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Chevy Volt Rated At 230 mpg In the City
necro81 writes "General Motors, emerging from bankruptcy, today announced that its upcoming plug-in hybrid vehicle, the Volt, will have an EPA rating of 230 mpg for city driving (about 98 km/L). The unprecedented rating, the first in triple digits, is the result of a new (draft) methodology for calculating the 'gas' mileage for vehicles that operate primarily or extensively on electricity. The Volt, due out late next year, can drive approximately 40 miles on its Li-Ion battery pack, after which a gasoline engine kicks in to provide additional electricity to charge the battery. Running off the gasoline engine yields approximately 50 mpg. Of course, the devil's in the details, because the conversion of grid-based electricity to gasoline-mileage is imprecise." Now we know the meaning of the mysterious "230" viral marketing campaign.
One of many BIG questions I have: How does this thing provide heating/cooling and what impact does running these systems have on said MPG performance?
How about miles per pound of carbon dioxide emission?
Or, or in addition, miles per PRIMARY unit of energy input?
--PM
As stated in the summary, that's the EPA's rating, not GM's rating. It comes from the same place as the MPG rating on your car right now. GM didn't calculate it, or come up with it. They are just quoting it.
And yes, it's a plug-in. (That's the point.) And that is for driving using the power from the grid. Power plants are much more efficient than the engines in cars, so I assume that's being worked into that somewhere.
That said: This is the first time the EPA has ever tried to rate a plug-in electric vehicle, and their rating system probably has a few bugs to work out...
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Getting worse mileage than the best in the world isn't exactly something to complain loudly about... Even on the engine, it gets better than a Prius.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
>it has to lug around a heavy internal combustion engine
That tiny 1.0L engine that runs a generator? Id rather be able to put gas in it when I cannot find electricity, thanks. My neighborhood BP hasnt exactly switched over.
>Long range electric or efficient internal combustion. Please, please, pick one.
The battery tech isnt here. Perhaps you can wish for faeries to power the car while youre at it because youre being 100% irrational.
Hell, even if you do this, you still need to convince the gas stations to switch over, because you'll sometimes be in a situation where you need power, now, not overnight. Early adopters appreciate a little convenience.
That is not an argument to stop building electric cars. That is an argument to start building more powerplants.
Which is a good idea, and another discussion.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
You also got to consider the likelihood that as full or majority electric power cars start to become popular, you're going to see governments at the state, local and federal level attempting to make up for lost tax revenues. I'm not sure how they'll manage to differentiate between power for transport and power for home/business use, but if there's one thing that the government is good at it's figuring out new and inventive ways to tax people. Suffice it to say, driving one of these, especially on a short commute, will really save money, as well as the environment, but don't count on power being (as) cheap for long if we see a lot of these types of cars take to the streets.
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
The same thing that says that if electricity prices go up too much more putting photovoltaic cells on my roof becomes profitable.
It's not that my commute is 35 miles -- one-way. It's that four months out of the year the outside temperature averages 30ÂF during my commute. That's currently (no pun intended) the major drawback to a fully electric commute, because I'm certain that running an electric heater to keep warm will kill the car's driving range.
RTFA.
They discuss the electricity consumption/cost in the article, and that the number is an estimate that's hard to calculate since many people will use the battery exclusively about 75% of the time.
I agree, it's hard to calculate to give both an accurate and realistic number. If you drive non stop until the car both runs out of electricity and petrol, then calculate distance/gallons then that's an accurate number. But is it realistic? This car isn't designed for the cross-country road-trip in mind, but even still it would get hybrid (or better) mileage due to charging over nights.
So what number do I care about? Driving cross country or day to day driving?
Similarly I could try driving my hybrid on the highway, flooring it the entire way and I wouldn't get the advertised numbers.
Granted, it would be nicer to know "how many bushels of coal are needed to charge it to capacity" and then try to find an analogy between bushels of coal -> gallons of diesel -> gallons of petrol. Then you can say those 40 miles required so much diesel, which is about so much petrol. Then again, the entire country doesn't use coal-burning-plants so even then it wouldn't be accurate.
