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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.
How about miles per pound of carbon dioxide emission?
Or, or in addition, miles per PRIMARY unit of energy input?
--PM
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 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.
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.
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..."