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Meet the mother-daughter team that's worked on almost every Chevy Volt

It's Mother's Day, and we're soft enough we love our mothers enough to share a new video from General Motors with you. In it, we meet Monique Watson (left) and Evetta Osbourne, a mother-daughter team that works at the Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly where GM makes the Chevy Volt (along with all of GM's other plug-in hybrids: the Opel Ampera, Holden Volt and Cadillac ELR). The two work side-by-side and have installed the lithium-ion battery pack on almost all of those vehicles - nearly 80,000 of them - since GM started making the pre-production Volts in 2009. In a prepared statement, Watson said that she likes working next to her mom, day in and day out, and they the two are totally in sync when it comes to putting the 400-pound, 16.5-kWh packs into the vehicle undersides. They two can also share stories throughout the day, and Watson said, "The arrangement has absolutely improved our relationship." Osborne started working at Detroit-Hamtramck in 1999, Watson since 2006. If you're driving a Volt today, you probably have them to thank for doing a bit of the work putting your car together. See a short video of them in action below. It's Always Mother's Day for Detroit-Hamtramck Duo Mother, daughter install lithium-ion battery pack in nearly all GM electric vehicles 2014-05-08 DETROIT – For Detroit resident Evetta Osborne, every day is Mother's Day. That's because she literally works side by side with her daughter, Monique Watson, at General Motors' Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant. They have installed the lithium-ion battery pack on nearly every Chevrolet Volt, Opel Ampera, Holden Volt, and Cadillac ELR since production began. In fact, apart from vacation days and an occasional sick day, the mother-daughter duo has installed almost every battery pack since the Volt was in pre-production in 2009. The ELR launched earlier this year. All told – including Ampera – that's more than 80,000 electric vehicles. "We're a good team and our relationship is secondary when it comes to performing our jobs – but it's great to work alongside my daughter, said Osborne, a mother of five. Because the battery packs weigh more than 400 pounds each, automatic guided vehicles – robotic carts that use sensors to follow a path through the plant – deliver them just as the vehicle body structures glide into position overhead. The carts then lift the T-shaped packs, and Osborne and Watson guide them into the chassis and secure each one with 24 fasteners.

Cadillac to fight Audi A3, Mercedes CLA with small rear-drive sedan?

Compact luxury sedans are fast becoming the trend among upscale automakers. Mercedes has the new CLA (and its many platform-mates), BMW has the 1 Series and 2 Series, Audi has the A3 and, though Lexus apparently isn't interested in anything smaller than its CT 200h, Infiniti is getting in on the action with a compact model of its own. It would only follow logically, then, that Cadillac should launch a competitor, and according to the latest reports, that's just what it has in store.
Speaking with Car and Driver, Cadillac marketing chief Uwe Ellinghaus confirmed that such a project is in the works. But unlike its rivals, Cadillac aims to go with a rear-wheel-drive layout. This despite research that apparently indicates that a surprising 80 percent of owners think that their BMW 1 Series is front-drive. It's the driving dynamics and styling proportions that motivate Ellinghaus and his colleagues to stick with rear-drive, however.
The new model would in all likelihood be based on the same GM Alpha architecture that underpins the ATS and CTS - a platform that has helped Cadillac keep the weight down on both models and which is expected to underpin the next-generation Chevy Camaro, as well. The sub-ATS could be positioned as a four-door 2+2, however, as the ATS grows a little larger in its next iteration in order to make room for its new baby brother.

GM admits Cadillac ELR no real competition for Tesla Model S

Last year, then-CEO of General Motors, Dan Akerson, made it clear that the company lookouts at the Ren Cen had California automaker Tesla in their sights. "If you want to compete head-to-head with Tesla, and we ultimately will, you want to do it with a Cadillac," he said. So, given the fact that the Cadillac ELR has a plug and sells for roughly the same price at the Tesla Model S ($75,000 vs $69,900, before incentives) and that Cadillac doesn't have any other electric vehicle on the horizon, you'd be forgiven if you thought that the way that Akerson wanted to challenge Tesla's EV success was with the ELR. Well, you'd apparently be wrong. "The ELR is a different car, it's a different price point. It's way-different technology." - GM's Mark Reuss Speaking yesterday in Detroit, GM's head of global product development, Mark Reuss, admitted that the ELR is not the Tesla competitor that Akerson promised. "People like to say the ELR is [competition for the Model S], but it's really not. It's a different car, it's a different price point. It's way-different technology." So, if we follow that logic to conclusion with Akerson's quote from last year, then the only way that Cadillac can eventually compete with Tesla is with a pure electric car, and that seems an outside chance, at best, for the foreseeable future. Through the end of July, Cadillac has sold 578 ELRs since it went on sale earlier this year. Tesla doesn't break out monthly US sales, but has sold 15,114 Model S EVs around the world in the first six months of 2014. For his part, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has already said that GM is headed down the wrong path with plug-in hybrids like the ELR or the Chevy Volt. Speaking about the Volt last year, Musk said, Chevy "sort of created something that's a bit of amphibian," which resulted in a car that's, "Okay but not great."