover due to the new, more powerful engine.

Will buying a hybrid save you money on your auto insurance? That might not be a good assumption given this recent data.

Hybrid car owners may be a different shade of green than their insurers hoped.

Insurance companies often give discounts to drivers of hybrids, perhaps because the image of a tree-hugging environmentalist suggests a cautious type who is a good risk to insure. But hybrid drivers rack up more miles, more tickets and costlier accidents than conventional car drivers, according to a study released Wednesday.

“High-mileage drivers seem to be attracted to [hybrid] vehicles,” said Raj Bhat, president of Quality Planning Corp., the San Francisco firm that conducted a study of 360,000 vehicle-insurance claims made to 12 U.S. insurers over the last two years, comparing hybrid and conventional vehicles. Quality Planning is a unit of Insurance Services Office Inc., a closely held group of companies that provides data, analytics and other services.

The disconnect between perception and reality could leave insurers with unprofitable hybrid policies unless they adjust pricing to reflect the unexpectedly high costs, or make up the difference elsewhere, said Robert U’Ren, senior vice president of Quality Planning, in an interview.

For 2008 hybrid cars, the most recent model year it studied, Quality Planning found that the cost to insurers of providing collision coverage for hybrids was 13% higher than for conventional vehicles. The cost of providing comprehensive coverage, which also includes the expense of noncollision-related damage, was 17% higher. For older and particularly for larger hybrid models, the difference was even bigger. U’Ren said that the more complicated hybrid engine design likely accounted for much of the difference in cost.

The article goes on to explain that most insurance companies have not made significant adjustments relating to premiums and coverage for hybrid cars, and several insurance companies, including Farmers Group Inc., a subsidiary of Zurich Financial Services AG, and Travelers offer hybrid owners up to 10% off coverage prices. It will be interesting to see how this develops as more data becomes available.

Wired.com’s Autotopia blog has a cool post of five auto-related terms that will be dying out soon along with five new terms that we’ll need to become familiar with. You’ll soon be forgetting terms like gas pedal, MPG, throttle, transmission and tachometer. Here’s one of the new ones:

Parallel vs. series hybrid – These terms have so far been relegated to the geeks, but as the industry progresses and hybrids of all stripes become more common, you’ll want to know the difference. They refer to how the gasoline engine and electric motor are configured. A parallel hybrid like the Toyota Prius uses a traditional transmission to couple the gasoline engine and electric motor to the wheels. Such vehicles use internal combustion and electricity to drive the wheels. A series hybrid like the Chevrolet Volt does away with the transmission because the engine drives a generator that takes over when the battery runs down. The electric motor is the only thing driving the wheels. Many see the series hybrid as the “true” hybrid configuration minimizing energy loss due to wasteful idle engine spinning friction.

Also, get ready to hear the following terms as well: Lithium-ion battery, continuous vs. peak power, kilowatt-hour vs. kilowatt and drive-by-wire.

Fiat’s Sergio Marchionne said he needed scale to compete, and now he’s plowing forward in China.

The Fiat Group announced a 50-50 joint venture on Monday with the Guangzhou Automobile Group to make cars and engines for the Chinese market, the latest move by the Italian automaker to expand outside its home market.

The companies said they would build a 173-acre plant in Changsha, in Hunan province, at a cost of more than $556 million, with production to begin by late 2011.

Upon completion of the first phase of development, the venture will have the capacity to make 140,000 cars and 220,000 engines a year.

The companies said capacity at the plant, which will make fuel-efficient, low-emission vehicles, could eventually be increased to 250,000 cars and 300,000 engines a year.

Sergio Marchionne, Fiat’s chief executive, has described the world’s carmakers as being in a struggle for survival, with only those of sufficient scale and efficiency capable of riding out the crisis. Fiat, which had revenue last year of $83 billion, acquired a controlling 20 percent stake in Chrysler Group LLC in June to gain access to the North American market.

The Guangzhou Automobile Group, a state-owned holding company, had 2008 revenue of $16 billion.

The company, which has joint ventures with major partners including Honda Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp., said it delivered more than 530,000 cars to customers last year.

Fiat has been looking for a new Chinese partner since it terminated a venture with Nanjing Auto in late 2007. A planned joint venture with Chery Automobile, China’s largest domestic carmaker, was to start production this year, but the project was put on indefinite hold in March.

Marchionne also said that Fiat is still interested in Opel as well.

Tesla will not make any immediate changes to the battery for it’s new sedan.

Large format battery cells will slowly gain a foothold on the automotive EV market in the coming years. Companies such as LG Chem, A123 Systems, and EnerDel have been hard at work developing the large format automotive specific batteries, but Tesla still insists that the laptop format, as used in their Roadster, is the best thing going right now.

According to Tesla, the laptop battery offers proven performance at an affordable price. With mass production of this type of battery ongoing for several decades now, the technology has advanced beyond that of current large format batteries. As Tesla has indicated, the mass economies that surround laptop batteries have increased competition, driven technological advances, and reduced prices making them perfectly suitable for cars.

Tesla recently received a loan from the federal government, and it will be interesting to see how he battery issue plays out over time.

Tesla Motors, an electric-car company in California that sells a high-end roadster, will use some of $465 million in loans now to build a plant in Southern California to make its new Model S sedan. The rest will be used later for a plant in Northern California to make battery packs and electric drivetrains to be used in other carmakers’ vehicles.

