Hybrid assist on this model is quite weak. This would accelerate slower than almost any new economy car available for sale in North America.
I like the Insight Aluminum shell but I think it better suited for Full EV conversions and this diesel one would likely be deemed unroadworthy in many jurisdictions because of the emissions.
The why no manufacturers are doing this is:
because it won't pass emissions... because it will be slug like in acceleration. because it using a very expensive aluminum body.
Slow, expensive and not passing emissions.
When you can get past emissions, keep costs low and accelerate in about 10 seconds, then manufacturers will do that.. (hence the new Insight).
Time will tell. I will bet on this being a fairly large liability for GM if they really do a 10 year warranty. Now we just have to wait 2011 for the real details and 2020 for the outcome.
"So what number do I care about? Driving cross country or day to day driving?"
Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to simple tell you the EV range and the Generator based MPG (after EV range) so you could clearly understand how it fit any of your own situations, rather than make up one arbitrary circumstance that fits nothing.
"As stated in the summary, that's the EPA's rating, not GM's rating."
It is the new system that GM lobbied the EPA for and worked with the EPA to achieve. While the EPA shares some blame GM was the driver. Clearly GM was looking for a measurement that produced big numbers.
gm-volt.com is an enthusiast site, not official GM info. But I checked, found no GM PR indicating such a warranty. Just a reference to design news interview, where Larry Burns makes reference to protecting customers back before they even knew which chemistry they were going with.
It will be entertaining if GM warranties for 10 years as this will be a huge future liability. In ten years cells will fail even if the pack still has the capacity it will likely require replacement of bad cells.
Lithiums have calendar life issues just sitting on a shelf. You wouldn't want a 10 year old lithium that was sealed new in its factory carton, it would likely be dead.
"Volt's battery is guaranteed to deliver 40 miles of AER _even_ after 10 years or 150000 miles."
Where have they guaranteed this? I was reading comments on the GM blog and someone noted that the EPA watt-hours per mile actually translated into 32 miles range for 8KWhs. The GM answer was already hedging the range saying the 40 miles was "up to" 40 miles and the EPA used pesky things like AC.
Lithium batteries suffer cycle degradation, but they also suffer calendar degradation. They lose capacity just sitting there. I doubt there will be many Volts running on ten year old batteries. GM knows this, so I doubt you will get a 10 year warranty.
"General Motors Corp. said it reached a preliminary agreement that clears the way for U.S. regulators to certify the Chevrolet Volt, an electric vehicle that can be recharged at home or with a 1.4-liter gasoline engine, as the first 100 mile-per-gallon car."
When I read this article last year it sounded like GM was pushing forward this kind of nonsense measurement. Sound like a coup for GM.
I subscribe to Consumer Reports mainly for their more sane MPG measurements with cars rather than the bad joke EPA tests that are gamed and self reported by the manufacturers.
But this takes the cake. GM lobbies and gets a meaningless overinflated nonsensical measurement to use that contains all noise and no signal. With this kind of measurement you have ZERO indication of what kind of mpg you will get after you run the the battery down. None at all. This is content free hype and nothing more.
Are there still scientists/engineers working at the EPA? If so, they need to hang their heads in shame of foisting a useless measurement like this on the buying public.
EV range: + Charge Sustaining MPG:
This is the only thing that makes sense.
EV range: + Meaningless huge MPG number mainly made up of multiple EV charges:
This adds no value, tells us nothing. This is just misleading hype.
The EPA should not be part of GMs hype machine.
Long term this will just damage GM as these will be called "GM MPG" for overinflated meaningless mpg ratings. Very sad they chose the low road.
They are not doing a eMPG like conversion for the electricity used. Tesla Roadster runs at similar efficiency as the Volt in EV mode (28 vs 25 KWh/100miles) and the eMPG rating that I have seen for Tesla was 135 eMPG. Now clear if you mix in some gas range it is only going to get worse than that, no significanlty better.
