Could the Volt Jump-Start GM?

Watch the youtube video: the Volt is very nearly done. The question is: is it "before its time"? Will a $40,000 car ($33,000 with government subsidy) that needs to be plugged in every day sell well enough?

If it does, GM will have leap-frogged Toyota to the next generation. The FFH is a good car from Ford, but of course it depends on technology licensed from Toyota, so in that sense is it even a "competitor"?

We just bought a 2010 Prius and I think that hybrid technology will have LONG legs, but the future seems to belong to plugins. Toyota is taking the two-step, evolutionary approach from a hybrid base, while GM is making a clean-slate approach to get there in a single leap. You might call it a "hail mary" pass, that if it works will put GM up in the game, while Toyota is already up by 3 and is going for a second field goal.

(Not to mention that Toyota has put up a huge web of hybrid patents and it's my guess that the Volt design allows GM to avoid that thicket. Ford, on the other hand, is having to buy its way through.)

 

The Wall Street Journal had a piece entitled (something like) can the small car save GM? It notes that the profit margin for small cars in very low; however, congress mandated the GM small car be built in America. No other small car is assembled here., even teh new Ford small car is slated for Mexico.

The article also discussed CAFE and noted that no current GM car can achieve the 2016 CAFE dictated by the EPA. But ...... GM now has government subsidies. I suppose it really does not matter if the Volt can "jump start GM" ...... the American taxpayer will be there with tax dollars.

 

Yeah, like the Zenn City Car with EEstor ultra-caps is "very nearly done" and the Zap X is "very nearly done" and all those water-for-gas cars are "very nearly done."

Will you buy a Volt if it costs $40,000 after the tax rebate and has an EV range of 7 miles and then gets 35 mpg and seats 4?

Remember that originally it was going to cost $20,000 and have an EV range of 40 miles. Now it's going to cost twice that and go half as far, and they have not yet built an actual Volt as it will be manufactures for sale to the public. By the time they do, it will be a shadow of its original promise, if they even build it at all.

 

I think you're over the top on this. As far as I can tell, GM is on their second generation of test vehicle, which takes a production car -- the same chasis as the Volt will use -- and packs real stuff into a street-legal car.

This isn't some secret "Can't show you under the hood",or "we hand-made this prototype", or "It's the real engine, just sitting in the back of a pickup truck mule". Unlike the examples you give.

We just bought a 2010 Prius, so I'm not going to be buying anything else soon. Nor will a plugin (Toyota or GM) work for us any time soon, since we live in a condo and there's nowhere to plug it in.

An EV range of 7 is ridiculous, unless GM is flat-out lying (and stupid).

I've not seen anything from GM indicating that the EV target has been cut in half. It's still 40 miles. And they have put the Volt powertrain in a car that is production (Chevy Cruz) and is the same chasis that the Volt will use , so it's a lot closer than you allow.

 

Daniel may appear cynical, but that's only because I have not staked out the far edge yet in this thread

The Volt was a PR exercise. It became something more to beg for the federal bailout, and will now (maybe) actually be built by federal demand. But it will be only a few thousand vehicles, and then will be allowed to die.

Or... teh car czar will realize that the idea is still-born, and kill it before it sucks up billions more of taxpayer money.

 

Can you point us to the article? I briefly skimmed Fuel Standards Are Killing GM - WSJ.com (you might need to use a Google search to find it to read it in its entirety). Is that it?

The above author is also making misleading statements by saying things like "Sales of Toyota's Prius, Yaris, Corolla and Scion, for example, allow and encourage Toyota to market more Lexus 460s, Sequoia SUVs and Tundra pickups in the U.S. without incurring fines" and "The Environmental Protection Agency rates the mileage of the Toyota Sienna van and Nissan Titan pickup as worst in their class, and comparable Chevys as best. Unlike GM, however, Japanese car companies sell enough small cars to offset the large and thus hold down the average figures."

