2011 Chevrolet Volt gets an EPA certified rating of 93 MPGe and 37 mpg in gasoline mode

2 less cu.ft. and Volt would have been classified as Subcompact.

 

Comparing the volume of two small cars is like two fathers competing for who has the ugliest daughter.

They are both small cars and in the real world the prius is a 4 seater:

 

Prius is designated a midsize, Volt a compact. On several occasions I've ferried two women and a 10 year old child in the back seat of my Prius. Which one should I kick out if I was driving a Volt?

 

Baby seat can face rear in the middle rear seat. It will not be possible in the Volt.

 

Uh, no. Prius does not have a physical obstruction to prevent a third skinny teenager from sitting in the middle. Therefore, in the real world that includes later night partiers crashing into obstructions and product liability lawyers looking for deep pockets to pay compensation, the middle position must have a seat belt as lawsuit protection. It provides at least an opportunity to buckle up.

My last Ford had just four seat belts. That model was later hit with just such a lawsuit.

 

This part was plagiarized from an electric car story from AP / Jonathon Fahey, Nov. 21-22.

I call Fahey's overall article a FUD piece. This particular statement is very badly stated, in a way that will leave most readers (including the engineer who alerted me to the story) with false impressions.

 

I don't agree with this at all, and I think it is biased.

I drove a motorcycle 45 miles (one way) to work for over 3 years. I barely had any storage space for anything, showing me that a lot of people driving cars take their storage space for granted; often using their cars as a free storage unit for things they don't have room for.

ANY extra space is welcome in these scenarios. If a car design team can fit more storage space into a vehicle it should be a welcome comparison to their competitors. We also aren't talking about a small pocket but 5 cubic feet, which is probably more accessible in the Prius.

I think this has already been adequately touched upon by other posters but I wanted to add one more thing. Nobody can ever assume to know when they may need to give a person a ride; wouldn't it be better to have that extra option (legally)?

 

Link Please.

It is so obvious that coal and nuclear are base load I did not feel the need to post a link but here it is:

[ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load_power_plant]Base load power plant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

"Base load power plant usage [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power"]Nuclear[/ame] and [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_plant"]coal[/ame] power plants may take many hours, if not days, to achieve a steady state power output.[[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed"]citation needed[/ame]] On the other hand, they have low [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost"]fuel costs[/ame].[6] Because they require a long period of time to heat up to [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_temperature"]operating temperature[/ame], these plants typically handle large amounts of baseload demand. Different plants and technologies may have differing capacities to increase or decrease output on demand: nuclear plants are generally run at close to peak output continuously (apart from maintenance, [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel"]refueling[/ame] and periodic refurbishment), while coal-fired plants may be cycled over the course of a day to meet demand.[[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed"]citation needed[/ame]] Plants with multiple generating units may be used as a group to improve the "fit" with demand, by operating each unit as close to peak [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_conversion_efficiency"]efficiency[/ame] as possible."

 

Electric cars use electricity — lots of it. In fact, the Edison Electric Institute estimates that driving 10,000 miles in an electric car will use about 2,500 kilowatt-hours, 20 percent more than the average home uses in a year. ..

Are the facts wrong? If not how can facts cause false impressions? Do electric cars use lots of electricity? Do they use about 2,500 kw per 10,000 miles? Is this about 20% of what an average household uses?

Reminds me of the old joke; don't confuse me with the facts.

I do agree that most will charge at night when power levels are down but a lot of them will also be charging all day long when the driver is at work, at peak times.

I also remember the 70's when they wanted to build a bunch of Nuclear power plants in the Northwest. They based this on the fact that we would soon run out of electricity if we did not build more plants. Most of these went broke and were not built and some that were no longer work. And the lights still work 40 years later.

One thing I do worry about is the lack of road tax and who will pay the bill? So I can see a extra road tax on my light bill if I decide to drive an electric car or not.

TED

 

That would seem less misleading. Adding an EV will cause an average homeowner to increase electric consumption by 20%. The way it was written implied a homeowner would increase consumption 120%. Anouther way to look at it is if 3% of cars were ev, house hold electricity consumption would increase (3% x 20% = ) 0.6%. Since electric generation includes commercial and industrial production actually increase in demand would be much less, while oil consumption would decrease over 1%.

There was a great deal of retarded thinking in the 70s. This makes it all the more puzzling why many older people think those of us in our 20s and 30s are going down hill. The road tax issue is a non-issue. The penetration of bevs will be very slow. Once it happens these fees can be charged when licensing the vehicles.

 

Excellent reply Austin, I see your point now. I always read this as a 20% increase and did not see it any other way. But I guess how some people might. Like you say it will come on slow and should have time to work out all the problems with supply.

Your view on the road tax is also good. An 12,000 a year 45mpg Prius would burn about 267 gallons a year. The tax in Washington is 37.5 cents and the Federal tax is 18.4 cents for a total of 55.9 cents. So if you take 267 times 55.9 cents you come up with about $150 a year paid in tax. So if you add $150 to the licensing fee of every electric car it would come out about even. A fair and easy solution but I'm sure the Government will screw it up. I guess this tax would applies to pure electric cars (Leaf) and the Volt/Prius would not qualify.

As a side note Washington does this now for Propane and adds on a $45 a year fee (propane is also subject to the sales tax) and they have to have a sticker on the car before they can buy fuel.

Thanks

TED

 

I was being nice about the writer's innumeracy. But I also notice that you have altered the wording to hide the original factual error. As written - "20% more than" - the statement was simply false.

Fahey wasn't worried about this, but about something else:

"Nationwide, utilities have enough power plants and equipment to power hundreds of thousands of electric cars. Problems could crop up long before that many are sold, though, because of a phenomenon carmakers and utilities call "clustering.""