You are also going to see metered parking lot outlets. (These are already used in places like Fairbanks Alaska for headbolt heaters).
There is no free lunch, and there is no work place recharging stations for 99.9999% of workers. The fact that NetworkBoy found one is 1) a miracle, 2) short lived, 3) bound to be usurped by his boss.
So NetworkBoy will end up paying the full recharge bill and will have to charge at home. Still not so bad.
But, IF this vehicle ever became popular we will have another crisis on our hands. The electrical grid probably can't handle the load, even in off peak hours, let alone in high-demand hours. And while you wait 15 years to get another nuclear power station permitted you will be keeping the coal fired plant up all night.
Just about all coal generation plants are Clean Coal plants these days, but the definition of "clean" keeps changing. The juice has to come from somewhere, and scrubbed coal plants may be cleaner than the exhaust of millions of vehicles, but it is by no means a Free Lunch.
So advocates need to temper their glee with a little reality check until they can hang enough solar panels on their roofs to charge their cars.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Its already been proven that the Government won't let anything happen to GM. Plus, GM has the best balance sheet in the industry because of it's bankruptcy. Have you seen any other automaker's debt-ratio lately?
Yes, because comparing a Volt to a motorcycle makes a ton of sense and isn't at all a strawman. Why not compare it with riding the bus, or getting on a bike? The guy has a car, he's in the market for a new car, and he's getting the Volt. Please compare within those parameters. Most compacts start in the teens these days, so the gas savings he's quoting start to make sense around a midrange, reasonably priced new car. This is not a loss, and that's one way to look at them.
By saying he should get a motorcycle you might as well say "New cars are a joke, they are a loss no matter how you look at them" because your argument could easily be used there as well. Of course, thats not at all the point of the discussion, so I don't see how your point is at all relevant.
...why do these stories about hybrids, fully-electrics, etc. always elicit responses like "but it freezes here, which kills performance" and "but I drive 200 miles every day, will it be able to do that? No."
I don't hear anybody ranting on the Mini for not being able to support a soccer (hockey?) mom with her 3 kids+entourage+equipment.
I don't hear anybody complaining that a Ford Excursion is crap up in northern Alaska because the tires keep sinking into the thawing dirt roads.
Who last complained about a Scuderia Spider (open top car) because they lived in Seattle and, well, dur?
Not every single car is going to fill your specific needs and desires; thank goodness, then, that there is a wide range to choose from.. and with the Volt and other initiatives, those whose desires include having a non-gasoline car to drive short distances regularly in non-extreme (4 months of freezing is extreme enough, tyvm) weather will be having that choice available to them, just as you have had the choice between a myriad of cars that will happily run with little performance loss at 30F and the heater blasting at full.
"This new bogus number is because of GM working with/lobbying EPA. I can't believe EPA caved into such a content free meaningless number."
Why not? It's just one federal government agency working with another one!
Still, at some point the battery is going to need replacement when it's out of warranty.
Why? No, seriously, *why*? Why is there this huge insistence that EV battery packs are somehow inherently going to die before the rest of the car? You've got good odds of your transmission dying in an ICE car before it meets the scrapheap, yet people act like EV and hybrid battery packs somehow *must* all die before the car does.
Ever heard of the Baker Electric? Jay Leno has one from the early 1900s. It still runs on its original nickel-iron batteries. Companies pick battery chemistries, sizes, arrangements, cooling, depth of discharge, etc in order to best meet the need of the product they're making it for. Laptops aren't expected to be used for much more than a few years, so battery packs for them are optimized more for capacity, reduced weight, reduced volume, etc. That's why your laptop pack dies after a few years. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about LiP or manganese spinel cells. These have ten times the longevity of your typical laptop or cell phone battery. GM isn't warrantying their pack for ten years for the fun of it.
Look at the Prius. For God's sake, even many first-gen Prius *taxis* are still operating on their original packs. By all standards, the pack will outlive the car for most owners. That's what you get with a sizable, low-DoD, cooled NiMH pack in typical hybrid driving conditions. We're not talking about high-DoD lead-acid or cobalt/graphite li-ion (excepting, in the latter case, Tesla -- and even then, they've done some major tricks to up lifespan). We're talking about far more stable packs than that.
