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?

[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).

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.