₦airaland Forum

Ikengawo:
Which world is celebrating him?
Innov8.com?!
Life style gist magazine?

After reading BannedOtherView's post you ran out of what to say and decided to just post 'd' shay?

Wait for my Electric Biro!!!

The melon ...

Giving the Volt Some Nips and Tucks-New York Times

https://o.aolcdn.com/dims-shared/dims3/GLOB/legacy_thumbnail/800x450/format/jpg/quality/85/http://www.blogcdn.com/green.autoblog.com/media/2008/08/volt-boniface.jpg
“YOU may never buy gasoline again.” It’s a compelling sales pitch these days, and it’s the pitch General Motors is making for its Chevrolet Volt.
Enlarge This Image

Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times
Robert Boniface had the task of making the Chevrolet Volt efficient as well as exciting.
The Volt was first shown as a concept car in 2007, and last month a production version was displayed on G.M.’s 100th birthday. Both designs were the work of a team headed by Robert Boniface, a mild-mannered Ohio native who was charged with shaping a car to be aerodynamic but space efficient, exciting but not intimidating. The car had to look like a dream, but be real.

The Volt, scheduled to arrive at dealers in late 2010, will use lithium-ion batteries that charge overnight. G.M. says it will be able to travel 40 miles between charges. For longer trips, a small gasoline engine will generate electricity to drive the Volt. But if you put fewer than 40 miles on the odometer every day, you may never visit a gas pump again.

It was Mr. Boniface’s job to ensure that the Volt’s body cuts through the air efficiently enough to keep this promise. How the new system is packaged also has a lot to do with how well it sells.

G.M.’s chief executive, Rick Wagoner, calls the Volt the most important car in the company’s history. “It is the symbol of G.M.’s commitment to the environment,” he said.

For G.M., which is struggling mightily this year, the Volt is critical. The car is an effort to match Toyota’s Prius hybrid, which has had an impact on Toyota’s image far exceeding the hybrid’s sales or profits.

But the Volt’s ultimate success depends less on styling and aerodynamics and more on whether its battery system, still in development, will achieve the dependable range and 10-year life G.M. is aiming for, at a cost that makes the car affordable: G.M. promises the Volt will be priced below $40,000. But the average car sells for about $30,000, and many sell for less.

If Mr. Boniface feels pressure about the car’s design, you would not know it to meet him. He talks sports cars and baseball. He grew up near Youngstown, drawing cars as a child and as a teenager playing with Ferraris and Corvettes in his father’s classic collection.

He headed to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and worked as an accountant after graduating in 1987. But his fascination with cars got the better of him. He received a degree in 1993 from the College of Creative Studies in Detroit, a leading training ground for auto designers, and was at Daimler Chrysler’s Advanced Product Design Studio when G.M. hired him in 2003.

At G.M. he worked on teams for the Corvette and Camaro before being assigned to design vehicles with advanced power plants, including electric, gas-electric hybrid and fuel cell cars.

To design the concept Volt, Mr. Boniface looked at “green cars” and did something different.

There are two approaches to designing cars with novel power plants. One is simply to put a new kind of engine, like a hybrid, in a conventional car, which might be reassuring to buyers. The other is to make a futuristically powered car look futuristic on the outside as well.

Toyota had struck a balance between these approaches with the Prius, which was different enough for drivers to enjoy being recognized as innovators without paying a penalty in practicality or weirdness of appearance. It was not beautiful, but its high-roofed, wedge shape signaled that it was a new kind of car. Its drivers were proud of it.

Mr. Boniface took a different tack. He gave the Volt a sporty face with echoes of the new Camaro; aquiline headlights and a low, rakish roof; and full, muscular fenders that suggested dynamism.
[img]http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/storyimage/CA/20080814/OEM05/308149997/V2/0/V2-308149997.jpg&MaxW=700&cci_ts=20080814163836[/img]
He also altered the beltline, the delineation between the windowed greenhouse and the lower body that is critical to the essence of any car’s theme or graphic, as designers call it.

The concept Volt was well received. Suddenly, G.M. found a car boasting fuel economy being treated like a sports car. Online, discussion of the Volt began to resemble discussion of iPods.