Personally, I think his concern will be realized in serious form only if all sides -- consumers, utilities, and car manufacturers -- handle recharging with maximum stupidity. Time of use metering should have been rolled out to far more residential customers long ago.

Wowser, what an oversimplification.

For much of the 20th century, electric demand was growing at approximately 7% per year, or doubling every decade. With planning cycles and construction cycles typically lasting about a decade each, that meant that at any given moment:
(1) capacity under construction needed to be as large as the total existing demand;
(2) capacity in planning needed to be double the total existing demand.

This pattern was shattered in 1973, by an event you should remember. This threw a serious monkeywrench in electric power planning, and it took a long time before planners could get a handle on the new patterns.

Which of those 70's era Northwest nuke plants - plural - no longer work? Trojan was shut down and dismantled, WNP-2 is still running.

 

That is way off! The average household uses 960 kwh a month.

Yes, the facts are wrong.

Large format televisions have caused and will continue to cause more headaches for the power industry then the electric car will for years to come.

 

Concerns over where the electricity will come from for all the EVs over look the simple fact that making gasoline is an energy intensive process that consumes electricity. As EV numbers increase, there will be less need for gasoline. Leaving the power production that was used to make gas available for EVs.

Space is a consideration when car shopping, but there are others, and compromises will have to made between them. The Volt has an electric range that may cover a persons daily use. It needs a large battery to do this, which in turn requires space. The hybrid Camry and Fusion give up trunk space. So does the Civic, along with fold down seats.

A rear bench seat would have made the car more versatile. However, we don't know what compromises that would have entailed. Perhaps it would have taken up more than acceptable trunk space, unbalanced the car's weight distribution and center of gravity, battery could overheat, or maybe they just did because that's how it was done in the EV1.

During the days of the Prius' ascension, we all got upset when an article compared the Prius to the Corolla. Let's compare the Volt to something in its size class, because if someone has a regular need for carrying 5 people or cargo, they aren't going to get the Volt regardless of how they feel about the drive system.

There's the Insight, or Civic to keep it sedan to sedan. I'd find a Cruze comparison interesting. With roughly the same features, the Volt costs about $20,000 more. How much battery, motors, alternator, and charger does that buy. Does the Volt have an aluminum body?

 

Hold on here, a college student asked me why I bought a Prius 14 months ago, lets look at my answers back then and see how the Volt does.

http://priuschat.com/forums/gen-iii...502-2010-prius-school-project.html#post979468

# 1. is a win, while the Volt was not a hybrid 14 months ago, it is today. Purists would argue it was always a hybrid, GM was just lying 14 months ago.

#2 I think it holds 1/2 as much by volume, I can get a ten foot 2 by 4 in a Prius, not hanging out a window.
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos...1348787722119_1304125006_985752_4829746_n.jpg

#3 I have not tried a Volt, but so far the photos are not promising.

#4 The Volt is not a SULEV or an ATPZEV.

#5 If I drove less than half as far as I do, the Volt (or Leaf) would be a compelling choice, as it is, the Prius costs less for fuel and creates less CO2 when driven 110 miles a day to a random location, then home.

#6 I honestly have heard no hint that the Volt is quiet when using gas, I would hope they managed to make it as quiet as a Prius when driven electrically.

#7 The Volt does fine on point 7

#8 Does not bode well for the Volt, my last Chevy was a long term rental that failed to start the first 5 Fridays in a row. I eventually abandoned it in a restaurant parking lot and told the rental car agency where it was.

#9 The Volt would make more sense that the Subaru, but is really better suited to somewhere more suburban. This is too bad as I have eight 240 volt outlets in my garage, two of them 3 phase, so I really want to like a plug in car.

So on questions answered long before there was a Volt:

The Volt is fine on #1, #7 and #9
The Volt is poor on #2, #4, #5, and #8
The jury is out on #3, and #6, although both seem unlikely to be wins.

If it does not work as a car, it cannot work as a hybrid car.

 

Can some people help me out to confirm some things about the Volt?

1) Is it true when the Volt battery depletes, the gas powered generator will provide power to the electric motor which drives the gears to the wheels? (2 energy conversion processes - gas/mechanical to electric then electric to mechanical for the wheels)

2) Is it true when the 400+ lb. battery is depleted, it is completely 'dead weight' in the car and no battery contributes to propulsion at that point?

3) Can someone confirm the Volt would not go anywhere close to 400 miles at one stretch on 8 gallons, that it would go about (37 x 8) + 40 = 336 miles on 8 US gallons of premium, the Volt?

4) I could drive any 2010 Prius from SJ to LA, 400 miles on 8 US gallons regular.

5) Does the Volt really only get about 37 MPG US when battery depleted? !! If so, Automobile Magazine seems a little off to proclaim Volt as the most important car on the road today.

6) GM made a huge gamble to assume many will buy Volt to drive under 40 miles / day. After that, it's like an over weight Civic.

 

You would still have regenerative braking though, which would require the electricity be stored in the battery, right? (I ask that as a question because I'm not 100% positive)

 

I think Volt battery never depletes. And ICE is there to give a hand, only, cannot take motion only by itself.

 

As far as I understand, the battery is kept at a minimum level of charge by the ICE, which also provides power to the wheels when under demand, kind of like a... HYBRID! Shhhh!

 

The Volt is a hybrid, whether or not GM's marketing department likes it or not. It is a plug in hybrid.

GM marketing made up the term 'extended range electric vehicle' to make themselves appear special. If the Volt was indeed a true serial hybrid (which it is not) then maybe I would have gone alone with it.

In the hybrid community we had terms for these vehicles years ago such as PHEV, PHEV40 etc.