It is clear this is some arbitrary amount of EV miles likely close to 5 full charge cycles before burning one gallon of gas. As such it misleads and tells us nothing about the actual gas geneator->wheels mpg. I think this number is likely to be unimpressive and if GM gets it's way, we may need to wait for independent parties to get a production volt to test before we find out.
GM is borderline lying here, and to top it off they haven't told us anything about the actual efficiency of burning gas and turning it into motion. That is buried behind some arbitrary amount of charge cycles.
The honest and usable way to report the efficiency would be:
EV range: Charge sustaing MPG:
That is it. From that you can understand what the car will do in any usage situation. With the current arbitrary blended number we actually know nothing.
It is all hype and no substance.
If this is the "New GM", I want no part of it. I was previously rooting for a GM comeback. No more. I don't support dishonest snake oil salesmen.
This new bogus number is because of GM working with/lobbying EPA. I can't believe EPA caved into such a content free meaningless number.
To get 230 miles from a gallon you would also need about 5 full charges to go with it. It isn't intuitive, it isn't useful in any way. It is just hot air.
During the last update VLC update cycle people talked up MPC Home Cinema. So I cleaned out all my old players and codecs and started over with VLC and MPC HC.
VLC I can't get DD/DTS passthrough working with at all (never could on any version) it just gets stuck repeatedly playing a sample.
On MPC HC I can get some tracks to passthrough, but the on 1080 MKVs it produces jerky video (while using almost no CPU). It might be the renderer but I needed an advanced one to all the change from 0-255 to 16-235 gamma levels or something like that. Without this, blacks are gray.
In short I want a decent windows player that will:
Play DTS/DD soundtracks with proper passthrough to my Denon receiver. Play high res without frame skipping/jitter (MPC HC) Allow gamma adjustment to get black blacks...
Maybe I have to go back to the old MPC and codec packs???
If the main issue is the death by teleporting enemies into the insta kill zone, then it seems a simple patch that would make a no teleport in zone within range of that would solve that problem.
No doubt he would find some other way to be an ass. I hope tax dollars didn't go into funding this nonsense research.
I have never played any MMOs, but this looks exactly like that southpark episode about warcraft with the lame griefer ruing the game for everyone.
I was considering a BD drive for my HTPC. I was ready to go for that HD quality. But it sounds like this arms race will probably render it hopeless at playing movies.
Either it won't play the latest BD+ or I will have to pay regularly for upgrades to play new movies.
This kind of war is the kind that keeps legitimate customers on the side lines.
I am not buying into a new format until they address the anti user features.
Unity: as opposed to the fragmentation of Linux. Linux has ~1% of the desktop market and that is divided into a hundred fragments. I say this as someone who uses RH at work and Ubuntu at home (secondary boot to windows). I am not going to get into a back and forth over the benefit of the freedom to fork new things. Yep thats nice, but with the utter fragmentation reducing Linux to the ghetto forever, it has IMO relegated it to the backwaters forever.
Name recognition: To stand out from the Linux rabble.
Money: to advertise/fix issue/build whatever they need to make it work...
From all of the above you get buy in, trust, investment.
I'd love to replace my Ubuntu boot with Android if it ever heads in that direction.
Slashdot Mirror
In its day, Suprnova was THE torrent site. Its shutdown lead to the rise of PB, mininova and many others.
What will the shutdown of PB lead to? It is a giant game of wack a mole.
I will miss PB mainly for their snarky attitude posting the threat letters they get and responding to them in almost Monty Python fashion.
Hybrid assist on this model is quite weak. This would accelerate slower than almost any new economy car available for sale in North America.
I like the Insight Aluminum shell but I think it better suited for Full EV conversions and this diesel one would likely be deemed unroadworthy in many jurisdictions because of the emissions.
The why no manufacturers are doing this is:
because it won't pass emissions...
because it will be slug like in acceleration.
because it using a very expensive aluminum body.
Slow, expensive and not passing emissions.
When you can get past emissions, keep costs low and accelerate in about 10 seconds, then manufacturers will do that.. (hence the new Insight).
http://www.99mpg.com/projectcars/redlightracingworl/
I will agree with others who said this is gutless. This is a 1.2L diesel. Probably doesn't produce 50 HP.
