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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.
should be available by 2010 according to this morning news.
I'll be buying one as well.
My RT commute is ~24 miles. I can charge at work. Free gas anyone?
Not having to charge at home means just a little more in my pocket each month. Since this will be replacing no vehicle (I'll keep my truck thankyouverymuch) I doubt it'll pay for its self simply on saved fuel, but maybe it will. I burn ~550 gallons of mid-grade fuel per year just on my commute. At $3/gallon that's $1650/year. Assuming the car lasts 10 years I'll save $16K just on not paying for commute fuel. Any other driving I do with it will still be more efficient than my pickup (at 11Mpg).
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
The Tesla uses electricity for both. It sounds inefficient, but compared to the power draw for moving the vehicle, it's a drop in the bucket.
Best part is, you'll be able to sit in your Volt in the parking lot and nap with the A/C or the heat running, and yet the engine can be off until it needs to start in order to charge the batteries back up. (which would probably be many hours later if you started with full batteries)
It's not vaporware once public betas are available for evaluation. The "vapor" part implies it doesn't exist at all, not that it just hasn't released yet. The beta can reveal a product to be vapor, if the product in the beta doesn't match the features of the pre-beta hype. But that just means the pre-beta hyped product was vapor. The crappy beta product is real.
I think this applies both for software production and for the Chevy Volt.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I'm not sure why people are hating on this car so much other than the fact that it's GM and everyone is mad at them for the whole bailout thing right now.
.75 gallons? You're going to complain about that?
The only real difference between this car and previous hybrids is that this one will go 40 (maybe, I'm guessing closer to 30) miles before it kicks into hyrbid mode.
This car is a great concept and for the vast majority of people I know, will provide essentially gas-less lifestyles (except on road trips, but if you're taking THIS little thing on a road trip, you did something else wrong). And if you need to go 70 miles instead of 40 in one day, you spend what?
This is the kind of technology that can break the oil companies hold on the auto industry. yet people continue to bitch about how it's not good enough for them. I say fuck you all and I hope other companies follow in this car's footsteps. All technology has to start somewhere and this is the first version of a gas-free car to hit the market. Give it a few years and we'll be seeing cars that go 60 miles on one charge, then 100, then maybe even more. Give it time, stop bitching and appreciate how far we have come, not how much you still want to happen.
If you have the cheddar to drop $40k on a commuter car, you probably don't think twice about the price at the pump.
Don't fool yourself. People with the kind of cash to afford 40k on a car are probably more honest about their finances. There's a reason the rich remain rich; they're not idiots about their money.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Because we don't know where your grid power comes from. Coal fired? Nuclear? Hydroelectric?
The cost is different in each case.
Screw the motorcycle. Drive a $1000 shittermobile. It's pretty easy to buy one that gets 30 mpg. Drive it for a year or two and either junk it, or sell it for a couple hundred dollars. You'll never approach the efficiency of that compared to buying any new car, hybrid or not as there will be no new manufacturing required.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
I'd be worried that if all my runs were full-electric, that is to say that my 10 mile commute never required the car to dip into the gasoline, that without treatment, the gasoline could break down and gum up the injectors - like when you store a boat or mower over the winter...but who wants to drive around with a stabilizer-mix full time? that's gotta put a big hit on efficiency and power if you ever need the combustion engine to kick in.
i don't think i've ever seen that issue discussed when hybrids are brought up.
If I was a betting man, I wouldn't bet on GM being around in 10 years.
Sheldon
When's the last time the government ever cut a program or subsidy? Hell, we still have a subsidy to goat herders for mohair to make WW1 uniforms.
Now that GM has fully transitioned from company-that-makes-cars-for-profit into union-employment-welfare-program, it will never go away unless the government itself does.
I bought my 2002 Prius after a six month wait time. I paid more for it then a comparably equiped gas car. There was no economic rationale for my purchase -- I did it because I loved the car, and had the privilege of driving a cutting edge piece of engineering for going on seven years now, with minimum maintenance and hassle. There's something beautiful about driving with virtually no noise and I still smile when I roll up to a stop sign and the engine shuts off.
Moreover, I am willing to pay higher than market rate because of the externalities associated with having the world's first mass-produced electric car:
I am supporting an environmental technology that I believe in.
I am supporting green-tech projects, built in America.
I love driving on electric power only.
I am willing to take a risk on buying the Volt or the Prius or any other quasi-experimental first-generation piece of tech hardware because I have the money.
I am buying it because as a child I wanted to know why I couldn't put a windmill on top of the family car and use wind power to make it go.
Hard to understand why the writer didn't just compare it to another Hybrid. Ford's Hybrid Fusion I think is the most impressive Hybrid for what you get for your dollar and the performance of the vehicle (also doesn't feel like a tin can). It starts and $27,270 and is closer to the Volt. Heck the Camry would have been closer to the Volt. The two Stipulations as to why he picked the Corolla don't really seem to make sense when there are dozens of models that would have been a closer match.
"Utility officials have already stated"? Oh yeah, that's comforting. Are these the same "utility officials" who mismanaged the power grid in CA so badly a few years back that we had rolling blackouts all summer?
By that you mean the California voters who voted to deregulate to the system we got? I really wish I could blame the officials, but we did that to ourselves... sort of like our current budget.