Chevy Volt Grabs 230 MPG Rating, With Catches

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bhf5006

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... You mean 60~ MPG Average. I'm tired of misleading unappropriate headlines... "230 MPG... for the first 40 miles and exponentially declining afterwards"
 
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This rating is extremely deceptive. Come on GM. This is a great vehicle, but be honest about fuel economy and give a figure that represents gasoline mode only. We know that the first 40 miles are electric only.
 

pkellmey

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Talk about a screwed up way to measure electric cars. I have a feeling those new government fuel measurements will be highly modified soon.
 

hellwig

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My car gets infinity miles per gallon*. Take that GM!
I can heat my home for pennies** a year
My 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
 

FlayerSlayer

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So if 40 miles without gas + 10 miles with gas = 230 MPG, then does that mean that if I go 41 miles, I am getting 2300 MPG? If I go 40 miles or less, I get Infinte MPG. Gee, sounds like an electic car that they just stopped driving once the mileage was where they wanted it.
 

jerther

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[citation][nom]doomtomb[/nom]This is screwy[/citation]
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
 

rooket

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I still have my doubts especially since it is GM. Plus I see very short reviews of the thing. Does this mean that it gets 230mpg out of the gas that is in the car, and not counting how much $ your utility bill is? I'm guessing that it does. Toyota said that they don't have plug in for the Prius because gasoline would have to be more expensive to warrant needing to plug it into the house. Also for plug in vehicles, the government is going to start applying taxes on top of charging your vehicle in order to maintain roads. So I don't know how they are going to meter that.

So it's a chevrolet does that mean it's not going to be made in the USA? lol.
 

lifelesspoet

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They ought to take the energy use from electric power, convert into what it would take for a gas fired power plant, minus average transmission loss and add them together.
Electric cars acheive up to 90% effeciency and sometimes more, gasoline provides roughly 25-30%. They are incredibly reliable and efficient machines, but pretending that the electricity doesn't exsist is misleading.
 

coverfire

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well considering I can go to work and home on a single charge and then be recharged by the next day I would save roughly 200.00 a month in gas.
 
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We need to get new MPG standards, saying a car has 240 MPG is meingless when you have to state that you have to drive exactly 50 miles to get the rating. With a further cavet that it has to be the first 50 miles after you have charged your car.

Saying the car gets 230 mpg is completely misleading. Say the MPG on fuel ONLY , and the watts/mile rating on electric ONLY.

 

The_Blood_Raven

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[citation][nom]coverfire[/nom]well considering I can go to work and home on a single charge and then be recharged by the next day I would save roughly 200.00 a month in gas.[/citation]

Yeah but you can go another 150-200 miles in a Tesla model S for roughly the same price.
 
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"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.
 
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