The Chevrolet Volt promised a revolution. A revolution of propulsion, of design and for a newly-adventurous General Motors. Sadly, it failed to sell in significant numbers. Yet there is little wrong with the Volt in itself, and a lot that is right. And yes, genuinely revolutionary.

This car, and its slightly more handsome Vauxhall Ampera cousin, are so rare in Britain that it’s worth reminding ourselves what this revolution is. Which is an E-REV, or extended-range electric vehicle. Today, we’d probably call it a plug-in hybrid.

On battery power alone, it’s capable of travelling 30-50 miles, which is more than enough for most commutes. When your volt and amp supply is exhausted, you have an 86hp petrol engine that kicks in to part-replenish the battery and provide the 150hp electric motor with juice. This enables you to travel another 310 miles without plugging into a power supply or pumping petrol into the tank.

The revolutionary part of all this is that you have a zero-emissions electric vehicle with a decent range when the battery’s exhausted, a pretty economical car when the petrol generator is running and a spectacularly economical car when it’s running on electricity alone. And a spectacularly green one, should the electricity used to recharge it come from a renewable source.

Taking on Toyota

All of which sounds relatively simple conceptually, but it required a gargantuan research and development push (and pile of money) from GM to realise. Its tasks included the development of lithium-ion battery packs for safe use in cars, and evolving safety systems that would enable the Volt to score the full five stars in Euro NCAP crash tests.

Indeed, when GM triggered the serious investment phase in the programme, the project’s bosses freely admitted that they weren’t actually sure that the Volt could be developed for the showroom because the battery technology wasn’t where it needed to be.

Which might make you wonder why GM wanted to make such a large bet on a semi-unknown technology. There are lots of reasons, of course, but a major one was that this often troubled organisation began to get fed-up with the positive PR that Toyota was getting with its Prius hybrid, and how few glowing column inches GM was winning for its (admittedly not-for-sale) fuel cell initiatives, the cost-effective hybrid system it had developed for its big trucks and the fact that its recently acquired Hummer brand was being vilified, despite its trucks being no more thirsty than many rivals.

Plenty of the kicking was justified – a Breaking Bad Pontiac Aztec, anyone? – but not all of it was, and a man getting particularly cheesed off with this situation was one Bob Lutz.

Lutz actually

Car guy, business book author, fighter jet flyer, classic car collector and serially successful auto executive, Lutz made several failed attempts to convince his bosses that GM should build a new electric car to take on Toyota.

That his bosses were reluctant is understandable when you consider their all-too-recent memories of the ill-starred, patchily admired, feature-film-inspiring PR disaster that was the EV1. GM eventually crushed most of these neat and rapid little electric coupes, squeezing the life out of any PR advantage they might have garnered and prompting widespread (and misguided) accusations that General Motors had killed the electric car. It hadn’t, but it could certainly have handled the project better.

So Lutz’s attempts to trigger a new EV project were repeatedly batted away, until the day that Tesla launched its Elise-based Roadster with a lithium-ion battery pack, a 200-mile range and a 0-60mph time of 4.0 seconds. That a Silicon Valley start-up was showing GM the way was enough to get Lutz a grudging go-ahead and the chance, he hoped, to win back some of Toyota’s hybrid advantage.

Danger! High Voltage

His electric car very rapidly turned into something else when engineering colleague Jon Lauckner persuaded Lutz, with the aid of a pad and a gold-nibbed fountain pen, that what was needed was a range-extending hybrid and not a pure EV. The batteries required to give an EV a decent range (i.e. something a lot more than the 100 miles possible at the time) would have been more expensive than the entire car at that point, argued Lauckner. He saw a range-extender as a way to reduce the size and price of the battery pack to relatively affordable levels.

GM showed a sleek concept called the Volt at the 2007 Detroit show, which won the kind of headlines Lutz was dreaming of, and gave GM the headache of delivering on its promise – something this American giant often failed to do. Four long years and many press briefings later, a Volt emerged that looked nothing like the original, whose shape sliced air about as cleanly as a combine harvester. But it certainly contained the promised technology and, what’s more, it worked.

True, there were some early troubles. GM’s foolish claim that the Volt only ever ran on electric power was eventually uncovered, the petrol generator engine occasionally lending a direct hand when the car was running flat-out to save the battery. A fire from a parked test car didn’t help its case either, but mostly the reviews were positive. Positive enough to win it a heap of awards, including the 2011 World Green Car of the Year.

The cost of going green

But none of this was enough to overcome the one big problem with this revolution: it was not a revolution of the people. The Volt and Ampera were simply too expensive to silently glide onto people’s radar. Even after generous government subsidies here and in the US, the pair cost getting on for twice the price of a similarly-sized Vauxhall Astra or Chevrolet Cruze.

There was the further drawback of only four seats rather than the usual five, the bulky T-shaped battery pack stealing the back bench’s middle seat. And the Lehman Brothers stole much of the Volt’s PR thunder, the collapse of this bank and the subsequent whirlwind economic depression tipping General Motors into bankruptcy. Suddenly, the angst over Toyota’s perpetual PR advantage was dwarfed by GM’s need for survival.

By the time a leaner, more humble General Motors had emerged, the Volt’s moment in the sun was passing, and the realisation that fuel prices simply weren’t high enough to interest American buyers in amazing fuel consumption were undermining its economic case. The payback period for the extra outlay required to acquire a Volt over an equivalent Cruze has never been definitely calculated (although many have tried) but there’s no question it amounted to eight years or more. And that was too long.

