akerson with us, and you know the reteen here. swearing in and then the five minutes and we go from there. raise your right hand. solemnly swear or affirm the testimony you're about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

let the record show the witness answered in the affirmative. you were here for the first panel, get five minutes, lenient with that time as you saw, and then we'll go to questioning and hopefully get this done before we have to go to vote. >> i did the same thing, turn on the microphone there if you would, and then just pull it close. should have a red light there. >> got it. >> there go. >> good morning. i welcome the opportunity to testify today and stand bind a car that all of us at general motors are proud of. allow me to start with some volt history. gm unvailed the volt con cement at the january 2007 detroit auto show. in june of 2008, the old gm's board of directors approved the volt product for production well

before the bankruptcy and the infusion of government funds. the battery story goes back much further in the early 1990s with gm's work on the ev1. drawing on that experience, we engineered the volt to be a winner on the road and in customer's hearts and proud to say the volt is performing exactly as we engineered it. in the first year, it garnered the triple crown of industry awards, motor trend car of the year, automobile magazine automobile of the year, and north american car of the year. volt is among the safest cars on the road earning five stars for occupant safety and a top safety pick with the insurance institute for highway safety. in 93% of volt owners report the highest customer satisfaction with the car, more than any other vehicle and highest ever

recorded in the industry. beyond the accolades, the volt's importance to gm and country's long term prospects is far reaching. we germinged the volt to be the only ev that you can drive across town or across the country without fear of being stranded when the battery is dead. you can go 35 miles, and in some cases much more, on a single charge, which is for 80% of american drivers is their total driving range. after that, a small gas engine extends your range to 375 miles, roughly, before you have to recharge or refill. if the volt message boards are indications there's some real one upsmanship going on a there. customers reported going months and thousands of miles without stopping once at the gas pump. no other ev can do this or

generate that much passion for its drivers. we engineered the volt to give drivers a choice to use energy produced in the united states rather than from oil from places that may not put america's best interests first. we engineered the volt to show the world what great vehicles we make at general motors. unfortunately, there's one thing we did not engineer. although we loaded the volt with state of the art safety features, we did not create the volt to be a political punching bag, and sadly, that's what it's become. for all of the loose talk about fires, we're here today bout tests resulted in a fire under lab conditions that no driver would experience in real world. in fact, customers drove over 2500 miles without a single similar incident. in one test, the fire took

occurred seven days after a simulated crash. in another, it took three weeks after the test. not three minutes. not three hours. not three days. three weeks. based on those test results, did we think there was an imminent safety risk? no. as one customer put it, if they couldn't cut him out of a vehicle in two or three weeks, he had a bigger problem to worry about. however, begin those test results, gm had a choice in how it would react. it was an easy call. we put our customers first. we moved fast with great transparency to engineer a solution. we contacted every volt owner and offered them a loaner car until the issue was settled. if that was not enough, we offered to buy the car back.

we assembled a team of engineers who worked nonstop to develop a modest enhancement to the battery system to address the issue. we'll begin adding that enhancement on the production line and in customer cars in a few weeks. in doing so, we took a five-star rated vehicle and made it even safer. nonetheless, these events have cast an undeserved, damaging light on a promising new technology that we're exporting around the world right from detroit. as the "wall street journal" wrote in its volt review, "we should suspend our ranker and savor a little american pride. a bunch of mid western engineers, bad haircuts, and cheap wristwatches just out engineered every other car company on the planet." the volt is safe. it's a marvelous machine

representing so much about what's right about general motors and frankly, about american ingenuity and manufacturing. i look forward to taking your questions. thank you. >> thank you, mr. akerson, we yh us today and the fact you talked about you contacted every volt owner over the response you took when this was brought to the public's attention. in your opinion, mr. akerson, should they have known to drain the battery -- when they conducted the test, subjected it to a crash, took it to a lot and let it set there, shouldn't they have known that they needed to drain the battery? >> i can only speak for general motors and the protocols within the industry. the protocol on whether it's a combustion engine or an electric assist as the volt is, is the

disconnect the battery, the 12-volt battery in a combustion engine car and drain the gas. our protocol at the time with the understanding and the background that this is a new and evolving technology was the battery, the 12-volt battery's disconnected and the large 16-kilowatt hour battery was disconnected, not depowered. lesson learned. that's part of the protocols going forward. >> let me be clear. is it fairly common knowledge that when there's a crash, you drain the battery, drain the gas tank, and that just -- is that comps? >> no, you disconnect the 12-volt battery, disconnect it from the circuitry, and you drain the gas tank. >> okay, but should have we expected them to know to drain the battery or unfair?

>> again, i can't speak for the administration. >> any testing you had done before any testing other that you know of other manufacturers with similar type electric vehicles? do they know they're -- i mean, did they drain their batteries in those tests? i mean, it seems to me this is something they should have known to do other than just park it on a lot with a bunch of other cars. >> let me speak to what general motors knew. we had $285,000 testing on this battery, equivalent to 25 car lives if you will, and everything we found was this was a safe -- >> any of that testing involve draining the battery after subjecting to a crash or after the battery was punctured? >> no. >> okay. when did you give them the protocols that included draining the battery? >> in the case in question where

the car had a fire three weeks after the crash, it was left, as you saw, on the side of the road, and i don't know that the battery was even disconnected. i believe it was. i'm talking about the 12-volt battery. i believe it was, and i believe the larger battery was disconnected from the circuitry, but not drained. >> okay. okay. and when did you plan on, if at all, informing the owners of the volt and the public about potential concerns? did you plan on doing that, or is that something you worked in conjunction with, or what was your plans at general motors for informing the public? >> well, after listening to the administrator's testimony, as the summer progressed, we had to disassemble the battery itself and look for the root cause, and

as he said, there were concerns about arson or one of the other, three or four cars involved. it was not clear to anyone exactly what happened. it happened over a weekend. there was no observation. there was no witness to what happened. in september of last year, we tested again, and we could not replicate a fire. >> okay. >> we did the same exact test, we, general motors, they did the same test, we could not replicate, and so there were further tests. as he said, the battery itself was extracted from the vehicle. it was pierced with a steel rod which is highly unlikely in the real world, and then it was rotated simulating a rollover, not in a second that you would expect on the road, but by an hour, and it was drenched, if

you will, in fluid, coolant. it took seven days for a fire to occur. i'd like to underscore there was no explosion. a fire. that -- at that point after that extreme -- what i would call not real world situation, seven days, that's when they said they wanted to open a formal investigation. we notified our customers immediately after that. >> okay. thank you. yield now to the gentleman. >> thank you, mr. akerson, for being here. is the volt safe? >> it is safe. >> have you had communication with anyone in the obama administration to ask them to provide some kind of consideration to gm with respect to the testing that you became aware of, not to disclose it or to defer disclosure of it?