The Chevy Volt, which was supposed to have an all-electric drivetrain (with a gas engine that only charged the batteries and didn’t drive the wheels) and was claimed to get 230 MPG, gets gas mileage in the 30’s and has a gas engine that does power the wheels.
The Volt is still an interesting car because it’s a plug hybrid, but it’s a pretty tame next step in the evolution of hybrid cars, not the revolution promised by GM when it was first introduced.
Jebediah
I had been all amped up about the Volt, but this news really hertz my enthusiasm for it.
Anya
Another Obama failure!
aimai
That’s a whole lot of lies packed in to one sentence. I think it ought to win a prize.
aimai
Newsouthzach
There are conflicting claims on this — the Detroit free press calls shenanigans on the jalopnik article. Sorry for no link, but I’m on the mobile…
duck-billed placelot
30 miles to the GALLON!? Surely it’s a space vehicle, since it’s so clearly from the, er, recent past.
cleek
this had so much potential, could have sparked a revolution in electric cars; could have been a real transformer. instead, it looks like GM has shorted us.
Xenos
Couldabeenacontenda! But now just a bum.
I am now driving a diesel BMW that gets 42 mpg (I think). Is it really that much more difficult to put electric motors on a couple wheels and skip the transmission, and so on? Even if you don’t make it a hybrid, can’t you make a decent set of electric motors powered by an efficient diesel?
Then again, this was something BOB used to advocate, so there must be a dozen reasons why this is a really stupid idea.
jon
If run without plugging it in–which isn’t supposed to be done–it gets that mileage. If it’s plugged in, it can go 40 miles before it starts to use the gas motor. So if it’s plugged in, it gets great mileage, but it never gets that super mileage per gallon if it’s not used as instructed. It still sounds like a great car to me, but I have a hard time criticizing anyone who suggests that the mileage estimates put out by GM were misleading. Did they lie? Did they exaggerate? Did they have their reasons? It’s a little of all three, if I read the linked things in the comments to the Jalopnik article.
But I have no idea how I’d measure mileage if I had one. 40 miles brings me from home to work and back, so I could potentially have infinite gas mileage if I kept the batteries in optimal working condition and only used it for work. Of course, then my car would be coal-powered.
All I know for certain is that the Nissan Leaf looks like a better option for me, but that the line is already sold out for the next year. I’ll stick to my gas-hog minivan until whenever, I guess. It’s paid for, and that makes all the difference right now.
c u n d gulag
I guess I’ll wait then. After all of that promise, I can see what’s coming:
The Chevy ‘Volt-up’ – a plug-in pick-up truck that gets about 20 mpg.
And the Chevy ‘Dolt’ – a plug-in SUV that gets about 22 mpg.
Ah, GM. ‘Back to the Future!’ Nothing like progress.
Sweet Jesus…………….
JRon
the 30’s? seriously? my 10-year-old 4000-lb Saab gets 32 if I carefully drive the speed limit.
I was looking to downsize recently but it makes no sense to me to get a much smaller car with poorer mileage and much less power. I just don’t understand why so many small domestic cars get such bad mileage.
In a weak defense of Chevy, though, there’s a lot of wasted energy in powering batteries from an engine, and so it may just not make conservation sense to use the engine in that way. They did finally improve the looks of the Volt though, thank God.
Walker
Look, I have no interest in the Volt. But this news was ridiculously slanted when it hit Slashdot, and this phrasing of the issue is even worse. This smacks of a serious smear campaign.
The gas engine only kicks in when you go above 70 mph. If you are commuting to work you will never use the gas engine. It was always planned to have a gas engine back-up for high speeds. The entire focus of this was for commutes.
AB
so they’re coming out with a new car that loses to the prius by about a factor of two in mileage? nice.
booferama
The Nissan Leaf is a more interesting car, aside from the fact that it’s not made by GM. It will have nearly 100 miles per charge and no gas tank.
cmorenc
Geez, my Ford Escape Hybrid small SUV regularly beats 30mpg average, city and highway combined. Since much of the Escape’s hybrid advantage is realized in city driving (where slowing/braking energy is recaptured as electric energy), and to a lesser extent, from having a smaller gasoline engine component (less gas-thirsty) than all-gas versions of the Escape, if what the article says is true then GM has labored mightily to produce a compact car that’s in effect, an inefficient version of the Honda Civic hybrid (itself not terribly efficient as an example of hybrid technology), and only very mildly better than my much more spacious SUV hybrid.