But to make the Volt production-ready required making it more aerodynamic. Wind tunnel tests showed that drag needed to be reduced to get the promised 40 miles of battery range.

As reports of G.M.’s losses and layoffs compounded, Mr. Boniface’s design for the Volt was used to help hold the skeptics at bay. Volt became a prop used by top executives to illustrate their promises that things would get better at G.M. In the summer, for a CNBC documentary on the company and again for PBS’s Charlie Rose, visiting Detroit, an executive tugged a curtain away from a few teasing inches of the production Volt’s fender, as coyly as a grand courtesan of 19th-century Paris flaunting an ankle.

The full revelation had to wait. On Sept. 16, G.M.’s anniversary, sunlight streamed into the Winter Garden of the Renaissance Center, G.M.’s headquarters on the Detroit waterfront.

Mr. Boniface stood beside the car. “We spent hundreds of hours of wind tunnel time to get the range we needed,” he said. “We rounded the front corners, so the air moves down the sides of the car smoothly.” The grille is now mostly cosmetic to save drag; air comes in by a narrow slit, because less air is needed than for a conventional engine. The car has no rear wheel covers like the first Honda Insight hybrid or G.M.’s earlier electric car, the EV1.

The critical change for airflow, however, is on the rear corners, where the edges are not smooth but crisp. Aero is not just about rounding things but about managing the flow and the way it adheres to shapes.

Mr. Boniface’s colleague Michael Simcoe, the director for exteriors, explained that those 400 or 500 hours of wind tunnel time were devoted to experiments, tweaking a side mirror shape, moving the rear spoiler a bit. “It is not a science,” he said “You try a lot of things. It is more a black art.”

“We tried to keep the graphic of the concept,” he said, using the designer’s term for its visual essence or signature.

Most of all Mr. Boniface was eager to show that this was now a practical car. He pointed out the rear lift gate and the fold-down rear seats. “We even have cup holders in the back seat,” he said.

But the production car looked more conventional than the concept Volt. Some Volt enthusiasts had asked Mr. Boniface to make the Volt real; now they were complaining it was too real. “Has Volt Lost Its Jolt?” asked a headline in Automotive News.

On G.M.’s “Fastlane” blog, Robert A. Lutz, the company vice chairman for global product development, defended the design changes. “The challenge to the designers,” he wrote, “wasn’t to design the most beautiful car imaginable and accept the compromises you have to make to do so. It was, make no compromise to fuel efficiency and electric range, and then do the most beautiful design possible, around those aerodynamic dictates.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/automobiles/autospecial2/30volt.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


www.nairaland.com/attachments/2609078_boniface1_pngd0f92bf485844d109eb4db5fb132d082

Jelani Aliyu can not be found when you search him on Chevy LOL
why? All of your sources are Nigerian gist. I've given you Google, Nytimes, Chevy.com and it will keep coming

Ikengawo:
Giving the Volt Some Nips and Tucks-New York Times


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/automobiles/autospecial2/30volt.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


www.nairaland.com/attachments/2609078_boniface1_pngd0f92bf485844d109eb4db5fb132d082

Jelani Aliyu can not be found when you search him on Chevy LOL
why? All of your sources are Nigerian gist. I've given you Google, Nytimes, Chevy.com and it will keep coming

Are you DAFT? Boniface is the director of the design team, he is not the designer of the Chevy Volt.

Ikengawo are you now claiming MOTORTRENDS is a Nigerian Publication? Show me your Boniface there

SMH.

http://www.motortrend.com/features/consumer/112_0904_chevrolet_volt_inside_story/people_behind_the_volt.html

ADAMUdaCOWBOY:
After reading BannedOtherView's post you ran out of what to say and decided to just post 'd' shay?

No surprises there. When you are fed on a diet of hate, your ability to appraise events objectively becomes heavily compromised.
Don't expect him to become chastened any time soon.

Ikengawo, like others of his ilk, is sadly without shame.
He will be back again in another day or week from now, doing what he does best: peddling bile and filth - in furtherance of an agenda geared to character assassination. NL allows that kind of self-medication, though. It encourages anyone with an unhinged mind to create incendiary posts that result in momentary catharsis.

fulanimafia:
Are you DAFT? Boniface is the director of the design team, he is not the designer of the Chevy Volt.

