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They are already cheaper when you calculate the entire cost of ownership over the period of the EV's warranty (typically 8 years).

No brake pads to replace until well after 100,000miles, no oil changes, no fluctuating gas price fill ups, no waiting in miserable weather for minutes on end to fill up every week (or more depending on car and guzzling rate).

My Gen2 Volt costs 1.59$CAD per every full charge of ~90km range average for 9 months of the year, and ~65km in dire winter.

I'm currently at +3400km on the same gas tank (it has range extender gas generator). It's the best car I ever bought. By a long stretch. Ironically I had bought it to have a dependable maintenance-free car while I rebuilt my turbo 4-banger. End result: looking at selling my rebuilt car. Drove is less than 200km this season.

Doubt me? Here are my starts for my car, Time Lord, since I've owned it in Dec. 2015.

I'm not telling you to buy a Volt (but it's the best IMO). Chose an EV that can sustain 80% of your daily commute in EV mode without recharge. And you'll wonder why you didn't do it before.

Batteries can store and discharge about 6-10 times the energy required to create them in their lifetimes.

That number seems very low. Got a source?

I was wondering too and did some searching. It looks like the number is realistic. What I found...

I hope I didn't screw up the math. If I did, please ridicule me and mod me down....

Modern EV batteries which are temperature controlled and charge limited have, so far, shown extremely low degradation over 100,000K EV miles.

The owner of this Volt, who is a member of a Facebook Volt owner group claims to still get the EPA rated 35 miles per charge from his Volt after 120K EV miles...

http://www.voltstats.net/Stats...

I personally own a Volt with 32K EV miles and still get the same EV range...

http://www.voltstats.net/Stats...

One charge in a Gen1 Volt is about 10.5 kWh. This means that over 100K EV miles, a Volt battery stores in the neighborhood of 29 MWh of energy.

1/10 of that would by 2.9 MWh

A quick search shows 828MJ per kWh of capacity to produce a lithium ion battery pack. This equates to 3.68 MWh to produce a 16kwh Chevy Volt battery pack.

https://www.quora.com/How-much...

Given that those Volt battery packs have shown little to no degradation so far, it's safe to say they have quite a bit more useful life to go, so they will probably make it close to 36 MWh of lifetime storage, but they will eventually succumb to the laws of physics though and start to degrade.

Batteries can store and discharge about 6-10 times the energy required to create them in their lifetimes.

That number seems very low. Got a source?

I was wondering too and did some searching. It looks like the number is realistic. What I found...

I hope I didn't screw up the math. If I did, please ridicule me and mod me down....

Modern EV batteries which are temperature controlled and charge limited have, so far, shown extremely low degradation over 100,000K EV miles.

The owner of this Volt, who is a member of a Facebook Volt owner group claims to still get the EPA rated 35 miles per charge from his Volt after 120K EV miles...

http://www.voltstats.net/Stats...

I personally own a Volt with 32K EV miles and still get the same EV range...

http://www.voltstats.net/Stats...

One charge in a Gen1 Volt is about 10.5 kWh. This means that over 100K EV miles, a Volt battery stores in the neighborhood of 29 MWh of energy.

1/10 of that would by 2.9 MWh

A quick search shows 828MJ per kWh of capacity to produce a lithium ion battery pack. This equates to 3.68 MWh to produce a 16kwh Chevy Volt battery pack.

https://www.quora.com/How-much...

Given that those Volt battery packs have shown little to no degradation so far, it's safe to say they have quite a bit more useful life to go, so they will probably make it close to 36 MWh of lifetime storage, but they will eventually succumb to the laws of physics though and start to degrade.

You wont have to replace your hybrid battery. That's myth brought on by cheap laptop & cell phones horrible power managements. Further propagated by the Cock Brothers (typo intended).

Sparkie raked up more than 118,000 EV miles, on a car with more than 330,000 miles with no loss of charge on his 2012 Chevy Volt.

Chevy has recently mentioned is has replaced exactly NONE of it's > 100,000 Volt batteries out there du to degradation.

The batteries lose very little capacity as long as they are thermally managed and never fully charged or discharged. GM's Gen-1 Volt has a "charge window" of 20% to 85%. They increased a bit with the Gen2 Volt after getting real-world data from Gen-1 Volts in the wild.

There are 2011/2012 Chevy Volts in the wild with around 100K EV miles and no apparent battery degradation.

Here is all-time the leader, "Sparkie",a GM employee from Michigan:

http://www.voltstats.net/Stats...

And mine... ;) (Yes, I'm totally biased)

http://www.voltstats.net/Stats...

You can browse the leaderboard, sort by "EV miles" and browse others.

As for Tesla, I don't think their batteries are quite up to the level of GM's, but they do employ active battery cooling and a charge window.

The one model that doesn't have active liquid cooling, the Nissan Leaf, is notorious for suffering significant range degradation after only a few years.

The batteries lose very little capacity as long as they are thermally managed and never fully charged or discharged. GM's Gen-1 Volt has a "charge window" of 20% to 85%. They increased a bit with the Gen2 Volt after getting real-world data from Gen-1 Volts in the wild.

There are 2011/2012 Chevy Volts in the wild with around 100K EV miles and no apparent battery degradation.

Here is all-time the leader, "Sparkie",a GM employee from Michigan:

http://www.voltstats.net/Stats...

And mine... ;) (Yes, I'm totally biased)

http://www.voltstats.net/Stats...

You can browse the leaderboard, sort by "EV miles" and browse others.

As for Tesla, I don't think their batteries are quite up to the level of GM's, but they do employ active battery cooling and a charge window.

The one model that doesn't have active liquid cooling, the Nissan Leaf, is notorious for suffering significant range degradation after only a few years.

Please provide a citation for that being a pure series hybrid being the original intent. Please also provide a citation discussing how the one driving scenario we've discussed above prevents the range extender from being transitioned to a larger battery or a fuel cell. As a counter point, here's one that shows that it wouldn't be difficult at all. Since the ICE is not needed for maximum acceleration or vehicle speed, the Volt does not need that mechanical connection, it is simply an optimization of the equipment that they already had on board for the existing design. Replace the ICE with a battery and you get some higher EV range, but when it runs out it runs out. Replace it with a fuel cell and a Hydrogen tank and you can replenish the battery from that, but now you have to deal with the lack of Hydrogen infrastructure and the challenge of transporting it safely.

The Volt is not a series hybrid. It is not a parallel hybrid. It is not a pure battery-EV. It can be any one of those things depending on driving conditions and state of charge. If you peruse this website and sort by EV% (distance traveled in EV mode as a percentage of total distance traveled) you can see people using their Volts anywhere from nearly completely EV mode all of the time to nearly always series/parallel-hybrid. Obviously there is a use-case for the entire spectrum.

See another car:

http://www.voltstats.net/Stats/Details/771

Those are user comments, not generated by the site. If the owner was worried him from his white diamond description on the net, he wouldn't have entered that in the user comments.

Think site mentioned could do a lot more to protect its user's privacy as well. The detailed info page for the top ranked car gives you enough info (white diamond colour car in Arlington, VA, fully loaded spec) to figure out who the owner is with a bit of detective work. How many white Volts are there likely to be in that town?