The car is all about efficiency. Only under certain, slim, circumstances can the gas engine divert some of it's mechanical output to the drive train through the ring gear.
1) car must be running on gas already becuase of:
A) battery is "empty" or
B) user selected to use gas, despite range still on the battery (ie: "hold" or "mountain" modes)
2) You must be cruising at high speed within a very limited range
Since the car is electric, it is basically ALWAYS running off the battery. When the gas engine kicks on to generate electricity it is clutched into the smaller of the two motors, the larger motor is connected to the ring gear to drive the car. SOMETIMES it is more efficient (in this special tiny window) to bypass the energy conversion (mechanical->electrical->mechanical) and use some of the mechancial energy directly. Note I said "some" as the car is still generating juice as well. Friggin genius that they can balance everything that way.
Just as in the Prius and other parallel hybrids, the high torque electric motors provide the short duration boost on acceleration so that the gas engine doesn't have to ramp up to provide it. But in the Volt's case, the gas engine isn't MADE to be able to pull the car entirely by itself anyway, so if you floor it the gas engine just disconnects and goes back to generation duties. The car goes to native 100% electric propulsion and just zooms away without you ever knowing all the machinations going on under the hood.
I got my Volt in Dec '12, a model year 2013, and I friggin love the car. Basically, if you haven't even driven one... why are you talking like you have any experience? How can the company making the best selling EV on planet not be relevant?
The volt is a GREAT car. The amount of engineering they put into it boggles the mind. Take the NFC brake rotors that don't rust. They bake steel rotors in an oven the size of a bus, with all the air evacuated and replaced with Nitrogen at about 500 degress for a 24hr period. Why does that matter you ask? Because with the industry-leading regenerative braking efficiency my first brake pad replacement should be around 100K miles.
Also, you can see the Thermally Managed battery pack evolve in the new Spark EV, and the Cadillac ELR, the first of many more EV models coming out. Nissan thought they could get by with the Leaf but has had to replace entire car packs in extreme climates like AZ. GM did it right and warranty their packs for 8 yrs/100K miles. Longer than most transmissions! Solid engineering - the reliability stats on the Volt are off the charts. Volts have racked up nearly 200 MILLION miles, the experimental phase is over.
The Volt has all the advantages of a battery car: quick, responsive, quiet, cheap - 25% the cost to run, no stupid serpintine belts, super low maintenance..
And it fixes the BIG drawback to EVs... range anxiety. I drive it from Dallas to Amarillo multiple times a year, did Austin in the summer.
Also, EVs benefit from modern design and are SUPER safe compared to almost all gas cars. 10 airbags (including knee airbags) in the Volt.
While I go all electric as often as I can, I still do buy 8 gallons of gas about every 6 weeks due to my new job commute. Before that I worked closer to home and I went almost 3 months without burning ANY gas at all! Still on track to save $1,200 year in fuel costs (I have avoided 420 gallons of fuel in only 9 months).
Are great products relevant? Poor advertising is one thing, but sales are ramping up year-on-year so I'm not worried. Go drive one for a day, spend hours on the internet reading up on the tech, then maybe you'll have a better perspective on relevancy.
Did you know the averaged amount of energy (US) for the cleanest type of oil to be drilled, transported, refined, distributed and pumped is 6.6KWH per gallon? For Canadian tar-sands, which is near the dirtiest type of oil we can use, is it closer to 13.3KWH per gallon produced?
So when you burn a gallon of gasoline, and go ~30 miles on it, remember you have both your car's direct emissions AND all the emissions used to generate the electricity needed to get it into your tank. So basically your car is twice as smoggy as you knew.
Or... you could just put that same electricity into a EV, drive ~60 miles with no added emissions, and leave the oil in the ground. An EV uses a form of energy but an ICE car burns a finite resource. We can do better, why are we even arguing about the need to?
"including the ability to directly cut and paste document items directly into emails and have it fully handled and look and behave perfectly".
Sorry, but I can't stop laughing at this to post long enough to post a real reply. Let's just say that hasn't been my experience. Especially when you remeber microsoft's definition of cross platform is it works on both Vista AND win7. Maybe if 100% of all servers, clients and OS were all the same versions? I guess that rules out macs, iphones, androids, etc. PLEASE. The larger the enterprise the worse the fragmentation gets.
In my situation I used visio diagrammes in jpg with a client side image map. This did multiple things simultaneously: grouping and hierarchy. Geolocation and service clusters. Plus the CFIO could even drill down for her research! All the while retaining the full text search, etc., that the wiki provides.
Good luck!
But for now... If I were a Samurai, I would not start newbies with a live sharp sword. And Modern Perl is so, so very sharp...
I keep reading the full paper (+points for publishing the whole thing!) and have yet to hit upon the definition of the word "accurate" they are using to measure the results. Apparently that is contained inside their previous paper with no direct link.
On page 3 though, Perl is described as "A well-known commercial programming language". Really? C# is a commercial language, Perl is an Open Source language with wide commercial adoption that has evolved or the years into several distinct beasts.
