Chevy Volt Grabs 230 MPG Rating, With Catches

[rooket]

Surprising everyone here is leaving out the utility bill from the equasion. 40 miles is not free, you have to charge the battery somehow.

 

[rooket]

[citation][nom]hakesterman[/nom]The car is basically useless because the pricetag is $ 40,000. Only a small share of people canafford it and they would have to own the car for 15 years for it to pay for itself. Even if the government gives you a $ 7,500 tax credit for being green, it's still more than the average joe can afford and it's highly unlikely that it will ever come down in price. Now if they could get the price down to say $32,000 and you got an instant 7,500 off from the government so you only have to finance $24,500 minus your down payment, now your talking main stream America.[/citation]

That and they have a history in the past of pulling people's cars from them after the lease expires. That's gotta leave a bitter taste for the consumer.

 

[bootleghooch]

[citation][nom]hakesterman[/nom]The car is basically useless because the pricetag is $ 40,000. Only a small share of people canafford it and they would have to own the car for 15 years for it to pay for itself. Even if the government gives you a $ 7,500 tax credit for being green, it's still more than the average joe can afford and it's highly unlikely that it will ever come down in price. Now if they could get the price down to say $32,000 and you got an instant 7,500 off from the government so you only have to finance $24,500 minus your down payment, now your talking main stream America.[/citation]

My car is 12 years old. Why would you expect any car to pay for itself? I'd be happy with half.

 

[option350z]

[citation][nom]as8df7h2js8222[/nom]"Agreed... and I can't understand how charging batteries with a diesel engine would be more efficient than powering the darn car with the diesel engine itself... nonsens"Its very simple.1) fuel powered engines have a specific rpm range where they are the most efficient. At low and high rpms their fuel efficiency goes down MASSIVLY, as does their torque etc. If you use a generator, you run the engine in its optiom range all the time. Means you get a lot more energy generation out of the same ammount of fuel.2) You arent wasting power at idle when stopping in traffic. When you are idling in afuel powered car you are pissing awayfuel for no work. When you are idling in a electric car with a fuel generator, you are storing most of that energy.3) When you press the brake of a regular vehicle, all your stored momentum is disappated into heat. IE wasted. When you press the brake of a electric vehicle with regenerative breaking, you store a portion of that energy back into your batteries.Whats nonesense is their MPG rating. Using an electric drive train however is anything but nonesense. Even if they only had a battery that could do 1 mile, it would still be more efficient to use an electric drive train with the generator on all the time.However, the hybrid drive train option is nonesense. When you use both a fuel engine and a electric engine to power the drive train directly you combine the worst of both worlds at twice the price.volt = hybrid done mostly right. Tho i would have given it a bigger battery. And they should have kept the prototype body look, the production body looks like crap.They need to be more honest about the MPG rating tho.[/citation]

1.Diesel engines alter great than their petrol counterparts. The torque only decreases after a certain rpm. Lets say 3750 because that's where the most hp/torque is produced on a 1.9L AHU engine. Then it drops off after that point.
2. Having the engine idle does not waste that much fuel. In fact its very minuscule.
3. We all should take lessons from Europe and start driving diesels because the MPG is so great. 50+ MPG on the HWY and 43 in city sounds great to me. On the plus side, they have more oomph than hybrids, and alot more fun to drive. Diesels like to be driven hard.

 

[Guest]

Price is too high, GM has too bad of a reputation, (quality mainly) and sounds like a big pain in the rear to charge AND gas up a $40k car. I remember reading an article breaking down the production and emissions of a huge SUV vs. a hybrid in Car and Driver. The hybrids ended up using more resources and causing more emissions than the SUV according to them.
I'd rather buy a gas powered car that has higher gas mileage for less money.

 

[pharge]

[citation][nom]option350z[/nom] We all should take lessons from Europe and start driving diesels because the MPG is so great. 50+ MPG on the HWY and 43 in city sounds great to me. On the plus side, they have more oomph than hybrids, and alot more fun to drive. Diesels like to be driven hard.[/citation]

You left out the problem of diesels engines...
1) higher pollution, 2)higher vibration and noise, 3) in the US... a lot of time the price of diesels are even higher than the premium gas.