That led to GM selling far too few Volts, with only 65,000 finding buyers in the US. At one point, former GM boss Dan Akerson reckoned on selling 60,000 a year in North America alone. Now plug-in hybrids have become commonplace, seen as a stepping stone to fully electric cars. It seems the Volt and Ampera just arrived too soon.

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Ford knew it had a problem. How it came to have this problem is a little harder to understand.

Nonetheless, in the few remaining months before the 1994 Scorpio’s launch, Ford’s communications machine realised that it must try to adjust the minds of the media – and fast.

What it had to talk up, explain or, at worst, excuse, was the look of the company’s new big car. A few scoop pictures had appeared in the press, and with them some uncomfortably acidic words.

Granny annexed

Before all this, the Ford Granada had been a comfortably familiar machine, the population well used to the bold, almost Citroen-esque car that had arrived in 1985.

This smooth-nosed, curve-windowed hatchback was an arresting contrast to the quietly handsome, square-jawed Granada that had gone before. However, people were better prepared for the shock of the Blue Oval’s new; the jarring arrival of the Sierra three years earlier had thoroughly softened their senses.

The Granada sold well, its spectacular cabin space, comfortable ride and practicality winning sales, as did its standard ABS brakes and a long list of equipment. Those unable to adjust to its hatchback silhouette were eventually offered a saloon or estate.

The birth of the Scorpio

By the mid-1990s, though, the Granada needed renewing. Ford had already performed one minor facelift and should have replaced the car completely, given its age. But the market for executive models from mainstream makers was dying, so it chose a light mechanical upgrade and reskin instead. With this came a rebadging to Scorpio, this name used for the high-end Granadas in Britain and the entire model line-up elsewhere.

The word ‘reskin’, however, doesn’t really describe the transformation effected. The usual battery of words from the designer’s lexicon, such as ‘stance’, ‘dynamic’, ‘looks like it’s moving when it’s standing still’, ‘proportion’ and ‘muscularity’ didn’t really do it either.

Instead, you had to reach for adjectives used for some of the less winsome of Earth’s creatures; the Scorpio resembled something that David Attenborough might reveal from a dank cave in Borneo.

The front end was particularly troubling, your eyes irresistibly drawn to it before your brain fought over whether to focus upon the globular triangles of its headlights, or the reptilian gurn of its grille. With a face like this, the new Scorpio’s oddly fat flanks were easy to pass over until you arrived at a plump rear end that resembled a giant cushion.

Decorating it like an ill-chosen necklace was a gratuitously narrow strip of chrome-capped lights. Apart from the uncertain use of glitter, this was a tail that seemed to have nothing in common with the Scorpio’s nose beyond the doors that joined them.

This, of course, prompted many to mouth that old cliché about the car’s front-end being designed by people who had never been allowed anywhere near its rear.

‘Gargoyle-ugly’

So, the new Scorpio was gargoyle-ugly. And all of a sudden the press was going to be shown the car, months before any test-drives, in an effort to persuade them that black was actually white. The indoctrination was to take place at Ford’s engineering and design centre in Cologne.

New European design boss Fritz Mayhew, who defended the car stoutly, despite having no hand in it, kicked off the proceedings. And he gave the assembled hacks, your reporter included, an interesting and very plausible account of where car design had been heading during the past decade.

This was towards a uniformly bland, identikit look with grille-less noses, flat flanks and rounded corners that made loads of European cars – Fords included, although he didn’t say that – look two-dimensional, rather than three. And he was not wrong.

Prescient Ford?

The antidote to this, Mayhew reckoned, would be the re-emergence of the radiator grille (as per the facelifted Rover 800, which was now outselling the Granada), the dawn of more sculptural lamps and the return of chrome trim.

Mayhew was right about all of this – these trends are still in vogue today – and he was right about the shift towards more curvaceous and less blocky dashboards, too.

Then came a quick-fire sequence of pictures of handsome classic cars, each with distinctive front grilles. Surprisingly, given what the 800 was doing to Granada sales, the first of these was of a Rover P5, followed by an Austin-Healey 3000, Bristol 401, Jaguar XK120, Facel Vega and Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider.

There was much admiration in the room for Ford’s willingness to acknowledge the existence of good design from other carmakers, something that big corporations can rarely bring themselves to do. But admiration was in short supply when the new Scorpio was unveiled, mostly to looks of wonderment. And not of the positive kind.

Still, you couldn’t argue with the design’s content. The new Scorpio was distinctive, rather than Euro-clone in its looks. It had a face, it had chrome and it had a strikingly curvaceous dashboard, though much of this was filled with nasty ‘Timberlex’ wood rather than the aluminium that Ford’s designers had presciently reckoned it should flaunt.

A struggle for sales

Mayhew considered the Scorpio a signpost towards a newly individual design trend for Ford, rather than a breakthrough look – even if this was a worryingly unpromising start.

The Scorpio also proved worryingly unpromising in showrooms, the new car struggling to sell despite a considerable improvement in how it drove. Ford’s designers gave it one more tweak two years before its death in 1998, darkening its headlights (see above) to make it look less bug-eyed.

Yet despite its unsettling aesthetics, the Scorpio previewed a rich era for Ford styling, the company’s adventurous ‘New Edge’ design philosophy producing ground-breakers such as the 1996 Ka and 1998 Focus. The success of these quickly eclipsed the embarrassment of the Scorpio.

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