"Volt Interior Design Taking Cues From Apple?" Green Car Advisor

Volt Interior Design Taking Cues From Apple?

If the leaks keep on coming, people with the patience to piece a pile of spy photos together will know what the Chevrolet Volt looks like long before General Motors pulls the tarp off the production model.

So far, GM has allowed us to see bits and pieces of the front left corner, side-view mirror, grille and tail end of the Volt--- just enough to understand that the exterior won't look quite like the knife-edged cncept that was unveiled at last year's Detroit Auto Show, but probably won't come to life looking like the next-gen Malibu, either.

Now we're going inside the plug-in hybrid that GM believes will change the automotive landscape.

A view of a small slice of the interior -- the center stack -- seems to have leaked out from behind closed doors at some sort of a design review.

While not an official GM photo this time (previous "spy" shots were issued by the automaker to keep the buzz going), the pictures shows a center stack the looks a lot like the one in a very fuzzy photo (right) of the stack in a Volt designer's sketchbook that showed up on the web back in April.

The new photo, which first appeared Thursday in a readers forum on the website of Motive Magazine , shows a stack, clad in shiny white plastic a la an iMac computer. It houses all the climate, entertainment and various other controls plus the screen for a driver communication center (and, possibly, navigation system).

The comkmunication screes shows a schematic of the Volt's front-mounted, internal combustion engine/generator and the lithium-ion battery pack it feeds.

The white center stack is surrounded by a matte black dash pierced by louvered air vents, and the image on the left edge of the photo shows a bit of what appears to be a hooded instrument cluster.

There are few visible buttons or switches on the stack, controls seem mainly to be soft-touch switchgear hidden beneath the unbroken plastic surface.

We can't be sure the photo represents the final version of the Volt's center stack, but it seems pretty certain that it is, indeed, a picture of what it looks like right now. A GM spokesman all but acknowledged the authenticity of the shot in a late Thursday e-mail exchange with Green Car Advisor:

"Can't really dispute the beauty that is inherent in the photo highlighting the technological prowess that is the Chevrolet Volt," wrote GM's Dave Darovitz, adding that he believed the photo "is representative of the Volt in general..."

John O'Dell, Senior Editor