However, with some modification... diesel engines do take bio-diesel which is nice.

Since nothing is perfect... we just need to weight on what is more important to us.

By the way, thought I heard somebody was trying to make the disel-hybrid cars... maybe that can be a good idea

 

[jacobdrj]

[citation][nom]kaiser_25[/nom]The car itself still seems kinda nice, but their advertising gives me a bitter taste for GM...they shouldn’t be exaggerating right now, they need to win the consumer back...they wont, but that’s what they should be trying to do.[/citation]
They are not exaggerating: They are required by law to advertise these MPG ratings.

 

[jacobdrj]

[citation][nom]pharge[/nom]You left out the problem of diesels engines...1) higher pollution, 2)higher vibration and noise, 3) in the US... a lot of time the price of diesels are even higher than the premium gas.However, with some modification... diesel engines do take bio-diesel which is nice.Since nothing is perfect... we just need to weight on what is more important to us.By the way, thought I heard somebody was trying to make the disel-hybrid cars... maybe that can be a good idea[/citation]
Diesel engines can be clean running. The Diesel cycle was actually originally designed to run on bio-fuels, not fossil fuels, and can actually run better on bio-fuels in some circumstances.
Biggest problem is actually the fact that diesel doesn't start well in the winter.

 

[ac21365]

[citation][nom]hellwig[/nom]My car gets infinity miles per gallon*. Take that GM!I can heat my home for pennies** a yearMy desktop computer gets over 1.9Peta-FLOPS***It's all in how you word it!*when turned off and pushed under manual power**roughly 50,000+ pennies during winter months.***FLOPS = FLoating point Operations Per Seven-days[/citation]

Came to say this.

 

[jacobdrj]

[citation][nom]b1k[/nom]Price is too high, GM has too bad of a reputation, (quality mainly) and sounds like a big pain in the rear to charge AND gas up a $40k car. I remember reading an article breaking down the production and emissions of a huge SUV vs. a hybrid in Car and Driver. The hybrids ended up using more resources and causing more emissions than the SUV according to them. I'd rather buy a gas powered car that has higher gas mileage for less money.[/citation]
A) The price is too high. There is a market for luxury cars and niche cars, and this may fall there, but in no way will this technology trickle down to regular consumers.
B) Finding a way to deal with the eventually dead batteries will be a real resource hog. Not to mention Lithium is in kind of short supply on Earth...
C) They have a bad reputation, and with some of their brands they have earned it, but with others, like Buick, they are actually top 3 in reliability...
D) The average car buyer values a car at rarely more than $10,000. That is why Cash for Clunkers was so popular. A new car could actually be purchased from Chrysler for a 'reasonable' price, often without credit.

 

[jacobdrj]

[citation][nom]ac21365[/nom]Came to say this.[/citation]
Well, there was gas that went into the production of the food you ate that powered your pushing... So... .001 MPG?

 

[cdillon]

Wow, electric cars will have a hard time taking off with all the ignorance I'm seeing here. You pay far less money out of your wallet per-mile when using electricity. So yes, you're "trading gas bills for electric bills". MUCH SMALLER bills in total. But because there are so many ignoramuses out there who don't understand how electric cars work, they had to dumb things down and come up with a "MPG" equivalent number. There ARE NO "MILES PER GALLON" when you're dealing with electric cars. They're coming up with the number to give you a cost comparison. Also, charging the batteries with a built-in gas or diesel generator is MORE EFFICIENT (sorry for all the caps, they're my equivalent of a two-by-four upside the back of the head, seems to be required sometimes) than running the car directly from the engine. I'm not going to explain why that is, there's more than enough reading material out there on the subject. Get to reading before posting completely ignorant remarks.

 

[mlopinto2k1]

[citation][nom]ravenware[/nom]Gas fired? Thought they all used coal and nuclear. Anyway all fossil fueled power plants can be replaced. The gov will probably just tax us until it is out of style and never replace them.[/citation]

He wasn't referring to a "Power Plant". He was talking about a gasoline engine. Just, worded it pretty weird!!

