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?

[Pharmboy]

Look, the government actually owns GM - Government Motors. The same guys that buy $400 hammers. The fact that the government can produce ANY motor vehicle for under $100,000 is a fucking miracle.

Re:Decent competitor?

[DaHat]

Uhhh...what? I think you mean General Motors. And no, they are not owned by the US government

Um... did you miss the side bar?

Owner(s):
-United States Department of the Treasury (61%)
-United Auto Workers Union Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (17.5%)
-Canada Development Investment Corporation (7.9%)
-Government of Ontario (3.8%)
-Bond holders of Motors Liquidation Company (9.8%)

If a 61% stake isn't ownership... I don't know what is!

Re:Decent competitor?

[Chris Burke]

"Owns a controlling stake" is synonymous with "owns" in the context of publicly traded companies, just as "buying 51% or more of the voting stock of the company" is synonymous with "buying the company".

Re:Decent competitor?

[afidel]

No, the $400 hammer was part of a special silent repair kit made for operating outside of the sonically shielded portion of a $Billions submarine. The kit was put together to a very exacting spec and then only a handful were ordered to go on the small fleet of American submarines. The rather high development cost was spread over a small number of kits. The $600 toilet seat was similar, a long out of production aircraft, the P3-C Orion subhunter (still used by NOAA for hurricane insertions) needed to have the existing toilet seats replaced due to age (25 years old at the start of production) and so a new mold needed to be made to fit the particular size and physical requirements for the aircraft. Anyone who works with plastics or fiberglass knows that the majority of the cost is in setting up the mold, so when you order 63 parts your per-part cost is going to be crazy high. Btw, this happens in industry all the time. When I worked at Cisco we spent several million on the tapeout for a new chip that ended up having a critical flaw that required a design spin and hence new tapeout. The handful of chips that were made with the flawed mask could have been said to be x hundred thousand dollar chips, but it would be just as inaccurate as the people yelling about the hammers and toilets. There's plenty of waste in the US government, finding stupid examples like those just makes you look like a fool.

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.

Po-TAY-to vs. Po-TAH-to

[fructose]

Its a car that primarily electric driven and uses the gas engine when the batteries/motor can't cut it. Is it really that important what it's called? It's a car designed to be 'green' and that's what it's being sold as. The only thing that GM should be criticized for is the over estimation of the range you can expect. What we call is it pretty moot.

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...

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.

Gasp! Not additional features!

[meta-monkey]

So, if the batteries are dead, the car runs like a regular gasoline-powered vehicle. And people are upset by this? Isn't that a great feature? I'd be kind of pissed if I drove a Volt, were stranded in the desert because the batteries died, and when I complained, "jeez, why can't you just make it so if the batteries are dead, the gas engine runs the car?" "Naw, then it wouldn't be an 'electric vehicle!'"

Re:Gasp! Not additional features!

[Darkness404]

For a small commute it makes a whole lot more sense to buy a simi-reliable cheap, used car. You can find decent ones for $1,000-$3,000 if you know what you are looking for. Lets assume that an all-electric Volt would cost $25,000 new. Now, you wouldn't have to pay for fuel with a Volt and lets say you won't have maintenance for 3 years. And lets say you find a 1988 Ford Taurus for $2,000. Now, lets say you've got a 9 mile commute, thats 18 miles round trip, at the car's 18 MPG city you are looking at, say $2.50 per day, that is $2737.50 in fuel costs for 3 years. Now, even assuming that you've got to pay $1,000 in maintenance costs, that is still a total cost of ownership of only $5737.50 for 3 years. Plus, assuming that it isn't in too bad of shape you can recoup about $1,000 or more of the costs if you sell the car after 3 years. If you'd do that with the Volt you'd end up losing far more than $5,737.

Distinction without a difference?

[Chris Burke]

From the car connection blog:

The problem the buff books (and a few online outlets parroting their stance) have with the newly-announced ability of the Volt to supplement power with mechanical energy directly from the on-board 1.4-liter four-cylinder, is that it's no longer purely electric power driving the wheels.

This is a distinction without a difference. You can burn gasoline to spin a generator to charge the batteries to power the electric motors, or you can partially skip the middle man and send some of that gas-generated power straight to the wheels. Either way, gas is burned to turn the wheels.

