Chevrolet Volt has been a admirable and fairly successful first attempt by GM. By they weren’t content with what they’d achieved and kept busy studying the car in the past three years, so they can come up with something even better for the Volt 2.0. Those studies culminate in what Chevy calls the “Voltec Drive Unit”.

That is propulsion system that will power the 2016 Chevrolet Volt, set to debut at the Los Angeles Auto Show. It is basically the same range-extended electric drivetrain as the old Volt, but thanks to a range of modifications and enhancements, it operates approximately 5 to 12 percent more efficiently and weighs 100 pounds (45 kg) less than the current system.

2016 Chevrolet Volt comes with an all-new, high-efficiency 1.5L 4-cylinder engine that acts only as a range-extender – essentially a generator – and features a new battery pack with revised cell chemistry. The new technology has allowed the engineers to increase the capacity of the pack by 20 percent while reducing the number of cells from 288 to 192, thus making it lighter by 30 pounds (13 kg).

“It would have been simple for us to tweak our existing battery to provide nominally increased range, but that’s not what our customers want,” aid Larry Nitz, executive director of GM Powertrain’s electrification engineering team. “So our team created a new battery system that will exceed the performance expectations of most of our owners.”