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Flush with socialist bailout money, General Motors is now trying to destroy the oil industry with a car that will get 230 miles per gallon in city driving! GM calls it the Chevy Volt and classifies it as an "extended-range vehicle" powered by an electric motor and a battery pack with a 40-mile range. (After that, a small internal combustion engine takes over to generate electricity for a total range of 300 miles.) Toyota’s Prius, the most fuel-efficient hybrid sold in the U.S., gets 48 miles per gallon and looks like a Hummer 3 by comparison. GM CEO Fritz Henderson promises that at the U.S. average cost of electricity (approximately 11 cents per kWh), a typical Volt driver would pay about $2.75 for electricity to travel 100 miles, or less than 3 cents per mile. Of course, big oil still has some time to assassinate Henderson and burn down GM's R&D labs—the first-generation Volt is expected to cost about $40,000, which most consumers might not swallow even if gasoline returns to $4 per gallon. And the E.P.A. still has run its own tests to confirm GM's assertions, but the company says Volt is on schedule to reach showrooms late next year. But whatever happened to the P.U.M.A.!?
GM: Electric Car Volt Will Get 230 MPG In The City
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"Volt is expected to cost about $40,000, which most consumers might not swallow even if gasoline returns to $4 per gallon"
They will swallow it, and competitors will give consumers other options as well because in the face of $4 and up gas, it just makes sense.
It will be difficult to break Americans of their gaseous habits.
what's the approved container for a gallon of electricity?
An empty KFC bucket.
As one reporter questioned in the press conference with GM CEO (followed by an insufficient response)...
Where are people who live in the city and don't have a garage going to plug this thing in to charge it???
They'll figure it out. This is not just a new car, but a change in the culture of driving. If the savings are as much as GM says it will be, the consumer (As well as municipalities) will adapt.
from the article: "The battery pack can be recharged from a standard home outlet."
I think the question is: what if you park on the street?
And I wonder how long it will be before people start stealing electricity.
I'd start stealing electricity right after I bought one of these....I'd plug it right into a street light to recharge each night.
I was wondering the same thing. What's the MPG of a Volt after it runs out of juice? Is it still efficient with the generator motor running?
about 50 mpg.
the slashdot blurb has some interesting links for more reading.
from slashdot
Which is exactly why I'm much more inclined toward something like the PUMA. If it's designed right, the relatively small (maybe 80 pound) battery pack should be detachable and carted inside like a rolling suitcase, so you can just drag it into your apartment and plug it into the wall. Or take it inside at work and charge it there instead. The smaller battery should also recharge overnight or faster, instead of a full day like the Volt. Of course, if you live in a fifth-floor walkup, you're screwed.
The Teslas rule! ( even though the roadster goes for around 100k :( )
I'd like to see the math they used to get that rating.
Would you like to see the math that disproves the claim?
Nice.
So no accounting for the energy used to produce the electricity?
Only in Washington does 1+1 not equal 2.
230 Miles Per Gallon with an horse jockey, no seats except for driver, no hubcaps, no floor carpet, no radio, and no trunk liner and $4 of socket power for 1 night's charge at 22 cents per kwh (thanks so much ConEd with all your subtotal taxes, surcharges, and usage taxes).
What's different about the Volt as opposed to the Prius and other hybrids currently on the market is that at no time in the Volt does the gasoline engine ever drive the wheels. In that sense it's much more like a locomotive, where the wheels are driven exclusively by electric motors which are powered by a diesel engine running a generator.
The efficiency advantage of such a setup is that the gasoline can engine can be run at a constant rpm while charging the batteries/providing electrical power to drive the wheels which has the potential to increase fuel efficiency significantly over a typical hybrid setup where the gasoline engine takes over and drives the wheels directly, thus having to operate at various rpms and levels of efficiency.
Still, I think 230 mpg is pure horseshit. :-)
Actually, more like the Design Line hybrid electric buses we were discussing here a few weeks ago. They also use an engine to charge a battery pack, which motive power is completely electrical:
http://gothamist.com/2009/06/30/new_nyc_transit_buses_will_save_env.php
We should strip mine central park to get more coal for the power plants.
These sort of electric cars are a joke. Hydrogen powered cars are the answer. They do the same thing regular cars do without the whole power plant thing.
And where exactly would you get this hydrogen without power plants? It takes a lot of electricity to hydrolyze water to make hydrogen. And how would you transport it once you had it? Liquid hydrogen? A hell of a lot more energy to liquefy it, not to mention the need for an insulated tank to keep LH2 cold. Metal hydrides? Very heavy and expensive. Nanotubes? We can't even produce those by the thimbleful, never mind by the hundreds of millions of tons necessary for a hydrogen economy. Where would you fuel up? Last I saw, hydrogen filling stations aren't exactly on every corner or even on every seaboard. You're living in a fantasy land.
Oops. "Liquify."
Also, there's plenty of electricity if the cars will be charged off-peak (overnight). You can't just shut down large power plants like a light switch. They have to keep running whether people are using the electricity or not.
Power 'em with nuclear plants. Call 'em "Chermobiles".
They did it already. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon
Just wait for the brownouts from these a-holes plugging their cars in all the time.