Early versions of the Chevrolet Volt’s battery packs are powerful enough to run the high-stakes rechargeable car, but dozens of issues remain before General Motors Corp. can start selling the revolutionary vehicle in 2010 as planned.

The Volt’s chief engineer is on a tight schedule to figure out how the car will handle the batteries’ weight, dissipate their heat and mechanically transfer their power to the wheels. That’s not to mention the list of issues that have nothing to do with the fact that the car plugs in to the wall for recharging.

But the 47-year-old veteran GM engineer who was recruited from a GM post in Germany to run the high-profile project is driven by knowing the entire company’s future could rest with it.

“At this point, there’s nothing standing in our way of continuing to do what we said we’re going to do,” Andrew Farah, the Volt’s chief engineer, said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Work on the Volt, introduced as a concept car at the 2007 Detroit auto show, has taken on a more urgent pace with gasoline hovering near $4 per gallon and the U.S. auto market dramatically shifting from trucks to cars.

The car is designed to run on an electric motor powered by a battery pack. Drivers will recharge the vehicle from a standard home wall outlet.

The Volt will be able to travel 40 miles on a full charge, and a small gasoline engine will recharge the batteries to keep it rolling on longer trips. GM says the vehicle will get the equivalent of 150 miles per gallon.

But for now, as a new commercial airing during the Olympics touts the Volt as the pinnacle of GM’s fuel economy improvements and hybrid lineup, Farah and hundreds of other engineers are working quickly to deal with the inevitable glitches from new technology.

They must figure out how to keep the battery cool and adjust the car’s suspension so it performs well while carrying a 400-pound battery pack.

“All those things result in lots of other mechanical parts and bits and pieces that have nothing to do with electrical energy,” Farah said. “So we’ve had some issues there.”

Simultaneously, other GM workers are testing batteries to make sure they last at least 10 years or 150,000 miles. It would cost more than $10,000 to replace them.

Other workers are making the Volt more functional, giving it the room and feel of a regular car “such that the vehicle is not just a battery on wheels,” Farah said.

The early concept, a low-riding, sleek silver hatchback, was uncomfortable to sit in and not very functional, Farah said. The new five-door hatchback version more resembles a normal car, a little larger than a Honda Civic.

“It’ll have a similar set of visual cues and some of the features that were on the concept car,” Farah said.

Late last year, it looked like the Volt’s schedule would be derailed by battery delays. Two competing battery makers — Compact Power Inc. of Troy, Mich., which is working with parent LG Chem of Korea, and Frankfurt, Germany-based Continental Automotive Systems, which is working with GM and A123 Systems Inc. of Watertown, Mass. — fell 10 weeks behind on delivering the power packs.

GM engineers used the time to work on the mechanical connections. Batteries arrived in January at GM’s sprawling Warren, Mich., technical center, and the team has nearly erased the 10-week deficit, Farah said.

The Volt also is going through the same design issues as a new car powered by a conventional engine, Farah said.

“The program has all of those same things built in. We’re just doing them faster because we have to,” he said.

Although GM has promised to begin selling the Volt in a little more than two years, experts wonder if it will be ready in time, whether enough batteries will be available to sell the cars in significant numbers, and whether the cost can be reduced to make the car affordable to the masses. GM has said the Volt will cost $30,000 to $40,000, and that it expects to sell 100,000 per year starting in 2012. While ambitious, that’s still 81,000 fewer than the number of Prius gas-electric hybrids sold by Toyota last year.

Brett Smith, assistant director for manufacturing and technology at the Center for Automotive Research, said even in small volumes, the Volt is a game-changer.

“It’s an entirely different technology. It’s an entirely different powertrain layout. It’s a huge step forward,” he said Tuesday at an industry conference in Traverse City.

Smith wonders, however, whether early buyers will wind up being part of an extended test.

“This and the other vehicles that are coming out in plug-in form, are for all intents and purposes because of some timing, they are in a lot of ways prototype vehicles being put on the market to test,” he said.

Much of GM’s push on the Volt is designed to recapture the technology leadership image from Toyota Motor Corp., which has led the way in alternative powertrains with its Prius gasoline-electric hybrid car, Smith said.

“There’s no doubt that General Motors realized the importance of positive media coverage with the Prius,” he said.

Toyota also is pushing to get its plug-in electric vehicle to market in 2010, while Ford Motor Co., which is testing 20 on roads in California, says it is five years away from producing them in significant numbers.

Smith said despite uncertainties, GM has given every indication that the technology will be ready.

But between now and then, it’s Farah’s job to eliminate the uncertainties, banking on experience from work on GM’s EV-1 electric car in the 1980s.