I took a $10K(USD) cut: $5K for cutting a 25 minute drive down a tollway that costs me $600/yr to a 2.1mile door to door "commute". Bicycling to work ROCKS. And another $5K discount to work with under a particular manager that I had worked with before. That was 3 yrs ago when the company was starting off, now we are peers, and the company just got acquired by the largest competitor in the field. I have no complaints.
So - his loyalty (to his workers) engendered similar loyalty in turn (to him). I wouldn't have sacrificed the pay cut for just anyone. Everyone benefited from it. And oh yes, I got that $10K added back to my salary within 2 yrs. I would do that again.
But despite the fact loyalty does work... that doesn't seem to be the position you are in. Right? If you can leave cleanly, do it. They will survive just fine and you will be remembered as the miracle worker that built it from scratch.
I 3rd the vote for YaST! THE easiest way to transition from windows to Linux is through a menu driven configuration utility, and YaST runs in ncurses too so you can run your server without loading a GUI (and it's security issues).
That aside, don't deploy to 2500 users an unfamiliar tech you can't fix...
But seriously...
We just wrote an enterprise, line of business application in Perl using Catalyst, Moose, DBIx, Template Toolkit, etc.
After that experience this 44 year old programmer says "You can pry Perl from my cold dead fingers".
In just over a year, my small team of two accomplished what takes competitors 2+ years with actual staff of 5+.
Additionally I am not even sure we could have met the performance requirements with.Net or Java.
Writing large apps in Modern Perl has been frigging wonderful, people. I like going to work again.
That is why Perl isn't "dead".
I am looking forward to Perl6, because I am all about leaving on time. Every day.
Which Perl enabled me to do now.
Congrats Rakudo Star team!
I run 100% on Linux except in this domain. CorelDraw suite is dirt cheap compared to Adobe, has both vector and bitmap (Great CMYK support) and is a solid worker. My graphic artist friends describe it as a production tool instead of a creative tool, but they got work to pay for their copies of CS3. I cannot wait for Xara to finish their Corel import filter - Or for Corel to get back into Linux app market (Yup, I'm a dreamer!). Newer versions with new MS installer isn't working under WINE yet, so I run a copy on XP inside Virtualbox.
But I increasingly create alot of my artwork in Inkscape as vector exported to target size in bitmaps (like glass looking buttons...) that I used to do 100% as bitmap. Makes custom art soooo much faster.
Krita in the KOffice suite has CYMK, nice controls, but lacks the vast the plugin library we have become accustomed to. It will come I am sure.
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The car is all about efficiency. Only under certain, slim, circumstances can the gas engine divert some of it's mechanical output to the drive train through the ring gear.
1) car must be running on gas already becuase of:
A) battery is "empty" or
B) user selected to use gas, despite range still on the battery (ie: "hold" or "mountain" modes)
2) You must be cruising at high speed within a very limited range
Since the car is electric, it is basically ALWAYS running off the battery. When the gas engine kicks on to generate electricity it is clutched into the smaller of the two motors, the larger motor is connected to the ring gear to drive the car. SOMETIMES it is more efficient (in this special tiny window) to bypass the energy conversion (mechanical->electrical->mechanical) and use some of the mechancial energy directly. Note I said "some" as the car is still generating juice as well. Friggin genius that they can balance everything that way.
Just as in the Prius and other parallel hybrids, the high torque electric motors provide the short duration boost on acceleration so that the gas engine doesn't have to ramp up to provide it. But in the Volt's case, the gas engine isn't MADE to be able to pull the car entirely by itself anyway, so if you floor it the gas engine just disconnects and goes back to generation duties. The car goes to native 100% electric propulsion and just zooms away without you ever knowing all the machinations going on under the hood.
I got my Volt in Dec '12, a model year 2013, and I friggin love the car. Basically, if you haven't even driven one... why are you talking like you have any experience? How can the company making the best selling EV on planet not be relevant?
The volt is a GREAT car. The amount of engineering they put into it boggles the mind. Take the NFC brake rotors that don't rust. They bake steel rotors in an oven the size of a bus, with all the air evacuated and replaced with Nitrogen at about 500 degress for a 24hr period. Why does that matter you ask? Because with the industry-leading regenerative braking efficiency my first brake pad replacement should be around 100K miles.
Also, you can see the Thermally Managed battery pack evolve in the new Spark EV, and the Cadillac ELR, the first of many more EV models coming out. Nissan thought they could get by with the Leaf but has had to replace entire car packs in extreme climates like AZ. GM did it right and warranty their packs for 8 yrs/100K miles. Longer than most transmissions! Solid engineering - the reliability stats on the Volt are off the charts. Volts have racked up nearly 200 MILLION miles, the experimental phase is over.
The Volt has all the advantages of a battery car: quick, responsive, quiet, cheap - 25% the cost to run, no stupid serpintine belts, super low maintenance..
And it fixes the BIG drawback to EVs... range anxiety. I drive it from Dallas to Amarillo multiple times a year, did Austin in the summer.
Also, EVs benefit from modern design and are SUPER safe compared to almost all gas cars. 10 airbags (including knee airbags) in the Volt.