Bob Westal takes a look at the 2006 documentary:

With a share of General Motors running just a bit above the price of a single Hot Wheels car, this seems like an opportune time to catch-up with this surprisingly upbeat 2006 documentary covering perhaps the worst single piece of corporate strategy in business history. Directed by first-timer Chris Paine, with assists from big-time executive producer Dean Devlin and super-documentarian Alex Gibney, “Who Killed the Electric Car?” starts off as an earnest, L.A.-centric, paean to the efforts of activist drivers to fight GM’s very literal trashing of the all-electric EV-1 — launched in 1996 on a lease-only arrangement after California emissions rules forced auto companies to explore non-polluting vehicles. After spending time with such once-satisfied EV-1 customers as actors Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, Peter Horton, Alexandra Paul, and comedienne Phyllis Diller, the film switches gears to becomes a far more interesting industrial whodunit, examining the corporate and the political forces that led to the car’s passive-aggressive treatment by GM.

The green revolution is in high gear! Inhabitat covers the Geneva Motor Show and picks its five green favorites: The Infiniti Essence (pictured above), the Chevrolet Spark, the Volkswagon Bluemotion Polo, the Ford losis Max, and the Dacia Duster.

All of them are cool cars, and thiagain demonstrates that the new push for green techology can lead to an explosion of innovation. We do not need to continue our addiction to oil. It’s now just a matter of time, and these cars show that the transition can be fun as well.

Will Tesla get its loan? It’s not clear at this point.

Tesla Motors said its long-awaited $450 million loan from the federal government could come as soon as this summer, a crucial factor in its plans to build an electric-car factory in California.

“I am excited to report that the Department of Energy informed Tesla last week that they expect to disburse funds … within four or five months,” Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive and chairman, wrote in a newsletter distributed to customers Wednesday.

Tesla, based in San Carlos, stopped short of saying its loan application had been approved. Indeed, an Energy Department spokeswoman said Wednesday that her agency “has made no final decisions for specific applications for the auto-loan program.”

Still, Tesla is optimistic the department will approve its request for money from the $25 billion loan program to retool U.S. factories to make more fuel-efficient cars and trucks, said Diarmuid O’Connell, the company’s director of corporate development. Tesla has asked for $350 million to retrofit a factory to assemble its Model S electric sedan and $100 million for its battery-supply business.

“We have a high degree of confidence,” O’Connell said. For one thing, he said, Tesla has asked for a small amount compared with the Detroit Three automakers, which have requested $5 billion or more each.

Of the 75 companies that requested funds under the program, only 26, including Tesla, were told that their applications were “substantially complete,” he said.

I’d like to see them get it. The technology is impessive, and Musk hasn’t been shy about putting his own money behind the venture. BusinessWeek explains that Tesla needs to convince the government that it has a viable strategy.

Eager to build a sedan, Musk is pinning his hopes on the U.S. Energy Dept. The DOE is offering two kinds of credit lines: one for companies working on alternative energy projects and another for carmakers developing green vehicles. Automakers may apply for both kinds of credit, which they can access as projects hit key milestones.

To qualify for DOE money, Musk needs to prove Tesla is viable. “We’ll be profitable in five months,” he says. He also needs to raise tens of millions of dollars in matching funds. In what some industry watchers deem an act of desperation, Musk aims to ask potential buyers of the new sedan to pay a big chunk of the $50,000 sticker price up front. Yet the car won’t be ready until 2011—and only if the government gives him credit. Musk acknowledges customers would put “their money at risk.” He also has been trying to get Roadster owners and buyers to fork over $12,000 for a future replacement battery—even though the one in their cars is supposed to last well into the next decade.

Tesla is making other changes to get money fast. The company has scrapped plans for a brand-new factory in San Jose, Calif., opting instead to look for an old, idle industrial site where it could build a factory to make Model S cars and batteries. Tesla needs government loans for both projects, and loan applications that intend to use existing facilities get preference from the DOE. So Tesla may get money faster that way, if it gets approved. The company says it is negotiating deals for some industrial property for both sites and may have news soon.

Companies like GM have the advantage of scale, but Tesla’s all-electric sedan could be a sensation.

For years, the Big Three automakers fought efforts in Congress to increase mileage standards. Now we’re all paying the price.

Given the gas price shock last summer and the current economic crisis, Ford is rediscovering some old techniques to help them improve gas mileage in its vehicles.

As fuel-economy standards get tougher, auto companies are peering into a future where next-generation electric vehicles and advanced hybrids beckon. But these days, Ford Motor executives have one eye on the future and one on the past. Ford is dusting off a host of old ideas for boosting gas mileage and slashing emissions. Some of these concepts were dreamed up decades ago, deployed in lots of small European cars, and vigorously promoted by environmentalists. But in Detroit, the technology has mostly sat on the shelf.

Not anymore. Ford now emphasizes fuel economy across its whole lineup. And for its 2011 Explorer the company is making prominent use of such “retro” green technology as lighter-weight steel body parts and “direct injection” engine technology. This technique, which dates to the 1940s, feeds gas and air straight into the engine cylinder instead of premixing it, resulting in a more efficient fuel burn. Together, the technologies could allow the new Explorer to reach highway fuel economy of 30 miles per gallon, upstaging Toyota’s Highlander hybrid, which gets 25 mpg. “There is a lot we can do to get meaningful fuel-economy improvements without going all the way into electrics,” says Ford’s global product development chief, Derrick Kuzak.

It’s about time.