IMO the cool thing here is the Insight car body, this is proably the slipperiest and lightest car body on the road.
IMO this is a better use for an Insight body:
http://www.tamparacing.com/forums/lht-performance/425659-k20a-insight-lht.html
200hp and 50mpg.
The engine they use is not emissions legal in this country.
Time will tell. I will bet on this being a fairly large liability for GM if they really do a 10 year warranty. Now we just have to wait 2011 for the real details and 2020 for the outcome.
"I don't see why it's impossible, chemistry of lithium batteries is known well enough to make such a gurantee."
The chemistry is known for calendar life weakness. Even if you don't use Lithium batteries they die of old age before ten years.
"So what number do I care about? Driving cross country or day to day driving?"
Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to simple tell you the EV range and the Generator based MPG (after EV range) so you could clearly understand how it fit any of your own situations, rather than make up one arbitrary circumstance that fits nothing.
"As stated in the summary, that's the EPA's rating, not GM's rating."
It is the new system that GM lobbied the EPA for and worked with the EPA to achieve. While the EPA shares some blame GM was the driver. Clearly GM was looking for a measurement that produced big numbers.
Here is the story about it from last year, clearly a harbinger of what was to come.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a2GgcMQbsIcU&refer=us
gm-volt.com is an enthusiast site, not official GM info. But I checked, found no GM PR indicating such a warranty. Just a reference to design news interview, where Larry Burns makes reference to protecting customers back before they even knew which chemistry they were going with.
It will be entertaining if GM warranties for 10 years as this will be a huge future liability. In ten years cells will fail even if the pack still has the capacity it will likely require replacement of bad cells.
Lithiums have calendar life issues just sitting on a shelf. You wouldn't want a 10 year old lithium that was sealed new in its factory carton, it would likely be dead.
"Volt's battery is guaranteed to deliver 40 miles of AER _even_ after 10 years or 150000 miles."
Where have they guaranteed this? I was reading comments on the GM blog and someone noted that the EPA watt-hours per mile actually translated into 32 miles range for 8KWhs. The GM answer was already hedging the range saying the 40 miles was "up to" 40 miles and the EPA used pesky things like AC.
Lithium batteries suffer cycle degradation, but they also suffer calendar degradation. They lose capacity just sitting there. I doubt there will be many Volts running on ten year old batteries. GM knows this, so I doubt you will get a 10 year warranty.
"then you'd need to drive around 177,000 miles to break even. "
You expect the battery to last 177 000 miles?
Here is more background on GMs push for this kind of rating:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a2GgcMQbsIcU&refer=us
"General Motors Corp. said it reached a preliminary agreement that clears the way for U.S. regulators to certify the Chevrolet Volt, an electric vehicle that can be recharged at home or with a 1.4-liter gasoline engine, as the first 100 mile-per-gallon car."
When I read this article last year it sounded like GM was pushing forward this kind of nonsense measurement. Sound like a coup for GM.
"Right up there in the summary, it says "Running off the gasoline engine yields approximately 50 mpg."
This has been a long running guess, but I see nothing actually from GM on the charge sustaining mpg.
I read previous news that GM was working with and lobbying the EPA on this new standard. I fully blame GM for this mess.
I subscribe to Consumer Reports mainly for their more sane MPG measurements with cars rather than the bad joke EPA tests that are gamed and self reported by the manufacturers.
But this takes the cake. GM lobbies and gets a meaningless overinflated nonsensical measurement to use that contains all noise and no signal. With this kind of measurement you have ZERO indication of what kind of mpg you will get after you run the the battery down. None at all. This is content free hype and nothing more.
Are there still scientists/engineers working at the EPA? If so, they need to hang their heads in shame of foisting a useless measurement like this on the buying public.
EV range: +
Charge Sustaining MPG:
This is the only thing that makes sense.
EV range: +
Meaningless huge MPG number mainly made up of multiple EV charges:
This adds no value, tells us nothing. This is just misleading hype.
