GM Criticized Over Chevy Volt's Hybrid Similarities

Attila Dimedici writes "This article says the Chevy Volt is not what GM claimed it was: an Extended Range Electric Vehicle. The Volt is simply a plug-in hybrid. Instead of a vehicle that is only driven with the electric drive train that uses a gasoline engine to charge the batteries, the Volt actually uses the gasoline engine to drive the front wheels at speeds above 70 miles per hour or when the batteries run down. Additionally, the Volt gets nowhere near the 230 mpg that GM was claiming for it. If this is all true, why did GM misrepresent the car? The facts as stated in the article make the Volt a pretty decent competitor to the Prius and other hybrids already on the market." A post at the Car Connection blog takes the opposing view, saying that accusations of GM "lying" are overhyped, since the capability to power the wheels with gasoline is reserved for situations where electricity isn't a viable option. The author says GM didn't mention this ability before now due to concerns over patents and competition from other companies.

Comments

Attempt to delaying uptake of competing products

[DragonWriter]

If this is all true, why did GM misrepresent the car?

Because hybrids like the Prius were already on the market, and "eventually, we'll get around to releasing a slightly-better hybrid on much the same model" isn't the kind of sales pitch that gets people to buy a conventional GM car now while deferring purchasing a hybrid for later.

Sending the message "we are going to real soon now come out with an electric car that will make hybrids obsolete" is somewhat better as an effort to slow the success of the existing, already-on-the-market hybrids.

Decent competitor?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not on price. It's fucking forty thousand dollars! It's an ECONOMY car!

Sheesh.

People are pissed because they still owe us (US taxpayers) nearly 50 billion dollars. This was the big 'ace in the hole' the used in part to sell the bailout to us.

This piece of shit is not going to put GM on the road to recovery, and the US taxpayer on the road to becoming whole again.

Re:Decent competitor?

[pixelpusher220]

My understanding was that the wasteful $400 hammers/toilet seats, were actually funding for the 'undisclosed' portions of the budget. But the 'wasteful' tag nicely got people in an uproar over something completely unrelated, thus clouding the issue beyond any rational discussion.

Re:Decent competitor?

[cynyr]

The Prius is a parallel hybrid as well, the gas engine can charge the battery and move the car or simply charge the batteries.

The reason i'm upset(i use that lightly) is that 1) They have been billing and advertising the car as a serial hybrid, 2) The inclusion of all the extra drive train components is a big pile of more stuff that I'll need to maintain. I was looking forward to a car without a transmission, but this one has an extra complicated one.

Re:Decent competitor?

[Chris Burke]

My understanding was that the wasteful $400 hammers/toilet seats, were actually funding for the 'undisclosed' portions of the budget.

That's what Seinfeld's Dad said in Independence Day, but I doubt it is true. All they have to do to fund the undisclosed portions of the budget is to move money from the disclosed portions to the undisclosed while telling everyone they spent it on the disclosed; I mean that's basically what's happening in the ID conspiracy theory, is it not?

The super-expensive items the government buys fall into two categories. First is truly special-purpose limited-run items which as always cost much more than general purpose mass-produced items. Second is misguided attempts at cost savings by specifying government purchasing requirements so precisely that only a single product matches, but then the makers of that product change the formula so it no longer matches and to satisfy the requirement it basically becomes a special-purpose item. On example I saw in an expose on the subject was a simple detergent that at the time of the requirement's creation was both adequate and the cheapest solution. But since the industry moved faster than the speed of government bureaucracy, this basically meant the government was paying to keep the old equipment running to produce the old detergent. Poof, suddenly instead of being the cheapest option it's 10x more expensive than anything else.

Truth is stupider than fiction. :)

Re:Decent competitor?

[bm_luethke]

Further there is a LOT of testing goes into those things. Yea we tend to take a toilet seat for granted but one many of those airplanes and especially things like submarines *every* part is critical. Some engineer has to plan out pretty much everything that can occur to it and make sure that it either doesn't fail or fails in such a way that it doesn't become mission critical - that is expensive and, as you say, when they are only buying 50 of them it really drives the per unit costs up.

I do work in mission critical computing and it is shocking how many SCSI terminators, USB cables, SATA cables, heck even raid controllers have an "acceptable" failure rate (uncaught) that is totally unacceptable when it is either millions of dollars per minute or often peoples lives on the line running through your equipment. Yea, we used to sell SCSI terminators at 1500 dollars piece, but when the countries stock exchange, New York cities 9-11 servers, or citi-banks central credit card processing servers count on it *working* it isn't that expensive. That's why EMC can charge the outrageous prices they do and why those data farms cost so much, it isn't the hardware that is the primary cost.

A toilet seat having a .1% chance of falling off your seat at home is just fine, a .001% chance of one falling off and becoming debris in an aircraft that will probably need to make high-g maneuvers is not. They are paying to make sure that it doesn't become a fairly heavy flying object. So even after tooling up per specifications I bet there was en extensive testing phase that went along with it too.

Similar thing is true for many of the "wasted" science - the part that made it not a waste was never reported. When I was at Oak Ridge National Labs we made the news for figuring out why a shower curtain pulls in when you take a shower instead of puffing out. I do not recall the exact amount spent but it was in the millions. Lots of carping about a waste of time - it was "obvious" (and the "obvious" answer was right too - moving air lowers pressure on the inside). However what the real science was about is that real life didn't follow the model with its margin of error - indeed it was well outside of it. The study modeled down to a molecular level, they eventually found some link with heat and water vapor (I don't recall exactly - I'm a computer scientist so outside of the opening paragraphs, closing paragraphs, and critiquing the methodology I can't do much). The big news about it around the lab was that the discovery was estimated to save several billion in fuel costs in the Aviation industry over the next 10 years. That little tidbit of information was never talked about, just the colossal "waste", the fact was it was an unknown effect and the easiest/cheapest to measure model was a shower. They could have tripled the budget and built a special made lab for it and sounded more "science like" (and is, later on, what they started to do to avoid bad press - yep, good thing people caught that govt waste).