No wonder GM went bankrupt, while Ford survived and foreign carmakers are dominant in the auto industry. They can’t even reinvent something as efficient as well-established current hybrid technology, and one that is a FAIL as a useful plug-in powered vehicle.
John S.
What a joke. My VW Sportwagen is but a mere turbo diesel, and it gets around 40mpg. I really don’t know what America’s hangup is with regard to diesel, but switching away from unleaded would double the average fuel economy of our cars very easily. No exotic technology or additional infrastructure required, and it could at least serve as a bridge between where we are now and where GM claimed to be taking us.
Napoleon
More info from the NYTimes auto blog.
brendancalling
my 1996 Subaru gets better mileage than that.
satby
Wait, a big corporation put out a line of self-serving BS?? Stop the presses!
beltane
@John S.: We’re looking at getting a Golf TDI eventually. The good thing about diesel is that if things go to hell in a hand-basket, it will still be possible for some enterprising souls to make their own diesel fuel.
DBrown
My 190 K miles (bad tires, too) 2005 Honda Civic Hybrid just gave me 55 miles/gal today (traveling 60 – 65 mph for 1.1 hours, mostly HW but some back roads) and people want to buy a more expensive car that just get’s in the 30’s … so what does it do when not using the gas engine!?
El Cid
The lie was not that a gasoline engine was necessary; it was always necessary.
The lie was that GM had been claiming that the actual power to the wheels would come entirely via the electric motors.
And that the gasoline engine would be there to drive a generator (a very powerful ‘alternator’) to provide electric power, either directly or indirectly.
Now, GM is apparently reversing one of its most significant technological gains and saying that the gasoline engine now directly drives the wheels through the transmission.
That in itself would have been a neat advance for a US automaker, since electric motors have traditionally been better at lower speed torque than higher speeds.
The fuel economy thing is a different matter — as was said above, it was only to provide all-electric power for, at the absolutely ideal best, 40 miles. I.e., for short commutes in a city. I don’t know that I saw firm estimates of fuel economy before of how it would work in highway driving and beyond the 40 mile limit.
I’m not quite sure why GM would have done this this way.
It did sound much more impressive by claiming that GM would be selling a sedan with an all-electric drive train with gasoline engine only for power generation.
I guess that’s why they pushed that story.
It could be the case that they were having problems with the electric drivetrain at higher speeds, or they thought American consumers would be too nervous with an all-electric drivetrain, or that the gas engine couldn’t provide enough electricity quickly enough to completely power higher speed driving (since at that point the batteries would not have bee providing it). Or none of these things.
Now, they’re in the position of walking back one of the most serious bragging points for the Volt. Rightly or wrongly, this is going to hurt the car’s image.
[Personally, I don’t think it should matter as far as the vehicle goes, this is more of a problem for how the PR was going of how revolutionary a vehicle it was.
Plus, I don’t think this was a vehicle targeted at being the most efficient way ordinary consumers could get high mileage, it was to be something really new and neat, yet very well done, that those consumers who enjoy being at the head of some trend would get.]
Thomas
We need to keep researching batteries but in the meantime do something to help the adoption of compressed natural gas vehicles. Its existing technology that significantly lowers the carbon emissions of a vehicle and it works. If every new car sold was bi-fuel capable (i.e. could run on gasoline or nat. gas. – again existing tech) sooner or later people would start to use and and get comfortable with it. Eventually you could add an additional tax to gasoline to further incentivize people to use nat. gas. and use the revenue from that to fund tax credits to and other incentives to gas stations to install cng refuelling pumps.
El Cid
It also occurs to me that I could be entirely wrong, and I hope so — maybe this reporting among primarily auto-geeks and industry reporters won’t really matter for the buying public.
It’s not something I would be interested in the slightest to get given I have a perfectly good older vehicle, but I hope it does well, both for US automakers somewhat pursuing newer technologies and GM’s stability.
Of course, we could save a lot more fuel overall by making sure big heavy work and cargo vehicles had properly inflated tires and other correct maintenance upkeep, but, you know, that’s for a bunch of French wimps.
The Grand Panjandrum
My Surly Big Dummy gets me where I want to go AND I can haul quite a bit of cargo on it. It has the added benefit of keeping me physically fit.
zattarra
That is not a very well written or researched article you link to. It does not understand the basic concept of how the Volt is supposed to run or what the 230 mpg equivalent number arose or what it means. The only thing they got right was GM changed the story on when the gas engine works. But the 230 mpg equivalent is assuming that you never do more than 40 miles between charges. And that is you gas equivalent mpg from plugging it in to your outlet – cost and carbon footprint.
