New Full Production VOLT Studio Pictures Leaked!

What idiot is driving his/her Prius in hail storms anyway??? :suspicious: This is a non-issue.

 

It hails when your car is parked at work, at the shopping mall, in the driveway or it can be anywhere, you don't have to be driving.

 

I've been through a lot of hail storms (Texas and otherwise), and always managed to keep my vehicle out of anything damaging. Rarely saw hail growing up, but it has been much more common in the past 10-15 years.

Solar panels don't have to be any more prone to hail damage than the rest of the vehicle. The aluminum hood will be beaten up first. Still not an issue.

 

GM's official release says the cargo capacity is only 10.6 cu. ft., so this combined with 4 seats means considerably less interior volume than the Prius. Dimensions given, but no weight.

 

Looks like a Chevy Malibu. Nice, but I too was expecting some wow factor. Nice color though.

 

In case nobody noticed, GM happens to be a conservative car company. And conservatism has gone out of fashion lately. The "production" Volt looks much more conservative than the prototype Volt, with its rakish lines. Big mistake, GM. Stick with the prototype styling.

 

Yeah. The stock market is crashing (another 5% today), our financial institutions are crumbling, our car companies are in trouble and Fox/CNN are talking about polls, personalities and the latest car bombing in Baghdad.

 

Volt actually has very very tight back seats, something that I did not expect. Compare it with Prius which easily has twice the leg space.

 

Volt looks interesting, both inside and out... insider, console has definetly an wow factor, but for me ergonomics are awful - touch buttons for centre console? Lock/Unlock from centre console?

Look at the back seat - no arm rest, rather you have hard plastic to rest your arms at...

If batteries took up too much space, they should have made car bigger so it could accomodate 5 passangers for normal trips and their luggage...

 

I'd like to smack the Volt's ergonomic engineers upside the head. They put the battery pack down the middle, which required the center console in the back, because "they don't want to lose trunk space."

Who cares about losing trunk space? People don't sit in the trunk! Put the darn battery pack in the trunk so you can have a proper roomy back seat compartment fer cryin' out loud.

 

I expected that from looking at the exterior. The rear roof line is not as high as Prius so the rear seats can not be moved as far back.

Damn, that leg room is almost like in Toyota iQ. Volt is 4 passenger and iQ is 3+1 and the packaging of both cars are just night and day.

Toyota, I want a plug-in iQ with HSD that goes 40 EV miles for $20k. With Prius starting $22k, I can have both cars and still come out cheaper than the Volt.

 

But Volt is suppose to be an electric car (aka battery carrier). The heaviest part of the car is the battery pack. People will just need to sit around it even when there is no juice left in the pack!

Since Volt will use gas on those long road trips, small leg room will be very punishing to the rear passengers. Volt is ideal for city and probably best suitable for Tokyo, NYC, SF, LA congested traffic. Wait, weren't anti-Prius crowd complaining how Prius was designed for Tokyo traffic and that it has no MPG benefit on the highway? How ironic.... Volt will be inefficient on the highway because it will need to convert all the gas power to electricity with a loss before reaching the wheels. According to GM, I thought their 2-mode is better because of direct mechanical power to the wheel.

Putting GM spins aside, HSD utilizes more electricity at low speed driving while highway speed use mostly mechanical power -- the best of both worlds.

 

Of course, it's built on the same platform as Cobalt, which is noticeably smaller than Prius.

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Call me crazy but I see some Camry styling in it.

 

That backseat is a disaster! My '91 240 had that much room in the back and I considered the back seats too small for anything other than 5 minute trips or toddlers. So they've got a small hatch volume, and virtually no back seat. And this car is bigger than the Prius? (Length is 1.7" greater, width 2.8" greater, height is 2.4" shorter though.) I'll bet it goes 3200 lbs or more.

I'll bet they put batteries down the middle for weight distribution. Too much weight aft and it would be prone to heavy oversteer, especially considering the primary braking being forward (regen.)

Effectively the car is a 2 + 2, not a four seater.

 

Not just that, but there's a liquid cooling & warming system for the batteries too.

Heat is obviously a problem for any battery. But for Li-Ion, unlike NiMH, the cold is too. So, Volt requires an extra complexity we haven't encountered yet.

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It looks nice but that's irrelevant.

This would work if the new Prius doesn't get better, available modifications with new batteries don't get cheaper, or Chevy cutting safety corners to avoid bankruptcy.

I hope Chevy does well, first of all the US economy can't take Chevy collapsing, a whole lot of people would be affected.

 

As I said before, Chevy predicts they will have ability to build 30,000 Volts in 2011.

Thats 30,000 cars.

They build around 8 million per year. Thats 0.375% of their output.

Toyota plans to build 1,000,000 hybrids in 2010 alone. Thats 11.7% of their output.

Thats just shows what Volt trully is - desperate try to keep GM shares up while they are losing billions.

If they were serious about hybrids, they would not sell 1,000 per month, and their biggest PR campaign in the history would not be about 0.03% of their output.

And you know what - as an customer, I still approve it, if it brings out more competition among car makers and brings real PHEVs closer to market. I just feel bad for GM shareholders.

 

p.s. from the info posted, does anyone have any idea of Volts performance once it is out of battery? How much loss is there from 1.4l powering batteries instead of directly powering the wheels? How much power will batteries give to the electric motors in that mode? It has to be less then when it is fully charged because whatever energy it can get back from the brakes would be spent a lot sooner if electric motor was fully used?

 

What warms the liquid for the battery pack? Yup, the gas engine. Volt will run on gas engine turning the generator until the battery pack warms up. That's not an electric car.