GM wants a 230MPG rating from the EPA

Your right, its negligible.. but there is a difference.
its noted somewhere in the prius that every 200 extra lbs added as cargo adds another 1 mpg loss.

If you pull your car down the road at 2 mph constant it will take so much energy.. now tie two together and do the same, it will take twice the energy to pull both.. the second one doesn't get a free ride!

They cannot make trains 500 cars long... they have to keep adding engines based on how many cars they are pulling, regardless of nill wind resistance since each is blocking the other cutting a hole in the wind.
I'm also skeptical about the wind drag..... I doubt it will come close to the prius.. it just doesn't look that aerodynamic.. but I could be wrong of course.

Speaking about another thing.... the 17" wheels on the package V prius is supposed to cause about a 3mph hit verses the 15" wheels per the chief engineer for prius.

I notice those big snazzy wheels on the Volt no one has mentioned about the mpg hit on those?

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Edit....
One last thought.... The Prius is so efficient that tiny things can affect gas mileage quite a bit... bigger and or wider tires, more weight, open windows for more wind drag.

Let say you do something like adding weight..... let say 20% more weight.
If you are already only at 20mpg, you just added 4mpg loss "if weight were the only factor or other factors were constant......
Now lets say your a prius getting 50mpg and you add 20% more weight..... you just added 10mpg loss!....

I understand there are other factors, but my point is that the higher the gas mileage, the greater the mileage hit when an in-efficient factor is added into the equation.
The Volt is not excluded from these laws of physics.

 

I had an error in my numbers... but ignoring gas efficiency, the truth is plain in simple.

In my neighborhood, a Chevy Volt would get 88 MPG equivalent for the first 40 miles. It's electric usage for those miles is the equivalent of .45 gallons.

That leaves 190 miles to drive on the remaining .55 of a gallon, if it is going to hit 230 MPG. Is it really going to do that?

Graph enclosed with my numbers (I don't know how to embed an attachment)...

 

How are you getting those mpg numbers?

 

Blue, you raise good points about the Volt in general.
However, the reason people are discussing the mileage claims is because GM themselves showcased the 230mpg claim.
Personally, the Volt should work very well as one of our two cars in the family IF there isn't a better alternative at the time for us.

GM's lofty claims and then the impending disappointment is just another sign that GM hasn't learned anything.
Either accidentally, or on purpose they are setting the Volt up to fail.
I say this not because I want them to fail, but because I have seen the critics and nay-sayers and their arguments about the Prius and PHEVs. I know they will take advantage of the overly optimistic numbers and the failure for real world drivers to attain those numbers.

 

Let's say the Volt goes 40 miles on electricity & 300 miles on 6 gallons of gas. From my POV 340 miles/6 gallons is 56.6mpg. I'm not going to argue specs for something that's not available. My point is that theoretically the Volt shows reasonable performance. The problem I see will be with owners who drive less than 40 miles per day & recharge every night. After a year they will have 6 gallons of liquid that will have decomposed to the point of not being able to start the engine or keep it running. I'd be happier if GM ditched the ICE for batteries to increase the range.

 

Back when magazines first got a hold of the Volt news, they reported that the Volt computer will keep track and automatically force you to burn the gasoline if it is more than a few months old. I'm not sure if GM is going to do that or not.

Fact: the PriusChat PHEV member who reported going 6 months on one tank of gasoline was able to burn that last 0.5 gallon after 6 months.
Fact: when I was a kid, I remember my dad and I taking the lawn mower out of the garage after not using it for a year and it would not start. The only thing we did was drain and refill it with new gasoline and it started right up.

 

Most people are going to go on a longer then 40 mile trip sometime in a month. 95% of people are going to need to refill within six months.

If you did not ..just buy three gallons instead of six (don't fill up). Every three months don't charge for a few days burn down to one gallon and refill back to three . Not expensive.

