Poland native heads team designing electric car

By Don Shilling

The vision behind the Volt

Owners can recharge the sleek electric car by plugging it into a standard outlet.

You can trace the design of General Motors’ upcoming electric car, the Chevrolet Volt, to a sketch pad once used by a young Poland boy.

Bob Boniface, the son of Dr. Raymond and Jacquelyn Boniface, amused himself as a boy by drawing cars with a wide, aggressive stance.

Now, he’s the GM executive in charge of the exterior and interior designs of the Volt, and it’s clear from the sleek electric car that his taste in designs hasn’t changed.

“I’ve always felt the stance of a car is the most important piece of the car. If it has a bad stance, it can look awkward. All of the cars I’ve designed — even those I sketched as a kid — have an athletic stance,” said Boniface, 42, GM’s director of design, E-flex systems.

Earlier in his career, the 1983 Cardinal Mooney High School graduate was the lead designer for the 1998 Dodge Intrepid and 2002 Jeep Liberty when he worked for Chrysler Corp. At GM, he was thrilled to oversee the design of the new Chevrolet Camaro, which is due out in January. When he was in his teens, he drove a 1975 Camaro.

But nothing he has done will be studied as closely as his work on the Volt. At a time when automakers are pondering how to power the cars of the future, GM believes it has the answer.

“In a lot of ways, we are betting our future on this vehicle,” Boniface said.

Due out in 2010, the battery-powered Volt is designed to travel up to 40 miles on a single charge and can be recharged by plugging into a standard outlet. Boniface said GM’s last electric vehicle, the EV1, failed because people did not want to be stranded without an easy way of recharging their car.

The Volt solves that concern with a small gasoline-powered generator that can keep the battery going an additional 600 miles.

Boniface said his team’s design work is just as important as the research being done on the battery and powertrain. No matter how much people want to help the environment, most aren’t going to buy a fuel-efficient car unless the styling appeals to them, he said.

Being in such a position of responsibility has been his dream since he was a boy. He not only spent his spare time with his sketch pad, but he also built model cars out of kits and pored through his father’s car magazines.

“I always loved cars. I always wanted to make a career out of it, but I didn’t know how to do it,” he said.

He went to Vanderbilt University, where a counselor suggested he start in engineering because of his interest in cars. He quickly found out he didn’t like calculus, however, so he gave up his dream of car design and ended up majoring in psychology and business administration.

His first job was working as a control accountant for a mutual fund in Boston, and he was miserable for two years.

The turning point came when his sister, Carla Devlin, stumbled onto an article in an airline magazine that explained the career of a car designer. She was so excited to learn that it didn’t require engineering that she had two design schools send her brother admissions information.

He went back for four more years of education and was graduated from the College of Creative Studies in Detroit.

Meanwhile, his three brothers, Raymond, Thomas and James, followed their father into medicine and now have an orthopedic practice in Boardman.

The public got its first glimpse of Bob Boniface’s work on the Volt when it was unveiled as a concept car at the Detroit auto show in January 2007.

The reaction from the public and the trade press was so favorable that GM committed to a production version of the car in April 2007 and built Boniface a new design studio at the company’s technical center in Warren, Mich.

Since then, Boniface has been working on the production version of the Volt. The car has been assigned to GM’s Delta underbody platform, the same one as the Chevrolet Cobalt, so Boniface made certain adjustments from the concept design, such as the placement of the front wheels and the overhang on the front end.

He said the production car will be unveiled soon, but he wouldn’t give a date.

He is predicting success for the car because it gives owners the option of using the gasoline-powered generator if they forget to recharge the battery. If they do plug the car in, it will use about the same amount of electricity as a water heater, he said. The cost for a recharge will be 40 cents to 80 cents, depending on the time of day.

“GM is going to leapfrog everyone. Gasoline has been around for a long time. Eventually, it will be replaced by another energy source. We think electricity is that energy source,” he said.

Electricity makes sense because it can be generated by coal, natural gas, wind, water and nuclear power, he said. Fuel cell vehicles are part of this move toward electricity because they will have electric motors that are powered by hydrogen, he said.

GM is so committed to electric vehicles that it already has Boniface designing other models for the GM lineup. He isn’t divulging any details, however.

“We like to keep a little bit of mystery,” he said.

shilling@vindy.com