Exactly nine weeks ago we were shown a countdown clock in front of the office of Andrew Farah, the Chevy Volt’s chief engineer.  That countdown clock was clicking off the days until the start of the first Chevy Volt integration vehicle build.  The integration vehicle, or IVer, is an actual full functioning Chevy Volt with authentic exterior, interior, and powertrain.  It is in effect, fully production intent. Today is the day says Andrew, “We will start general assembly build, what that means is the body in white comes out of the body shop and is positioned at the beginning of this pre-production assembly line over at the Warren Tech center. The whistle blows, all the parts are in line, and they start doing it.” “The first ones go very slowly (and) we call them template builds and they take about 2 weeks,” he says. “Eventually we’ll be able to crank them out at ten a week.” “My goal is for forth of July to be driving more than one,” he says. GM expects to build over 100 of these integration vehicles before moving to the next stage which are known as validation cars. Those will be assembled in gradually increasing quantities on the actual assembly line at the Detroit-Hamtramck plant in 2010, eventually ramping into the actual saleable production cars.

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