The way CAFE currently works is that there are 3 fleets: imported passenger cars (IP), domestic passenger cars (DP), and "light trucks" (LT). The mileage of one fleet cannot be used to offset low mileage of another fleet. So, either car fleet CANNOT offset mileage of "light trucks" (includes pickups, SUVs, minivans, and some vans) such as the Sienna, Sequoia and Tundra.

It sounds very unlikely that "no current GM car can achieve the 2016 CAFE dictated by the EPA." If they're supposed to meet "35.5 mpg" (which are unadjusted EPA dyno numbers), they already have some vehicles that meet or exceed this lame number. Go to Download the Fuel Economy Database, download the 2009 datafile and sort by UNRND COMP (EPA). You'll see vehicles w/above 35.5 like the Cobalt and Aveo. Unfortunately, some of them are from the soon to be defunct brands Saturn and Pontiac.

(BTW, notice that the 09 Prius counts as getting "65.8 mpg" for CAFE purposes.)

If they're unable to sell a proper mix of vehicles to meet whatever number they're supposed to (it's not 35.5 mpg but instead some other number that depends on the manufacturer), that's a different story.

 

Wow, then that's good news. If GM can get from testbeds to what you see in the videos in that short of a time, I guess they can accomplish about anything.

Not that I'm not a bit cynical, but I feel the need to balance this out with some anti-cynicism. GM (in the form of Corvette) and Ford have both shown that they DO have some design and engineering skills deep down. The new Taurus and FFH both seem to be good signs for Ford. The Volt looks good for GM.

As I've said, we bought a 2010 Prius, so I'm not expecting parity soon, but...

 

Of course they can, if they choose to. They built the EV1 a decade ago, and by all accounts it was a fabulous car.

The question is not whether they can or not. The question is whether they will. President Obama has said that he does not want the federal government to run GM. (I think the federal government should run GM. I often disagree with Obama, though I respect him for his intelligence and sincerity.)

GM built a great EV, but they didn't want to build an EV because they make too much profit from their share in the oil industry and from maintenance and repair of gasoline engines. So they took back the EV1s and crushed them as soon as they had successfully sued CARB to end the mandate.

GM could build a car every bit as good as Toyota. They could build the Volt and make it a great car. But I do not believe they will, because they don't want to build an EV. They just need to make it look as though they are "trying."

So they will find an excuse not to. Maybe they'll claim that batteries are too expensive or too unreliable. Or perhaps they will build a few hundred of them and then say they're too expensive to build. Or they'll build a car that's nothing like the original claims and call it the Volt, just as they now build cars that use regen braking to charge the 12-v battery and call them "hybrids."

GM has a very big incentive not to build EVs: They own a big chunk of the oil industry but they don't own any electrical generating plant. So they make profit when you buy gasoline but not when you plug in.

 

Not sure if you want article(s) about saving GM with small cars, or ads.
Did GM ever build a great small car that got snapped up, leaving a waiting list of thousand unfulfilled?. Yes. GM CAN build a small car entirely in the U.S.A. and GM can again, if they really want to. See ads:
(darell will have to forgive me for hotlinking)
EV1 Ads

GM did it for ego. Now they have to simply do it with mass production in mind. Range was over 100 miles ... and the technology was available for it, over TEN years ago. So what happened?

 

wfolta, I don't think the Volt engineering prototypes are as complete as you believe. AFAIK they haven't yet hooked up the ICE to recharge the battery. At the very least they have not publicly demonstrated the recharging. It will be interesting to see how the Volt competes with in the contempory hybrid & EV markets. My bet is that GM will be a day late & a dollar short. If GM were really serious they would follow Tesla's lead & start taking reservations & deposits for the Volt.

 

JimN, I seem to recall reading that the Volt ICE will not recharge the battery but will power the electric motors directly. The battery will only be charged via the plug. That article may have been wrong but that is what it said. Does anyone know any differently?

