Car & Driver Says Prime Ugly, Too Slow

Hello. I see that you just joined this forum. Welcome. Having been a very active participant on the Volt website and now owning a Bolt, you know very well the importance of audience. How many times did I ask "Who is the market for Volt?"

The upgrade from gen-1 to gen-2 is a big one, providing lots of enhancements. Owners will get lots of EV driving from Prime. They aren't looking for purity though. The engine will start-up from time to time, just like with Volt. Notice how you forgot to mention the time/distance criteria for Volt?

The point is, you get outstanding MPG from Prime. So what if the engine runs. Seeing MPG well above that for even the regular Prius is the point. You get lots of EV for an affordable price.

 

That is not so obvious.
E.g., the Volt "experience" could feel tarnished to some drivers knowing that the car is inefficient.

 

There is another condition based on fuel age. I forget how long it is, but it's something like 1 year I believe (I don't think it's as short as 6 months but I wouldn't be surprised). As you approach that age limit the Volt will start telling you it needs to run the gas engine. You can tell it not to run the first time or two but by like the third time it doesn't give you the option and just starts the engine telling you it has to run for maintenance reasons. As I understand it from when I used to read their forums is that the engine will then run until it either burns all the gas and you fill up or you go top up the tank. The concern is the gas going bad if it sits in the tank for too long. I'm not sure if the car is smart enough to realize you only added one gallon on a top up or if it requires you to replace the majority of the tank, but the volt forums have plenty of info on this.

 

Just to add to this, voltstats.net is a pretty neat site. It interfaces with onstar data from Volts to gather MPG related information. I'm not sure if volt owners have to subscribe to an onstar service for their info to upload or not but it's currently showing over 78 million miles tracked. Of that they're showing a fleet average EV% of 67.1, 105.8 straight MPG, 61.98 MPGe, but the most telling number is probably a 34.8 what they call MPGcs which is when the gas engine is running.

Does the Prime report numbers in a similar way that lets the public see a log of everyone's actual usage?

 

The current ratio for me (the axis on the right) is about 15. Anytime it's less than 20, the Prime wins for all trips. If gas costs increase and electricity costs don't, there will eventually be a narrow sliver (the gray) of trip miles where the Volt will win.

 

A feature Prime offers that Volt does not is charge-mode. So, if you are a weekend warrior and escape to a destination without a plug, you'll have EV available anyway. All those miles on the highway I spent a few days ago (over 1,600) could have easily been used to recharge. That way, at my sister-in-laws place and those stops along the way would be better served with electricity.

 

Ahh, I see my error.
I'd likely still pick a Volt over a Prime, with a BEV being my first choice.
I expect the price of gas to rise over the time I have the car, and home solar is something we both want.
The Sable would still be first choice for long trips no matter what.

Since you chose to ignore the rest of my post, how about you answer this question.

Between a 50mpg gas car and 60mpge electric one, which is more efficient when you have...
...a kilogram of coal?
...a therm of natural gas?
...a weeks worth of heat from an uranium fuel rod?
...a one meter square solar panel with 8hrs of equatorial sunlight?

Remember, you don't have gasoline; it has to be made like the electricity from the above. This is technically possible to do now.

The EV experience people crow about is the quietness, smoothness, and performance. Efficiency is there, but in comparison to gasoline cars. One that compares to the Volts EV performance isn't going to be getting 50mpg.

With over twice the EV range and Hold mode, a Volt doesn't need a charge mode to drag down its highway fuel economy. But if desired, Mountain mode can be used to provide 20 miles of EV to a depleted Volt battery.

 

When I test drove a Prime, the performance and feel in Hv mode was virtually identical to that in Ev mode with the only exception being at high throttle settings when the engine could be heard. The engine is so quiet that it's pretty hard to detect if it's running or not at highway cruise power, and the transition between Ev only and ICE assist was undetectable. My sound meter barely budged (might have been 1db) when I started the engine intentionally while cruising at 65mph.

 

Sounds just like the same weak excuses Volt enthusiasts used years ago to justify the lack of a HOLD mode. GM ended up delivering that with a mid-cycle upgrade.

The trip I took just last weekend, from Minnesota to Wyoming with stops in between, would most definitely benefited from having a CHARGE mode. My routine trips up north would benefit too. There is plenty of driving around once you reach your destination that could be EV instead. Using some gas while cruising along the highway to provide that is a good balance of resources... which is what being a hybrid is all about.

 

We'll start from 115k btu of CNG
Per EPA, the Honda Civic CNG will travel 31 - 32 combined city/highway miles

Now let's take that same 115 btu of CNG and run it in generator at 40% efficiency (yes, I'm being generous) first to make AC electricity, then invoke 15% charging losses into the battery for a car use at 60 MPGe EV
-- we started with one Ge
-- 40% made it to AC
-- 34% made it to the battery
All told, the EV will travel 20.4 miles

So ...
The EV with an MPGe about double the CNG car will travel ~ 65% the distance

Honestly, we do not need numbers to realize that the direct mechanical ICE path will always be more efficient than a combustion pathway run through electricity, while the idiotic MPGe ignores the conversion losses and assures us of a label on the EV with a higher number.

