It's sometimes difficult to restrain oneself, much less one's company. Every innovation is born of a huge measure of optimism and confidence that this is the solution for the market. When the Drive for Innovation rolled into Boston in the fall of 2011, we hadn't heard of XL Hybrids. Today, we did, as the company announced a supplier deal with

PHOENIX–Sometimes the biggest, most-ambitious projects end quietly and simply. A small group of executives from Avnet Electronics Marketing, including president Ed Smith and marketing VP Ian Basey, and I gathered in the company's headquarters this month as the good folks from the charitable organization Chances for Children took ownership of our home for the past year, the red Chevy Volt.

By John Scott-Thomas, TechInsights The Chevrolet Volt is GM’s atonement for the cancellation of its first modern electric vehicle, the EV1, and a potent attempt to create a bold new technical future. The Volt’s control systems are among the most elaborate ever created. Close to 100 microprocessors are in the car, and over 10 million lines of software are used; a Boeing

03/07/12 By Charles Murray, Senior Technical Editor, Electronics & Test for DesignNews The temporary halt in the production of the Chevy Volt isn't a sign that the Volt is dead or that electric cars are disappearing, but rather that General Motors executives must now separate the Volt's hype from its real value in the marketplace. The five-week shutdown, announced on

Here's a quick update on news about our favorite innovation metaphor and automotive magic carpet, the Chevy Volt. Ours is running just fine (just finished 2,100 miles through the South!). However, General Motors announced it will idle production for a few weeks to give demand a chance to catch up with supply.   [View the story "Chevy Volt Production halted"

02/02/12 Under the hood: GM blueprint for Volt 2.0

Success only succeeds in large companies if the entire organization buys into the mission. So I'm concerned that the astonishing engineering effort that produced the Chevrolet Volt will end up fizzling out because GM's CEO, Daniel Akerson, hasn't bought into the mission. Reuters reporter Larry Ingrassia, a longtime Wall Street Journal automotive industry observer, interviewed Akerson on camera, primarily to

GM Chairman Daniel Akerson came out today, amid the controversy and federal investigation into Chevy Volt battery fires, to say the battery may be redesigned. "…We're just gonna take a timeout if you will in terms of redesigning the battery possibly," Akerson said in an interview with Reuters (see full video interview below). If you've followed us and the issue,

  General Motors this week said it would give loaner cars to all 6,000 Chevy Volt owners (should they want them) while federal investigators try to figure out why the electric vehicles' batteries are exploding and catching fire in crash-tests.   We won't be taking them up on it. There have been three car fires (all caused by federal investigators