Farah, who started with GM in 1984, at first was reluctant to leave his German engineering assignment to lead the Volt’s development. He thought it would just be an experiment with a life span like the EV-1, which GM took off the market a few years after its debut. But Farah relented after finding out how important the Volt is to GM’s future.

He knew there would be early mornings and late nights away from his family, but said he gets great satisfaction from working on a car that has the potential to end America’s dependence on oil and the environmental and political problems that come with it.

High gas prices already have forced a major lifestyle changes in the U.S., with people taking fewer vacations or weekend trips. Americans drove 53.2 billion fewer miles as gas prices climbed from November through June than they did over the same eight-month period a year earlier, the Federal Highway Administration said Wednesday.

The Volt, Farah said, can keep people mobile with only the adjustment of having to plug in a car at night.

“It’s an opportunity to change the way we consume energy without significantly changing our lifestyle,” he said.

General Motors Corp., the world’s largest automaker, said it will invest $445 million for a new diesel-engine factory in Thailand and to upgrade vehicle assembly facilities as it seeks to boost growth in Asia.

GM will set up a diesel engine plant in the country, its first in Southeast Asia, the automaker said in a statement today.

The Thai investment extends Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner’s strategy of expanding in the Asia-Pacific region, where sales grew about 10 percent in the first half in contrast to slumping demand in the U.S. GM may be overtaken as the world’s largest automaker by Toyota Motor Corp. as the Detroit- based carmaker shuts plants in North America in the wake of a $15.5 billion second-quarter loss.

“GM needs Asian markets more than other automakers do to offset sluggish demand at home,” said Matthew Kong, associate director of Fitch Ratings in Beijing. “No automaker has an absolute advantage over each other with the rising competition in the Asian market.”

The diesel engine factory is scheduled to open in 2010 and will have a capacity to build 100,000 engines annually, the statement said. The facility will make 2.5-liter and 2.8-liter engines, it said.

Toyota Leads

The automaker fell further behind Toyota during the second quarter as a deteriorating U.S. market overshadowed gains overseas. GM dropped 5 percent to 2.29 million vehicles, while Toyota posted a preliminary increase of 1.8 percent to about 2.41 million. Demand in Asia and Latin America led GM to a 16 percent rise outside of Europe and North America.

GM said last month it plans to generate $4 billion to $7 billion by selling as-yet unidentified assets. The company may sell or shut down its Hummer SUV division as $4 a gallon gasoline cuts demand for heavy vehicles. U.S. sales of Hummer- brand vehicles dropped 44 percent in the first seven months of the year.

“We are getting some significant interest in Hummer and other assets,” Wagoner said today. Asset sales are a “lengthy process,” Wagoner said.

GM said in June it plans to cut North American truck production capacity by 700,000 vehicles. That effort includes closing four plants that make pickups, SUVs and medium-duty trucks by 2010.

Outside U.S.

Wagoner has said the sales title is worth battling for. Six of every 10 new GM vehicles are now sold overseas as U.S. production shrinks.

“Sales outside of the U.S. are extremely important to GM right now,” said David Healy, an analyst at Burnham Securities Inc., based in Sierra Vista, Arizona. “It gets more important all the time.”

GM expects to sell as many as 1.2 million vehicles in China this year and boost sales in India to about 220,000 in a couple of years, Wagoner said today.

Sales in Asia-Pacific region gained 9.9 percent in the first half of the year to 798,000 vehicles. GM on Aug. 1 reported a quarterly loss of $15.5 billion, the third biggest in its 100-year history, because of plunging U.S. sales and the declining value of truck leases.

Thai Market

The company was profitable in both its European and Latin America-Africa-Middle East regions, posting a combined $465 million gain. GM’s loss ballooned to $9.3 billion in North America, from a loss of $88 million. In its Asia-Pacific region, GM lost $163 million after a profit of $280 million a year earlier.

Thailand is Asia’s fifth-largest automobile producer, according to research firm Global Insight Inc. The country produced 1.28 million vehicles in 2007 while sales were about 631,000, according to the research company.

Japan is Asia’s largest vehicle producer, followed by China, South Korea and India.

Thailand, Southeast Asia’s largest vehicle market, has lured investment from overseas automakers through tax breaks in a bid to become a manufacturing hub for the region.

Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s second-largest automaker, said in June it will build hybrid cars in Thailand from 2009. Toyota said it will spend about 90 billion baht ($2.7 million) in Thailand, it said in the statement.

Toyota also plans to invest 5.4 billion baht to build a new factory in Thailand for diesel engines used in pickup trucks.