Where does this myth that the batteries are fundamentally going to have to be replaced come from?
And *even if they do have to be replaced*, you're talking about battery prices *ten years from today*, not today's prices. Look at how much the Prius's NiMH pack fell in price. I'd be surprised if a Volt pack replacement ten years from now costs any more than a transmission replacement does today.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Why are there so many haters on this car? If anyone thinks that this is the end all be all solution to the problem, they are freaking idiots. This is just the first volley across the bow of the PRACTICAL electric car idea. With mass production brings decreased costs and better technology over time. If all car companies waited until the technology were perfect before producing it, it would be another full decade before anything hits the market. Yes, GM has screwed up in the past, but don't hold that against them with this car. THIS IS A GOOD START.
http://www.tomandemily.com
No, the people who blythely say things, like, "Finally, zero-emissions transportation I can afford!" are disengenuous in the extreme. Because most of them do (sort of) know that they're burning a trainload of coal
So... they know it, you know it, I know it... Apparently everyone knows it, but it's still disengenuous to say something completely true -- the car is zero emission -- because apparently someone might not know that this doesn't mean there's no pollution involved ever even though everyone actually knows exactly what is meant.
Got it.
And of course they get to have a chuckle at the poor fools who can't personally afford to buy a new vehicle chock full of toxic batteries, but who none the less are subsidizing Mr. Cool Green's purchase by having several thousand dollars of his tax dollars pushed over onto them. So progressive to make lower middle class people who can't play the same game help buy your car for you.
And how the hell do you expect the "poor" (and lol, I know actual poor people, "lower middle class" isn't poor sorry) to ever be able to afford any of this stuff in nobody buys it, both to reduce production cost and to introduce these cars into the used market? Subsidies are there to actually make these cars (well not the Volt but e.g. Civic Hybrid) affordable to even to the lower middle class. Maybe if you hadn't bought that shiny new Explorer as soon as gas dropped below $4, you'd be able to take advantage of the incentives yourself.
People on a forum like this should be exactly the ones to universally downplay developments like this, because when they wax poetic about their coal-powered car, they're contributing to a larger conversation in the wider culture that generally picks up on the "zero emissions" part and doesn't have a clue about the reality of burning those fossile fuels on the other end of the grid.
No. Absolutely not. Because this development IS a huge improvement. That is not debatable. You can babble about toxic batteries (cluephone: The whole LiIon battery pack is vastly, vastly less toxic than the Lead-acid battery in your smog emitter) and coal power (which still ends up being vastly superior in terms of emissions) all you want, fact is this is a great development. Only the retarded -- or the retarded by choice -- would want to downplay a positive development.
But I'm glad to see that you're concerned about hypothetical retards who don't read slashdot. Even though I've seen semi-literates on non-slashdot spout the same stuff about how EVs don't do anything because it just moves the pollution to the power plant. Who are these people who don't know coal plants burn coal exactly? Because even the dumbest people I can think of know that. In fact, the only case I can think of where what you claim happens actually happened was when you pretended someone else didn't know that when they said "zero emissions" even though you knew that wasn't the case and they actually knew it. Made-up people are not a good argument.
In any case, at best that means be realistic about what you're claiming an EV accomplishes. It does not mean that this development should be downplayed. Because it's a good development. Say otherwise, and demonstrate ignorance or disingenuity.
When it comes to actually reducing emissions, cars like this are lost in the noise, compared to just using more insulation in the attics of older houses, or replacing the windows on older commercial structures. But that's SO not cool, compared to talking about a vehicle that has built-in MiFi, and so it goes un-talked-about.
It's not noise, vehicle emissions are a huge problem, but yes those are great ideas. Great ideas I've heard a thousand times, anyone who is buying a new house, getting work done on their house, building a new office building, or otherwise will hear about a lot. I've heard it on Fox News segments about saving energy -- "upgrade your insulation, buy new windows!" So yeah, surpr
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