 

[cdillon]

Forgot to mention that you save money running your car on electricity because the entire process, from energy source (coal, natural gas, wind, hydro, nuclear, geothermal, or Mr. Fusion) to your car is far more efficient than burning the same fuel directly in your car. Your car's gas engine is only about 15% efficient from tank-to-wheel, not including the inefficiencies involved in getting the gas into your car in the first place. Electric vehicles, on the other hand, are about 90-95% efficient from battery-to-wheel, and 80% efficient in total, from beginning to end. That means you spend less money AND they are greener because less fuel is used and less pollution is created, in total, at the electric plants. Also, when we decide one method of electric generation is too dirty (coal), you don't have to change every car on the road, you just change the electric plants to something cleaner. Electricity is universal.

 

[gpj]

[citation][nom]hakesterman[/nom]The car is basically useless because the pricetag is $ 40,000. Only a small share of people canafford it and they would have to own the car for 15 years for it to pay for itself. Even if the government gives you a $ 7,500 tax credit for being green, it's still more than the average joe can afford and it's highly unlikely that it will ever come down in price. Now if they could get the price down to say $32,000 and you got an instant 7,500 off from the government so you only have to finance $24,500 minus your down payment, now your talking main stream America.[/citation]

You're an idiot right?

I can't stand the argument that "it has to pay for itself in a couple years for it to be worth it." Being environmentally conscious isn't about saving the consumer a few bucks now... it's about saving us all a lot of bucks later on cleaning up after ourselves.

That said, I agree with the others than the marketing number of 230mpg is highly suspect and does a real disservice to how smart the average buyer is.

 

[mtd324]

Right on cdillon....
I think people are seriously misunderstanding this rating. The cars does not have a range of only 50 miles. It will go 40 miles on electricity alone then it will BEGIN to use fuel. I beleive the EPA only tests the car for a 50 mile trip thats why they are saying 40 on electricity then 10 on gas.Its not a marketing scheme, these are real numbers. If you commute less than 40 miles per day (roughly 75% of Americans) it DOES get infinite MPG because it uses ZERO fuel.

 

[geoffs]

GM has no choice: They are required by law to advertise ONLY the EPA ratings.

The EPA has not yet published an estimate for this vehicle, the 230MPG number is GM's estimate.

 

[falchard]

Gas is cheaper then electricity. Curbing a $200/month fuel charge for a $400/month electricity charge is a little dumb.

 

[geoffs]

I prefer a cost of energy approach... you're not getting infinite mileage under 40 miles because you have to pay for the cost of the electricity. The chart would look like this given their assessment that it costs 40 cents in electric to get 40 miles and a gallon of gas costs $2.70:

Right idea, wrong numbers. At $0.11/KWh, ~9KWh to charge and drive 40 miles, electricity cost is $0.025 per mile. The Volt is expected to get about 50MPG when running on gasoline, so the gasoline cost per mile is $0.054/mi, slightly more than 2x the cost of electricity.

However, relative prices can change, about 8 months ago where I live, electricity was 50% higher and gasoline was about 50% lower, so at that time electricity to charge the Volt would have been more expensive than just using gasoline to run the Volt. that's not likely to be the case on a frequent basis, but it has happened in the recent past.

 

[hakesterman]

WHO'S THE IDIOT RIGHT???? SO Your going to tell me your going to spend
an extra $ 15,000 to $ 20,000 on a vechical just so you can say your a green operator? How retarded is that. I would never spend extra on anything unless their is a payoff within 5 years. Most smart shoppers use this formula when shopping for heating furnaces, Houses with solar
power( 10 years ), Electric dryers VS. gas dryers. For all you Morons that's called value shopping. On a car it's a poor investment to spend
that much extra money because what you save in gas or electricity you spend in extra monthy payment. The extra interest you paid on that additional $15,000 is insane. So unless your a dope the car is a joke at $ 40,000.