While I go all electric as often as I can, I still do buy 8 gallons of gas about every 6 weeks due to my new job commute. Before that I worked closer to home and I went almost 3 months without burning ANY gas at all! Still on track to save $1,200 year in fuel costs (I have avoided 420 gallons of fuel in only 9 months).
Are great products relevant? Poor advertising is one thing, but sales are ramping up year-on-year so I'm not worried. Go drive one for a day, spend hours on the internet reading up on the tech, then maybe you'll have a better perspective on relevancy.
Did you know the averaged amount of energy (US) for the cleanest type of oil to be drilled, transported, refined, distributed and pumped is 6.6KWH per gallon? For Canadian tar-sands, which is near the dirtiest type of oil we can use, is it closer to 13.3KWH per gallon produced? So when you burn a gallon of gasoline, and go ~30 miles on it, remember you have both your car's direct emissions AND all the emissions used to generate the electricity needed to get it into your tank. So basically your car is twice as smoggy as you knew. Or... you could just put that same electricity into a EV, drive ~60 miles with no added emissions, and leave the oil in the ground. An EV uses a form of energy but an ICE car burns a finite resource. We can do better, why are we even arguing about the need to?
"including the ability to directly cut and paste document items directly into emails and have it fully handled and look and behave perfectly".
Sorry, but I can't stop laughing at this to post long enough to post a real reply. Let's just say that hasn't been my experience. Especially when you remeber microsoft's definition of cross platform is it works on both Vista AND win7. Maybe if 100% of all servers, clients and OS were all the same versions? I guess that rules out macs, iphones, androids, etc. PLEASE. The larger the enterprise the worse the fragmentation gets.
In my situation I used visio diagrammes in jpg with a client side image map. This did multiple things simultaneously: grouping and hierarchy. Geolocation and service clusters. Plus the CFIO could even drill down for her research! All the while retaining the full text search, etc., that the wiki provides. Good luck!
But for now... If I were a Samurai, I would not start newbies with a live sharp sword. And Modern Perl is so, so very sharp...
I keep reading the full paper (+points for publishing the whole thing!) and have yet to hit upon the definition of the word "accurate" they are using to measure the results. Apparently that is contained inside their previous paper with no direct link. On page 3 though, Perl is described as "A well-known commercial programming language". Really? C# is a commercial language, Perl is an Open Source language with wide commercial adoption that has evolved or the years into several distinct beasts.
I took a $10K(USD) cut: $5K for cutting a 25 minute drive down a tollway that costs me $600/yr to a 2.1mile door to door "commute". Bicycling to work ROCKS. And another $5K discount to work with under a particular manager that I had worked with before. That was 3 yrs ago when the company was starting off, now we are peers, and the company just got acquired by the largest competitor in the field. I have no complaints.
So - his loyalty (to his workers) engendered similar loyalty in turn (to him). I wouldn't have sacrificed the pay cut for just anyone. Everyone benefited from it. And oh yes, I got that $10K added back to my salary within 2 yrs. I would do that again.
But despite the fact loyalty does work... that doesn't seem to be the position you are in. Right? If you can leave cleanly, do it. They will survive just fine and you will be remembered as the miracle worker that built it from scratch.
I 3rd the vote for YaST! THE easiest way to transition from windows to Linux is through a menu driven configuration utility, and YaST runs in ncurses too so you can run your server without loading a GUI (and it's security issues). That aside, don't deploy to 2500 users an unfamiliar tech you can't fix...
But seriously... We just wrote an enterprise, line of business application in Perl using Catalyst, Moose, DBIx, Template Toolkit, etc. After that experience this 44 year old programmer says "You can pry Perl from my cold dead fingers". In just over a year, my small team of two accomplished what takes competitors 2+ years with actual staff of 5+. Additionally I am not even sure we could have met the performance requirements with .Net or Java.
Writing large apps in Modern Perl has been frigging wonderful, people. I like going to work again.
That is why Perl isn't "dead".
I am looking forward to Perl6, because I am all about leaving on time. Every day.
Which Perl enabled me to do now.
Congrats Rakudo Star team!
Did anyone else notice that "Complete Edition" is listed under the "Operating Systems" category, but if you go up into that category it disappears?
In the left hand helper column it even lists BOTH OSes: Mac and Windows
The only ways I could get to that item was:
a) the direct link
b) searching for linux on the site
Invisible = under the radar. Just saying...
I run 100% on Linux except in this domain. CorelDraw suite is dirt cheap compared to Adobe, has both vector and bitmap (Great CMYK support) and is a solid worker. My graphic artist friends describe it as a production tool instead of a creative tool, but they got work to pay for their copies of CS3. I cannot wait for Xara to finish their Corel import filter - Or for Corel to get back into Linux app market (Yup, I'm a dreamer!). Newer versions with new MS installer isn't working under WINE yet, so I run a copy on XP inside Virtualbox.
But I increasingly create alot of my artwork in Inkscape as vector exported to target size in bitmaps (like glass looking buttons...) that I used to do 100% as bitmap. Makes custom art soooo much faster.
Krita in the KOffice suite has CYMK, nice controls, but lacks the vast the plugin library we have become accustomed to. It will come I am sure.