Rick Wagoner has made an announcement that could very well be the first step in what will be a industry changing decision for General Motors. Mr. Wagoner made the announcement to shareholders on Tuesday that GM will indeed go ahead and put the Chevy Volt electric vehicle into full-time production. This is major news for the auto industry and even though electric vehicles are not unheard of in this country, this is the first major effort by a manufacture since, well, GM itself. Roughly ten years ago we had the EV1 electric vehicle. But it came and went in less than 3 years. The Volt, says Wagoner, will be different.

“The Chevy Volt is a go. We believe this is the biggest step yet in our industry’s move away from our historic, virtually complete reliance on petroleum to power vehicles.” said Wagoner. He added; “We intend to show a production version of the Chevy Volt publicly in the very near future and we remain focused on our target of getting the Volt into Chevrolet showrooms by the end of 2010.”

The target volume of about 100,000 Volts per year is substantially more than production on the EV1. GM leased only about 800 EV1s during the course of that electric vehicle’s life cycle, then it took all them back and crushed them all. Let’s hope the Volt won’t hold the same fate.

Above: Let’s hope for our sake that this electric vehicle from GM gets to stick around for a bit…