Ikengawo are you now claiming MOTORTRENDS is a Nigerian Publication?

SMH.

http://www.motortrend.com/features/consumer/112_0904_chevrolet_volt_inside_story/people_behind_the_volt.html

Am very sure ur research project is thrash, pls give me ya research topic cum details, wanna go look for it to know how on earth u graduated from higher institution.
Well, u re a product of "quota" system, so am not surprise.

My take on this is that @Ikengawo hates Fulanis.

bokohalal:
My take on this is that @Ikengawo hates Fulanis.

Fulaphobia? anyway kudos to Jelani for having something to do with such a feat, this better that being mentioned as waiting on death row in Asia.

Your family should be ashame of you@ikengawo....

bokohalal:
My take on this is that @Ikengawo hates Fulanis.

He doesn't, he's just trying to get back at him for what he did at the thread where an Anambra man renovated a tricycle to a semi car.
Fulanimafia at least u be learnt one thing learn to appreciate the little someone does, so dat when u do urs no mata how big or small u wud be applauded too, do to others as u want them to do unto u.

lygn19:
[s]He doesn't, he's just trying to get back at him for what he did at the thread where an Anambra man renovated a tricycle to a semi car.
Fulanimafia at least u be learnt one thing learn to appreciate the little someone does, so dat when u do urs no mata how big or small u wud be applauded too, do to others as u want them to do unto u.[/s]

Complete nonsense. Applauded my black behind, you must think everyone is an empty chestbeater seeking approval online. That was a celebration of mediocrity, if you're not myopic you would see the clown only ended up disgracing himself and helping us locate patent documents for Aliyu's invention which we would never have gone looking for. Now the world can see his folly in black and white.

bokohalal:
My take on this is that @Ikengawo hates Fulanis.

Imagine the thread he opened a few days ago predicting the extinction of the Fulani race. Don't mind the weak excuse of his minion.

https://www.nairaland.com/2435011/hausa-fulani-may-not-exist-next

@Ikengawo:

As I always tell you, the hate you harbour within is destroying you. Have you seen the disgrace?

@Post:
Every Nigerian is important. Am always happy for any Nigeria doing something good to make a difference.

This should settle the matter once and for all:
The Body
The body (exterior) design was one of the first tasks of the vehicle design during the concept development phase. Multiple design sketches and sub-scale models were proposed by GM’s design studios around the world in Warren, Michigan; London, England and North Hollywood, California. The proposed designs were reviewed in April, 2006 by the project leadership team including Bob Lutz, Jon Lauckner, and Ed Welburn who was the global design Vice President. The selected concept was conceived by the exterior designer, Jelani Aliyu.

http://www.presidio.edu/userfiles/file/Case%20Study/Chevrolet%20VOLT%20Case%20Study,%20rev_%208-27-2013,%20incl%20JLL%20comments.pdf

Page 27

Cc: fulanimafia, ikengawo

Ikengawo is a disgrace.

All those peddling Bob Boniface are the ignorant ones on this thread. Jelani Aliyu did design the Chevy volt concept and many other GM cars before it (e.g. pontiac G6 ). Bob Boniface is the impostor in this case, but yet again that's how the design industry works. While Jelani worked on the Concept car (Which was more important being the birth of the idea), Bob Directed the production car's design which is just work they based off the original concept anyway.

So eat your hearts out because he is till today a senior creative designer at GM, I am infact in contact with him and hope to invite him for my graduation from car design school pretty soon. So watch out!!

See below for more of his work and his recent work on the transformer movies' cars. Also check out the link for the design process of the volt, appropriately describing Boniface as the GM design director (who practically doesn't do shit other than managing the teams). Jelani can be seen working on the clay model of his concept.

http://www.carbodydesign.com/archive/2008/01/09-chevrolet-volt-updates/



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EamIveNq-9E

Ikengawo:
Which world is celebrating him?
Innov8.com?!
Life style gist magazine?

Do you really understand what a Patent means?