How will the Chevrolet Volt be better than a Toyota Prius plug-in hybrid?

CT200h was tested for safety by Euro NCAP in 2011 with the new (tougher) scheme.
It scored 5 stars (maximum) overall rating with excellent results for adult (94%) and child (84%) protection.
It is regarded as one of the safest cars in Europe.

Prius was tested in 2009 (also with the new test scheme:
5 stars overall, adult 88% child 82% safety assist 86% and is also regarded very safe.
The main reason for the adult lower (than CT200h) result is the lack of driver knee airbag (does the Volt have one?)

 

Yes, the Volt has knee airbags for both driver and front passenger.

 

Anyways, I am resting assured my grandchild is seated in the safest place of a very safe car.

 

Base Prius has driver knee airbag in Europe, mine is base model and has it.

 

You are correct, I wrote from memory.
Checked and it is the lower score for whiplash (rear impact) and side impact pole.

 

They all are very safe cars, as long as they have safe drivers. The volt will score higher on the tests, but its a big so what to most of us. I wish the us would relax crash standards to be the same as in europe, so that cars could just be brought back and forth.

The information does dispute that you should buy the prius because your going to die in a volt. But I don't think the volt's higher test scores really give it a major advantage.

 

Sorry, did not understand your post. Can you rephrase it in plain English?
My post was a reply to Jeff N that was hinting I am driving an unsafe car (and he did it again in another thread).

 

I never meant to hint that the CT 200h was unsafe. It's not at all unsafe. However, it does score as less safe than the Volt which was given a very good rating.

I took another look at the PDF file I linked to earlier and this time I noticed an error in their report. They list the Prius twice. The score I reported earlier was 85 which is higher than the average car. It turns out there is a separate entry that shows a score of 61 and has a couple of additional ratings data from the U.S. insurance industry crash test laboratory that apparently helped lower the score. The higher report entry is out of alphabetical order at the end of the Toyota listings which is why I didn't notice there were two Prius listings until now.

Bottom line, the Volt has an excellent safety score and the 200h and the Prius have good scores that are better than average. As I noted in the other thread you mentioned, part but not all of the reason the Volt got a better score is because it weighs more due to the battery and this gives it a low center of gravity. The added weight means that physics is on your side when in a collision with an average car that weighs less.

They describe their scoring system on their home page at:

Find the safest cars and vehicles and the most dangerous cars and vehicles.

 

Sure, sorry about that.

You have a very safe car. The volt scores higher than it in US safety tests, but I do not think the difference is very big.

The driver will make more of an impact than the choice between these cars.

Then probably the stuff that didn't sound like it was english. The US test and the European test are different and the same named car may score better in one place and worse in the other. Car manufactures often change some things in cars between the US and Europe/ROW to comply with safety standards. Most of the difference in standards does not really substantially improve safety.

 

The CT sold in the US has a neck protection scheme the Prius lacks. That is worth the price of admission IMO.

 

Uh oh, another poor choice of words!

 

The car weight should be less of a factor in safety tests IMO (or damage to other cars should be introduced as a factor as well).
It may inhibit development of new modern building materials (light and strong) for one thing.
The perception of "lets buy 'the wife' a big heavy SUV so in case of an accident someone else will die - not my family" is not my cup of tea (no hint to the Volt).

 

A few years ago I read a long article in the New Yorker about SUV "safety", the gist of which was that SUV's are about perceived safety; in fact they are less safe than a well-build sedan overall, according to accident and mileage statistics.

A number of problems are inherent in crash testing (not that it's a bad idea!):
- It doesn't measure the probability of having an accident in a dangerous situation. An SUV being larger and less maneuverable than a well built sedan is less capable at accident avoidance.
- People tend to imagine vehicle-to-vehicle accidents, but I believe the majority of accidents are single-vehicle. SUV's have several problems in this regard: higher CG means greater chance of rollover, greater mass means more energy to dissipate if you hit something solid (but of course that doesn't always happen)
- Greater height of an SUV should give better vision, but that seems to be offset by a feeling of invulnerability/superiority/isolation: you feel safer, so you tend to react slower to an emergency situation. And feeling safe, you may be more likely to engage in distracting activities (cell, texting, yelling at kids, reading, etc, etc).
- Everyone thinks AWD is safer, but it really doesn't help on anything but snow, and then only if you have tires that have good grip in snow.
- Originally SUV's were body-on-frame construction, which was less safe in a collision than unibody, but I think many of them are unibody now??
- The numbers may also be distorted against SUV's because less safe drivers may be in them precisely because they (or their spouses) realize they are poor drivers and therefore want a vehicle that "seems" safer. Or will protect their kids better.

Anyhow, the lessons were (a) that you have to look at overall safety rather than just crash safety, which is hard to get at, (b) driver attention and skill has a lot to do with it, and (c) the perception of safety is really misleading.

Wish I could get my hands on that article and reread it.

