Motortrend article: 100 MPG+ Chevy Volt, GM's "Moon Shot"

It's an interesting article about how the car with a possible 100MPG+*
rating come into being.

"It was the equivalent of an Apollo moon shot: The company was going
to invent a propulsion system and design an entirely new vehicle at
the same time. "We don't normally let people do that," notes GM CEO
Rick Wagoner. But despite those misgivings, Wagoner and his team had
now set a goal of unveiling a new design-not a fanciful concept car,
but a real car that could go into production-at the January 2007
Detroit auto show, only nine or 10 months away. By the standards of
the automotive industry, that would require blazing speed."

Full article:
http://www.motortrend.com/features/consumer/112_0904_chevrolet_volt_inside_story/index.html

* EPA Closer to Giving the Chevy Volt at Least a 100 mpg Rating:
http://gm-volt.com/2008/10/13/epa-closer-to-giving-the-chevy-volt-at-least-a-100-mpg-rating/

 

My hat's off to GM if they can make it a success. The Volt, slated to be the
first commercially available serial hybrid (an electric car with an on-board
charger), could be a major landmark in automotive history.

The second article underscores the rapidly shifting ground our current fuel
economy ratings are built on. They were intended to be "for comparison
purposes only" but the public has come to expect precision. That was never
possible - MPG is a calculation based on operation, not a design
characteristic - and now the entire concept is becoming poorly defined.

Mike

 

Promise them anything, but sell them a SUV?

 

Yeah, right, only problem is, it can't run on batteries only, it will run
for a few miles and then become a regular hybrid, it is expected to cost
about $40,00-$48,000 and apparently, really only get about 40 mpg. OOPS
sorry folks, did we waste your bailout money.

 

Seems to me the serial hybrid is easier to make than something like the
Prius hybrid hybrid. In the series hybrid you do not need to have any
fancy transmission with mechanical torque or rpm sharing. The only
drawback I see is that it requires a larger electric motor. But it lets
IC run at constant rpm and power output, for best efficiency.

In a parallel hybrid you need a way to mechanically combine the electric
and IC power. The downside is that the IC has to run at variable speed
and power output, which destroys efficiency.

The hybrid hybrid applies both IC and electric power to wheels
simultaneously, while letting IC run at constant rpm and power output.
hard to do!

 

You mean like Toyota, Honda and every other manufacture has been doing for
the past ten years, selling the vehicles buyers wanted to buy? Honda even
tried to make a "truck" out of a car, because THAT is what buyer wanted to
buy LOL

 

A guess we can assume you know nothing about the Volt, right?

 

There are several ways to figure the economy of the Volt, but perhaps
the most realistic is to forget about published MPG (really intended as
a comparative datum) and consider $ per 10k miles. Such a calculation
will include your local rate for electricity, and will consider your
driving habits over a period of time.

I did that for my Prius, and discovered that it costs about 5c a mile
for fuel. Remember, 100% of the Prius propulsion energy comes from
gasoline. There is no other source whatsoever, but the hybrid system
permits the use of a highly efficient ICE that has poor acceleration
characteristics, supported by an electric motor which has maximum torque
at zero rpm. The Volt, on the other hand, can be 100% plug-in for
average days (for me), with the ICE entering the equation only when I
drive further than, say, 40 miles between charges.

If GM's Volt project delivers its promoted configuration, it will cost
ME less than 3c per mile.

Neither figure includes maintenance, depreciation, (in)convenience,
etc., but an ICE that is designed to run at constant rpm can be
amazingly durable, and electric motors are usually good for hundreds of
thousands of hours. I won't talk about the battery...

Does it make sense to pay $40k to save $0.02 per mile? At 20k miles per
year that's $400, or 1% of the car's purchase price. So, the answer is
NO. But it's an engineering wonder that fascinates this early adopter -
which is why I bought my '04 Prius in Oct '03 when it first hit the
market. $$ benefits over time were secondary but gratifying.

I'd order a Volt today if my local Chevy dealer would accept the deposit.