Re:Decent competitor?

[trout007]

I work for NASA and sometimes I am responsible for those types of products. We get very special requests for equipment to work on the Space Shuttle. The first thing we do is try to find off the shelf solutions. If nothing suitable can be found we look for something close that can be modified. Only as a last resort do we actually design a tool from scratch. We have designed an built what was a $50,000 pair of vice grips. It had to produce a specific gripping force, be made of non sparking and non marring materials, be Liquid Oxygen compatible, and reach in at a certain angle. We looked all over for something that would work but we ended up having to make it ourselves. The alternative was to completely disassemble the Main Propulsion Line of an Orbiter which would have taken a year and cost tens of millions of dollars. So if someone wanted to make a big deal of it you could say we wasted $50,000 on a pair of pliers. In reality we saved tens of millions of dollars.

don't see an issue.

[pbjones]

for most daya to day urban running it'll be electric. For long trips it'll be hybrid, so watt is all of the fuss about? The USA has such low oil prices it's lucky to see hybrids at all. I have an old Prius for gadget value, using EV mode to stealth around car parks etc. Still get worried when the motor stops at traffic lights etc. I would like to add the engine stop feature to my 'normal' car.

They have bad ideas

[Anonymous Coward]

I want an electric car with a small generator that runs off gas or diesel. Just a normal electrical car with a small generator and a fuel-tank. It will increase somewhat in size, but there is no reason to make anything complicated out of it.

Re:Po-TAY-to vs. Po-TAH-to

[pixelpusher220]

Is it really that important what it's called?

It is important. If it is simply a version of the existing hybrid cars, with both gas and electric propulsion systems, then it needs the maintenance that gas and hybrid cars need; oil changes, traditional transmission, etc.

By being a fully electric vehicle it no longer needs those parts since there is only electric propulsion. Where that electricity comes from is where GM said the Volt differed. By adding a gas generator (range extender) module you lessen the chance of being stranded with a dead battery. It gives it a 'usable' range for family trips and such. More importantly, the range module can be swapped out for something else, an extra battery, a fuel cell..anything that produces electricity.

If it turns out that the gas generator is actually driving the wheels, it can no longer be swapped out...

The price is marginally (very marginally) acceptable given the new technology and abilities and projected savings that have been touted by GM. But if it's 'just' a hybrid with slightly better numbers, then the $40K price tag is simply ridiculous...

The Volt uses a planetary gearset

[rabtech]

The Volt uses a planetary gearset where the main gear is driven by the primary electric motor. The planet and ring gears can also optionally by driven by the engine and a second assist electric motor when needed. This allows the computer to continuously vary the power source that is driving the wheels. The only part of this equation that was not previously known was that the engine can directly give torque to the wheels under certain circumstances (without going through a generator).

Typical operation for a daily commuter is stop and go traffic of 20 miles or less each way, which means the typical commuter in a Volt will use only the electric motor. The gasoline engine will never even start up. The Volt also comes with plug-in support from the factory. These two things are what make it different than existing hybrid cars. If you can sell these cars and start moving them in large numbers then you can start moving the battery prices down and scaling the electric-only range up. You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good otherwise you'll never ship anything. We know that in software, in hardware (think 1st gen iPod), and it is just as true in cars. The Volt is a necessary evolutionary step and I hope it sells really well because battery prices will drop and we can take the next step even sooner.

I also find it disingenuous to run the Volt around with drained batteries so you can see its "true" MPG (whatever your definition of "true" is with this sort of test). That's like saying a hard-top convertible sucks because I wanted to see how it performed in the rain but purposely left the hard top in the garage. The whole point of the Volt is using 100% electric power for most people's daily commutes. If my commute is 37 miles round-trip, then the Volt gives me infinite MPG, which makes no sense because the electricity does have a cost to it. This just highlights how inadequate MPG is as an efficiency measurement.

Re:Attempt to delaying uptake of competing product

[Low Ranked Craig]

Alternatively, you should never be driving the car at more than 70 mph as it is illegal to do so. Therefore it isn't an issue. Or at least that is the case with the identical Vauxhall Ampere sold in the UK. The rest of Europe uses km/h for its speed limits and the speed limit is typically between 110 km/h and 130 km/h. 70 mph is 112km/h.

I routinely drive from Phoenix to LA and back. The speed limit is 75 on I-10 between Phoenix and Blythe. In CA it drops to 70. If you're doing 75 you'd better not be in the passing lane because the average speed on that road is 85 to 90 for cars in my experience. I've driven that route more than 50 times...

Re:My concern is what stimulus/tax incentives/prog

[afidel]

I don't think you have ANY clue what you are talking about. One of my dads larger accounts is Timken. Among other things Timken makes bearings, they make lots of bearings for the auto industry, but they also make lots of bearings for the military. Neither customer base is large enough to sustain the enterprise but combined it's enough of a market to make a decent profit when things are going well. Timken is important enough to the military that their bearing plant in Canton Ohio had its own thermonuclear warhead during the cold war. Had GM gone bankrupt and stiffed Timken then Timken would have gone bankrupt and there would be no domestic supplier of a whole host of critical parts. If you WANT the government dependent on some supplier in Malaysia or mainland China for critical parts then you're a fool.