 

I am not anti-EV. I am pro-electrification. I think EVs have great potential and will have great future but we are not there yet.

EVs running on average electricity today is not a clear winner (slightly worse) than no-plug AT-PZEV hybrid like Prius.

The "friction" starts when pro-EV people start to claim they are in the future. I am saying no, we are right here and here is how things stand, right now. That may sound like anti-EV but it really is not.

 

A subjective observation of mine is that SUV drivers seem unable to handle a vehicle of that size. I observe lane crossing by SUVs much more often than by pickup trucks, and I speculate that pickups are more often driven by people who have more experience in them or maybe learned in them, whereas SUVs are more often driven by people who learned and tested in a sedan, and have little experience and little feel for where the outline of their car is.

There is a busy street in Fargo that narrows in a curve, and the lanes narrow as a result. Almost every SUV I watched in that curve cuts into the adjoining lane. Pickups seldom did. This kind of driving is an accident waiting to happen, and could be avoided if drivers had to test in the vehicle class they're going to drive.

SUVs are dangerous to their occupants, and a hazard to other people on the road. And our lax attitude towards driver testing is probably responsible for many unnecessary deaths and injuries.

 

Insight-I Owner
Thanks, I agree.
Will add that feeling of invulnerability/superiority/isolation leads also to bad driving habits on the road.

 

Great job, you are beating the EPA figures. Imagine what you'll be getting with a 50 MPG Prius.

Average CS MPG on voltstats.net is 36 MPG. There are some that are getting single digit. Majority (127/182) are getting lower than the EPA 37 MPG.

 

Yes, we are in the now, but we have to start moving towards the future at some point.

If EV owners had followed your logic of buying just a plain Prius instead because it is cleaner now, do you think manufacturers would keep putting money into EV development? No, they'd be saying GM was right with the EV1, and when the grid is clean enough for you, there will be no EV options for the general public.

Perhaps the EV crowd gets ahead of themselves by claiming to be in the future (did not see it here), but the fact is the grid is getting cleaner. So an EV or PHV bought today will just get cleaner to run in time. That Prius will just keep pumping out the same amount of carbon in 5, 10, and more years.

They aren't in the future, but you are stuck in the present.

Then there was the irrational argument about electricity not being fungible. So the grid isn't clean enough now, but it isn't good enough for individual EV and PHV drivers to take steps to improve their portion of the grid. Home solar and wind only count if it's wired directly to the car? How do you think you come across?

 

I drove a 2004 Prius for 125,000 miles over the same driving pattern prior to getting the Volt and averaged around 46. My driving segments tend to be less than 10 miles on city streets so a significant part of the time I was running a relatively cold and inefficient engine. One of the big EV advantages is that short trips like that are just as efficient as longer segments.

If you look at voltstats.net you will notice a clear pattern where the lower mpg reports tend to come from either newer cars that haven't been driven enough to fall into a long-range average or they are cars with a very high EV usage ratio where the gas engine doesn't see much use. Cars with longer overall mileage and 20% or more of gas engine use tend to show upper 30 mpg averages consistent with the EPA estimate.

My utility, PG&E, has an average CO2 emission of only .524 pounds per kWh which is much lower than the national average. CA law requires ongoing aggressive improvements so large solar arrays are being built in Arizona, Nevada, and California as well as other efforts to ultimately generate even lower average CO2 results. Marginal generation above the nuclear and hydro base load tends to be from efficient natural gas generators.

At 110 total mpg and 300 Wh per mile, I'm far better off driving the Volt than a non-plug Prius. Given my personal driving pattern, I'm also better in a Volt than a PiP for reducing total mpg and CO2 emissions. I expect my total mpg to rise in future years due to better charging infrastructure during medium range trips.

 

The voltstats data for MPG-CS is very inaccurate especially for those cars with a low number of non-EV miles, so I don't think you can really use this for your Volt bashing. The onstar data they get for "lifetime MPG" has some weird anomaly where the amount of gas claimed to be used for that calculation is continually going up small amounts (as derived from total miles/"lifetime MPG") despite no gas actually being used. Voltstats uses this to derive the MPG-CS so the error shows up there too, magnified greatly on cars with low gas miles.

For example, on my car, it's been driven 129.23 miles on gas, and based on tank level measurement and individual trip metering, burned 3.25 gallons for 39.76 MPG. If I exclude the 2.33 miles/0.15gal supposedly put on by the dealer before I got it, it's 40.94 MPG for my personal driving. But the onstar data claims "570.63 lifetime MPG", which if divided into my total miles gives 3.675 gallons burned, a 13% error, and displays a 35.16 MPG-CS. That error has been continually increasing as my EV miles increase, without any gas miles added.

I don't yet know how the magnitude of this error changes with more gas miles burned, but it's there. And I think it's the cause of the low & single digit MPG-CS on many of the cars listed there with very low gas miles.