To summarize: comparing two cars with different fuel sources is an exercise in nonsense when starting from MPGe;
2, the common abuses and misunderstanding of what efficiency is just make matters more fuddled.

All those focus group folks who demanded that EVs be reported in gallon and MPGe are convinced that an EV with an MPGe higher than a competing ICE MPG will have lower running fuel costs. Just read the posts of our intrepid co-contributor to this discussion. If that does not convince you that MPGe has confused the nation, I give up.

 

A hypothetical trip will have some city driving until you get to a highway, then a little city to get to the final destination, and some short trips while there.

In a Prime, that first city leg uses a higher percentage of its pack than in a Volt. So you use Charge mode to replenish the pack for EV use at the destination. This will reduce fuel economy, but how much isn't exactly known. With more EV range in reserve, the Volt just goes into Hold on the highway to maintain its better than city fuel economy. If the short trips at the destination are such need more than half the Volt's EV range, then the Prime is going to be going int hybrid mode.

Then the Volt has Mountain mode, which will charge the pack up to 40% if turned on with the EV range depleted. That gives a little more than 20 miles of EV. Charge mode on the Prime only goes to 80% SOC; giving a little less than 20 miles.

So on the same trip, the Volt won't need to use a charge mode as a Prime. If it does, it replenishes the same amount of range as the Prime.

This isn't a gasoline car. Why take this further and use an antique steam car for the coal and uranium?

Generous would be 50+% that a CCGT plant could operate at since these are the type of NG plants used for grid level power.

If you going to invoke real ICE cars(which are no longer for sale by the way), why not use the Prime's 130mpge figure?

When you have an ICE that can burn the fuel, it is. The US needs to import crude petroleum to fuel all the vehicles on the road now. Coal, NG, and uranium are domestically available. We could convert these sources into gasoline or diesel for the cars on the road, but that will be less efficient than making electricity for EVs.

MPG ignores the energy the fuel pump used filling the car up. MPGe accounts for charging losses. Why don't we include the diesel burned getting the gas to the station, and transmission losses, and all the mining and drilling, and refining....

Because the MPG(e) on the window sticker isn't a well to wheels metric. It is just a efficiency metric of the car on fuel the consumer can buy "off the shelf". Using biased examples not grounded in reality doesn't make that not so.

The people buying EVs for efficiency aren't doing so because the MPGe is just higher than the MPG of a comparable ICE car. It is because the MPGe to two, three, four, or even fives higher. A person that will buy a Prius isn't going to buy any of those German power PHEVs. As for costs to run, those are also included on the EPA window sticker.

Why did you buy a Prime if using electricity to move it will always be less efficient than using the ICE?

 

Straw man.

I reserved the car to run the EV fraction on PV in ~ the most efficient manner*, and when consuming petroleum, to run the most efficient car available.

*The Hyundai Ioniq EV might beat the Prime by about 2% ... if you are inclined to believe the EPA sticker.

 

Yup, same old excuses.

 

its not that ugly. Personally I have more of a beef with the Volt looking exactly like the Cruze. bad for model identity, but that seems to drive people to buy them. Somehow the Prius was given a bad stigmatism. I'd take a stronger residual value and better reliability over looks.

 

Volt looking ordinary will become a liability. That appeal of the past isn't a good thing with a supposed vehicle of the future.

 

Volt disadvantages for me:

It's made by GMC so no Toyota reliability.
Lousy back seat room.
Lousy cargo area.
Poor electric efficiency.
Poor gas efficiency.
Very poor gas range due to small tank and poor mileage.
High cost.

 

That's why I asked the "Who is the market for Volt?" question literally endlessly on the Volt website. I kept pointing out over and over and over again that traditional vehicles were the competition, not other plug-in vehicles. They chose to belittle Prius instead.

It will be interesting to see if articles like this bring about a balance, enough to bring about discussions of tradeoffs... rather than mine is bigger than yours boasting.

 

Just editorial:

I think it's "stigma" you're looking for; "stigmatism" is not a word, a truncation of "astigmatism", a comon side condition of myopia. Come to think of it, that might be a good way to view Toyota (and Lexus) offerings of late, lol.

Also, stigma by definition is bad, negative. There are no good stigma. You could strip that adjective, just say: "Prius was given a stigma...".

 

Fine, ignore the rest of my post, again.

You don't like MPGe. Using an example that uses it outside of the context it was intended for, with an unlikely choice, grounded in a scenario that doesn't exist on the ground doesn't support your position that it is useless. Your scope of efficiency simply isn't what it is intended for, and for your's to be possible, the different fuels need to be in a like unit for comparison. That is all MPGe is doing; converting to a like unit.

If MPGe did go away, it would likely be replaced by some kWh metric. How could car shoppers compare EVs to ICE cars then? Have a conversion of MPG to the EV metric? How would that get calculated into CAFE, redo CAFE in the kWh metric for everything?

You held the Prime having a charge mode as an advantage over the Volt. How is using Mountain mode for charging an equal number of EV miles an excuse?
The gen2 Volt doesn't need Mountain mode, but people wanted for the charging.

Or some 60mpge one.

The Volt would likely fit my use better, but that is said without any test drives. The Ioniq Electric would be the best of whats available and coming soon. The Model S or X are probably the only plug ins that would meet my wife's approval for long trips, and price excludes them.