The EPA should not be part of GMs hype machine.
Long term this will just damage GM as these will be called "GM MPG" for overinflated meaningless mpg ratings. Very sad they chose the low road.
They are not doing a eMPG like conversion for the electricity used. Tesla Roadster runs at similar efficiency as the Volt in EV mode (28 vs 25 KWh/100miles) and the eMPG rating that I have seen for Tesla was 135 eMPG. Now clear if you mix in some gas range it is only going to get worse than that, no significanlty better.
It is clear this is some arbitrary amount of EV miles likely close to 5 full charge cycles before burning one gallon of gas. As such it misleads and tells us nothing about the actual gas geneator->wheels mpg. I think this number is likely to be unimpressive and if GM gets it's way, we may need to wait for independent parties to get a production volt to test before we find out.
GM is borderline lying here, and to top it off they haven't told us anything about the actual efficiency of burning gas and turning it into motion. That is buried behind some arbitrary amount of charge cycles.
The honest and usable way to report the efficiency would be:
EV range:
Charge sustaing MPG:
That is it. From that you can understand what the car will do in any usage situation. With the current arbitrary blended number we actually know nothing.
It is all hype and no substance.
If this is the "New GM", I want no part of it. I was previously rooting for a GM comeback. No more. I don't support dishonest snake oil salesmen.
This new bogus number is because of GM working with/lobbying EPA. I can't believe EPA caved into such a content free meaningless number.
To get 230 miles from a gallon you would also need about 5 full charges to go with it. It isn't intuitive, it isn't useful in any way. It is just hot air.
Thanks, one worked(Win32 WaveOut extension was the only one) But now there is a audio sync problem. Ugh.
During the last update VLC update cycle people talked up MPC Home Cinema. So I cleaned out all my old players and codecs and started over with VLC and MPC HC.
VLC I can't get DD/DTS passthrough working with at all (never could on any version) it just gets stuck repeatedly playing a sample.
On MPC HC I can get some tracks to passthrough, but the on 1080 MKVs it produces jerky video (while using almost no CPU). It might be the renderer but I needed an advanced one to all the change from 0-255 to 16-235 gamma levels or something like that. Without this, blacks are gray.
In short I want a decent windows player that will:
Play DTS/DD soundtracks with proper passthrough to my Denon receiver.
Play high res without frame skipping/jitter (MPC HC)
Allow gamma adjustment to get black blacks...
Maybe I have to go back to the old MPC and codec packs???
If the main issue is the death by teleporting enemies into the insta kill zone, then it seems a simple patch that would make a no teleport in zone within range of that would solve that problem.
No doubt he would find some other way to be an ass. I hope tax dollars didn't go into funding this nonsense research.
I have never played any MMOs, but this looks exactly like that southpark episode about warcraft with the lame griefer ruing the game for everyone.
I was considering a BD drive for my HTPC. I was ready to go for that HD quality. But it sounds like this arms race will probably render it hopeless at playing movies.
Either it won't play the latest BD+ or I will have to pay regularly for upgrades to play new movies.
This kind of war is the kind that keeps legitimate customers on the side lines.
I am not buying into a new format until they address the anti user features.
Or other secret treaties.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
Of course that eliminates a lot of countries.
"What does android has that linux doesn't?"
Unity: as opposed to the fragmentation of Linux. Linux has ~1% of the desktop market and that is divided into a hundred fragments. I say this as someone who uses RH at work and Ubuntu at home (secondary boot to windows). I am not going to get into a back and forth over the benefit of the freedom to fork new things. Yep thats nice, but with the utter fragmentation reducing Linux to the ghetto forever, it has IMO relegated it to the backwaters forever.
Name recognition: To stand out from the Linux rabble.
Money: to advertise/fix issue/build whatever they need to make it work...
From all of the above you get buy in, trust, investment.
I'd love to replace my Ubuntu boot with Android if it ever heads in that direction.
Flashblock to the rescue right now.
If they make aggravating crap out of of standard HTML, then it will likely be harder to shut down.