Ike

 

40 mpg? Not really. In the worst case scenario the Volt could only
get 40 mpg if the battery was discharged and you were forced to run
the gas engine continuously to charge the battery while driving.

I am surprised with your negativity that you didn't say that the Volt
got less than 1 mpg. That would be possible if you parked the Volt and
used the gas engine to re-charge the battery.

Realistically you could get unlimited gas mileage if you never went
beyond the 40 mile limit of the battery that 78% of Americans fall
under.

So when GM says 100 mpg they mean that if you drive 66.7 miles
the combination of unlimited mileage and the defined 40 mpg mileage
will equate to 100 mpg. Similarly if you took a trip of 80 miles you
would get 80 mpg.

 

Just what do you want? Nobody forces anyone to buy
a SUV. GM attempts to sell what the consumer wants.

Do you want to be forced to buy a puddle jumper?
Or would you like to make your own decision?

 

Did you calculate how long you could have driven a Carolla, with the $5,000
premium you paid to buy your Pruis, before you would have spend any
additional funds on gasoline? I seems to me you could have driven the
Corolla for at least four years on that $5,000 before you spent ANY money
for gas

 

----- Original Message -----
From: <>
Newsgroups:
alt.autos.gm,rec.autos.tech,alt.autos.toyota,alt.autos.toyota.prius,rec.autos.makers.honda
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 3:15 PM
Subject: Re: Motortrend article: 100 MPG+ Chevy Volt, GM's "Moon Shot"

I thought the Volt didn't use the gasoline engine to charge the
battery. I thought the Volt was really a plug-in electric car with a
gasoline engine that kickes in when the battery dies to provide
electricity to run the car nd that the battery was not recharged until
the car ws plugged in again...

See http://media.gm.com/volt/eflex/works.html - seems to confirm
what I thought.

Ed

 

Or buy 2 Corollas for the price of Volt.

 

This is true. The thing is... nobody really can predict what the consumer
will want in the future. Times change, tastes change.

That's why a lot of car companies have a wide range of different vehicles in
their product line, from small sporty cars and small economy cars up to SUVs
and full-sized trucks.

No, but I'd _like_ to buy a small car. It's important for car companies to
have a full range of products, even if this quarter a particular model isn't
very popular. Much of what hurt GM is that they abandoned a sector of the
market and then suddenly found it had become very important.

For a small niche vendor, they can get away with that. GM can't.
--scott

 

I make my own decisions, as much as possible, from the options left open
to me. One of the options is not to buy from any company which cannot
supply a product that fits my needs and my wallet.

There is no reason that GM, or any other company, cannot supply a
dependable car that will get 35 mpg on the highway, for example.. I
accessed part of that way back in 1989 with a Buick Regal that
very regularly got 35 mpg (2.8 litre).. The car was a disaster as far
as durability, so GM met part of my requirements.

I have owned a lot of GMs shoddier ideas.

 

Mike, selling is making someone want to buy. If they already want to buy,
no selling is required. Historically, in the automotive industry, selling
involves appealing to a prospect's self esteem. That's why they put names
like Tundra and Yukon on large (mostly hollow) vehicles with large diameter
exhaust pipes (think penis) and big tires (think tall). Americans have
been played for suckers for years.

 

At this point, I don't know when it becomes necessary to start charging the
batteries but it is reasonable to expect a vehicle propelled solely by
electric motors to require a substantial minimum charge to deal with long,
steep hills etc. I'll speculate the gas engine begins charging long before
40 miles have been driven. Please remember I wrote "speculate."

 

Considering the cost of both gasoline and electricity?

-- Michelle

 

Then why do businesses spend so much money on advertising and marketing?
They try to get consumers to want what they sell.

 

And you believe GM does not have that kind of lineup? Maybe a trip to some
GM dealerships would be in order.

GM has long built more 30mpg+ cars than any other manufacturer, so I do not
agree that they did not embrace this segment of the market. In my opinion,
what hurt them was the years of crapping on their customers with issues
like the intake gaskets on the 60 degree engines, and a small handful of
other persistent design issues they foisted on the consumer.