GM sees "showdown" with Toyota on electric car

By Kevin Krolicki

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - General Motors Corp is on track to road test its Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid early next year and to produce the rechargeable car by late 2010, setting the stage for a "showdown" with Toyota Motor Corp., a senior GM executive on Wednesday.

As the race to bring a mass-market, rechargeable electric vehicle to market heats up, Bob Lutz, GM's head of global product development, said the largest U.S. automaker remained on track to launch the Chevy Volt in November 2010.

"A lot of our team members working on the Volt keep telling us how aggressive that is," Lutz said at the Los Angeles auto show. "And it is aggressive, but we're not going to let up on it."

"The target is by the end of the first quarter (of 2008) we will have street-drivable prototypes on which we confidently expect to be able to demonstrate the electric drive," Lutz said.

GM is the only automaker to have provided a timeline on the production of a plug-in hybrid vehicle, even though other companies, such as Ford Motor Co and Toyota Motor Corp.

are working on similar technology.

Toyota executives have said they do not expect lithium-ion batteries to be ready for use in the company's market-leading Prius hybrid by GM's 2010 timetable.

Lutz said that difference in viewpoint set the stage for a "showdown" between GM and Toyota at a time when the Japanese automaker is on the verge of overtaking GM for the industry's No. 1 spot in terms of global sales.