 

I'm afraid you're right too. Chevy in particular always seems to have a way of disappointing people or at least a way of disappointing the public in general. As an example I don't know how a lot of people are responding to the Camaro right now but for most of the people I know the buzz came and went so quick you'd almost think it was still getting pushed back and not sitting on showroom floors in limited numbers, except of course for that one you see now and then. Obviously that's a very different animal but maybe in this tough economic time it's just less likely for there to be an explosion of sales. I'm trying to stay non-biased even though I own a GMC truck. The truth is I never thought I would own a GM vehicle because to this day I hate huge SUV's and I hated American automakers for a while there, only now I would like for them to succeed as much as I would like for America to succeed.

 

An early post in this forum made some mathematical claims that gas mileage could be as low as 23MPG. But I'm ignoring those for now. Just sticking to the electric equivalence. If the electric equivalent to gas is 88 MPG... I'm still not sure how it is supposed to do 190 remaining miles (230-40) on a single gallon of gas or less.

Point is, the only true comparison is this:

Put a gallon of gas in a Prius... drive until it runs out.
Put a gallon of gas in a Volt... drive until it runs out.

Now that Chevy is claiming 230 MPG, the second comparison will be:

Drive a Prius 230 miles, measure fuel consumption.
Drive a Volt 230 miles, measure fuel consumption.

First Volt owner in Florida is welcome to meet up with me and we will jointly carry these tests in a documented clear manner.

 

well. my Zenn has a MPG rating based on its watt/mile rating and the fact that gas has something like 35 kW. so that is how they got the 240 mpg figure.

so the Volt must either use less power than my Zenn (my weight is slightly over 1300 lbs so that is fairly unlikely...i think i am rated at like 205 watts per mile)

or that generator is nearly 100 efficient (without some sort of heat recovery system capturing that energy and converting that to electricity, that would be impossible)

so, like ya...

 

I kept asking myself Wth is this darn Zenn this guys keeps talking about....

...so finally I looked it up: [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZENN"]ZENN - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame] And I rememberd I had actually seen a video about them a while back.

I didn't see any of these when I was in WA. Saw LOTS of Subaru's though.

 

not gonna see a lot of them ANYWHERE, they dont sell that many. right now, all their resources are being put into the "Zennergy" drive train which will feature the imfamous eestor ultracapacitor.

i think their sales YTD is like 175 or so...

 

Yeah.... and they've been fighting the Canadian government for years just to be able to sell them IN Canada. (unless I'm mistaken) There's even speculation that the company might have to move to the states to maintain it's profit.

 

actually the Zenn is now legal in a few provinces. so they are making progress

 

Just picked up my 2010 Prius yesterday... for what its worth... my very first drive to work was 53mpg and thats with the Air going and it "feels" like the money I spent...suspension is tight, yet smooth and silky.... a nice luxury car.... quite glorious to drive.

Regardless of what Chevy pulls off... I just bet you it won't feel like this car!

 

I noticed a fairly large number of EVs on a recent sailing trip to Beaver Island. Beaver only has about nine miles of paved roads, and about 90 miles of roads overall. Gasoline is very expensive due to transportation costs, so EVs make a lot of sense. Many of the residents are there only for the summer: storage and maintanance are a lot easier with an EV.

In addition to commercial EVs, I also spotted a number of homemade contraptions. One was an electric skateboard/scooter with a plastic cooler full of batteries. The rider sat on the cooler. Another was in interesting looking tricycle. It looked like one of those big tricycles made from a VW back end, but it was toating a bank of lead acid batteries where the engine would normally be found.

The new community center on Beaver Island has a public charging station. It looks like the beginning of a ground swell.

Tom

 

and you told me you werent gonna buy one Alan!!... then again, i told you i wasnt gonna buy one either!!

oh well...at least you held out a lot longer than i did

 

LOL!...... I'm now a 3 car prius family!
I decided I needed to help my son get something as he is in college and so that gave me an excuse... it was that or help buy him some used car and still have two prius's with 91K on both of them.

The 2010 was a surprise after driving it... sitting in one is one thing, driving is quite another.

 

Keep in mind, they're unsafe at any speed! They make a Smart car look like a tank!

 

so are motorcycles, 90% of the cars made before the late 90's and remember, the ONLY thing that is unsafe is a careless or reckless driver!!