Okay, I think that's a fair point, but in my view it does make a difference. It means the Volt has to have a transmission, which means extra weight and maintenance issues, and all the complexity of an ICE-based drivetrain. It means the Volt's ICE may have to run over a range of RPMs rather than solely running at an optimal RPM.

So while I'm in tentative agreement that this isn't necessarily a lie, and that the Volt can still look appealing versus other hybrid options, it still makes a difference and reduces some of the advantages the Volt had.

Re:Distinction without a difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a one-gear "transmission", where the engine can provide extra power to the wheels. GM actually should be praised for having a simpler, more efficient system than Toyota, but all people can do is scream "You Lie!" and "Government Motors!", because they think they're being clever.

Other than being "pure EV", there is NO ADVANTAGE-- The loss of 10-15% energy converting from mechanical to electric to mechanical is significantly mitigated, the car is more efficient, performance doesn't suffer under the "highway speeds in charge sustaining mode", and it's a pretty simple modification to the gearset for the primary motor. It also finally answers the question of why they weren't using in-wheel motors. For the first 35-40 miles? All EV. Charge sustaining mode around town? EV with juice being supplied by gasoline engine. Over 70 mph with battery mostly depleted? Now the engine is engaged in the drive-train and you're getting extra oomph from the engine.

Now, the people who are actually *driving the Volt seem to think it has better acceleration, braking and handling than a Prius, with all of the benefits, and none of the drawbacks... But by all means, let's continue to rant against GM for a difference that 90% of the American car buying public wouldn't even understand, or care about.

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:They have bad ideas

[WindBourne]

First, you missed the batteries. Those add weight, and complexity. Now, you say that you want to add a small motor/generator. Well, as I pointed out, the RIGHT place for such an arrangement is larger trucks. The fact is, that if you need a range extension, then do one of serveral things:

1. Buy a gas/diesel car. If you are going on long trips regularly, then you are better off doing this.
2. Buy/rent a trailer with the generator. Seriously, if you need a range extender say once a year, then simply rent a trailer that has the ability to provide the electricity. Of course, the car has to be rigged for that.
3. Buy a car that has fast charge.

But it makes ZERO sense to have a 'range extended' car esp. in what is now a parallel system. Basically, GM is shipping a car based on profits to themselves, not based on what is good for customers.

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.

My concern is what stimulus/tax incentives/program

[Assmasher]

...did they benefit from because of this misrepresentation.

There can be absolutely zero doubt that they knew they were being deceitful, although the purpose may have been relatively innocuous; however, when you add this to the other deceitful tactics they've already employed and have been debunked (230mpg anyone?) a pattern of behavior seems to emerge that would require seriously mitigating circumstances which aren't readily apparent.

Doesn't matter to me

[hawguy]

I have a 15 mile commute (each way), and rarely am able to reach speeds of 70mph on my way to work -- 35 - 45 is more typical.

The Volt would give me an all-electric commute, yet I can still drive it 200 miles to Tahoe on the weekends.

The all-electric Leaf will give me around 70 miles of range, so no long weekend trips.

The plug-in Prius (official version, not aftermarket conversions) would give me around 15 miles of all electric range.

I fail to see the controversy - most people can have an all-electric commute with the Volt. It was already known that the ICE engine would kick in to supplement the battery, the fact that it supplements via mechanical connection in addition to charging seems immaterial.

Re:Attempt to delaying uptake of competing product

[amicusNYCL]

Alternatively, you should never be driving the car at more than 70 mph as it is illegal to do so.

Oh yeah? Here in Arizona the interstates are 75mph. In parts of Texas it's 80mph.

Re:Attempt to delaying uptake of competing product

[Trailwalker]

private cars are no longer a viable solution to our transport needs

Sho nuff, bring back horses. Fodder can be grown locally, no oil derivatives used to provide locomotion, and if worse comes to worse, you can eat them. Hides make good shoes and sports equipment. Best part: idle youth can be put to work shoveling horse shit instead of posting it on slashdot.

Re:Attempt to delaying uptake of competing product

[NuShrike]

Your citation also proves that moderate ridership is more efficient than cars. It also ignores that train systems run LESS train-cars and less trains during non-commuter hours to even out density per total number of train-cars.

Factoring these in, plus lower maintenance costs of rail vs asphalt, mass-transit is still a win.