 

I still haven't forgot about the EV1 program. For shame, GM, I will not be in line to get a Volt even if you do produce it and if it cost $10,000. You had a great EV program in place, people loved it... but what did you do? You crushed all the EV1's and continued to build gas guzzlers. So long GM, don't let the door hit you on the way out.

 

. The design is a classic series hybrid with plug-in capability. Wikipedia or 'howstuffworks' have good intro articles.

 

I understand. At the same time, it is a production chassis, with an EV system that basically delivers what they have targeted and fits the parts that they need to be in it. It's not a van with a prototype engine and an over-sized stack of batteries in the back.

Especially in light of the comments that I'm responding to which have implied that GM's going to halve the EV mileage again, that the price is going to go up 25% from the current target, or that compare the Volt to cars that never made it beyond the car show prototype stage.

I'll say it again, even if it works perfectly, we won't be getting a Volt for 8-10 years, when we might be looking to replace out 2010 Prius. (Not to mention that I'm a Toyota/Subaru/Ford kind of guy, not really GM.) And I think that non-hybrids will not be practical for a LONG time for those of us who don't have any place to plug them in. Don't get me wrong.

 

Oh one more thing about the Volt. Problem is GM likes to talk and talk and talk and talk about the Volt. They're not delivering what they initially showed us (concept). Things keep changing all the way along. They would have been better to keep the Volt a secret for another year or two until they actually had some decisions made (design, specs, etc.).

I don't know about you but GM talking about the Volt all the time and delivering nothing, coupled with their current state does not in any way make me want to visit a dealership and buy a GM product. OK, rant over. Back to regular programming

 

This is what I've heard also. Originally, the ICE was to be able to recharge the battery, but then they lowered the specs and said it would not.

Now here's the problem with that:

An ICE is most efficient if it can run at exactly its design power output, but a car sometimes needs a lot of power and sometimes not very much. If the Volt's ICE cannot charge the batteries, and must provide power directly to the electric motor, then it's running hard during acceleration, but providing a small fraction of its maximum power during cruising. This is extremely inefficient!!!

The proper way to run a series PHEV hybrid is to run the ICE at peak efficiency any time it's running at all. During cruising, it would run at peak efficiency, providing power to the electric motor and at the same time charging the battery. Once the battery is full, the ICE would shut off and the car would run on battery power. This is analogous to the way the Prius works: The Prius charges the battery when the car is demanding less power than the ICE's efficient range, and draws from the battery at other times.

In short, the new downwardly-revised Volt specs will provide significantly lower fuel efficiency. You will have a car that (I predict) will not go very far on EV, and then will burn more gas than a good econobox, and a lot more than a Prius. The Volt, if they ever build it, will be a P.O.S. And of course GM will then say that nobody wants an EV. (While at the same time Tesla cannot build cars fast enough to keep up with its waiting list.)

 

I'm pretty sure the spec is not intended to run as you think Daniel. Think of the ICE as the head of a river, that splits into two downstream. The wheels are one tributary that take as much of the flow as the driver wants, and the reminder is shunted off to the other triubutary -- the battery.

If the driver wants more flow (energy) than the total ICE flow, then the battery tributary reverses direction and adds flow to the wheels. Battery SOC is increased either through the mains, the ICE, or regen.

ICE power 'apparently' will try to stay in efficient power bands (or be off entirely), but here the spec is murky and changing.

 

Not too much before GM went into BK, they were reported to say that the Volt was on-track for real production -- they just needed to iron out MI state subsidy, and get another 6 Billion dollars from the feds for Volt specific R&D.

6 Billion dollars for R&D still needed. Think about that for a second. The entire Prius program reportedly cost Toyota one billion US dollars.

You of course can take from this whatever you like. I conclude the Volt story has been, and remains one big pile of BS.

 

This was the original description. I don't have a link, but more recently GM announced that the ICE would not recharge the battery: Once the battery was depleted, the car would operate as a straight series hybrid, with the ICE and generator powering the motor but not recharging the battery. This was a great disappointment to many Volt-watchers.