The Volt is still superior to the Leaf for a normal person. If you want to look at the Volt compared to the Leaf as an all electric vehicle for short commuters they are the same – both will run fine for a certain amount of time purely electric and you just charge up at home. But if you buy your electric car and then decide you want to take a long weekend trip your volt will actually get you there and back becasue you can run with a gas engine at times and actually make a 200 mile round trip. Your Leaf will leave you stranded somewhere because you can’t charge it.
My next car will be an electric vehicle in 2 years. It won’t be a Leaf or an all electric with no gas engine because the charging infrastructure doesn’t exist. It will be something like a Volt which works fine for my 20 miles of daily driving but will also allow me to go more than 50 miles from my house on a weekend.
El Cid
Also, for whatever reasons, Popular Mechanics has always seemed to me to be particularly dimwitted about car tests. So I’m not surprised that they immediately dismissed the idea of driving around in all-electric mode and went to see how it would perform with no charge.
My guess is that their readership would be most frightened that when it ran out of stored charge, the Volt would just shudder and drift to the side, leaving their poor offspring missing the soccer match and their friends and coworkers driving by in their Lexuses pointing and laughing at them.
JimF
I’m of two minds about this, on one hand I was looking forward to a pure electric with just a gas range extender. On the other hand as an engineer what they did makes sense. If your goal is to have the most efficient system possible then everything you do should head for that. They discovered that at high speeds system efficiency was improved by using the gasoline motor as an assist. If your goal was to make the car as efficient as possible why wouldn’t you design that in?
El Cid
Jaguar at the Paris auto show last few weeks unveiled a concept supercar (ultra-high-performance type vehicle for the rich) which was all-electric driven but also used an internal combustion engine for charging.
The big difference is that its internal combustion engines is a set of two gas turbine engines. Which is not only all cool and stuff, but if you’re going to have an internal combustion engine running at one single speed (ideal for driving an electric generator), that’s what turbines are best at.
No, these aren’t the big types like the Jay Leno car which can melt the bumper of the car behind you. Little bitty things often used in industrial generation, “microturbines”.
The technology was developed in part with assistance from the British government, which of course means that Obama’s soshullism done took over the whole dang world and there oughtta be English people stapling teabags to their hats and screaming how David Cameron = Hitler.
[P.S. Gas turbines can run on just about any fuel.]
El Cid
@JimF: I agree. This shouldn’t matter at all in thinking about the Volt as a product. It may, or may not be, a difficulty in PR by walking back the earlier claims, or claiming to have never really said the other bits at all. But, yeah, if that’s what worked best then it’s what should have been done, prior claims or not.
MarkusR
That article doesn’t jive. See this quote:
25-50 miles is range. 230MPG is rate of consumption. They are entirely two different concepts.
And that’s supposed to be a car-blog?
Jr
Unfortunately, the children at Jalopnik did not bother to read any of the articles they cited. Car and Driver was reporting the number of miles that they drove the car before running out of battery reserves, not the mileage. They were reporting on how different driving styles changed this distance, not reporting a mileage figure.
Zach
You’d be well served to read this week’s New Yorker profile of Nick Denton and the Gawker empire before taking analysis at one of his sites at face value. With phrase like “10% of the fuel economy initially touted” they’re flirting with a libel suit.
Hybrid cars don’t come close to going all-electric anywhere near 70 mph.
dumb monkey
The Mitsubishi i-Miev is the next All Electric Car to look at!
dhd
It’s a real shame that this article forced me to follow links to Slashdot in order to find out that it was bullshit.
cat48
He has let down Hamsher/Sirota again! They were on CNN together today to let everyone know how osama had let them down & won’t even admit it! Sigh…….
WyldPirate
@jon:
This is the problem with all of the electric cars unfortunately. Most people are oblivious to it and aren’t enamored with having nuclear power as a substitute.
There aren’t many pie-in-the sky solutions right now on the horizon. Coal is an option as it is something we have a pretty damned big supply of. The downside is the environmental damage of getting it out of ground and the fact that all of the CO2 has to go somewhere. Too much goes into the air which is just as problematic given the age of the coal-fired steam plants in the country.
Hopefully there will be be mechanisms to start capturing and sequestering CO2 emissions at the source of the power plants. perhaps more economical solar and wind units at homes to partially charge electric vehicles.
It’s going to have to come soon, though. Peak oil is literally upon us or just around a very short bend. With predicted drops in production, the devastation to the US economy–and to our lifestyle here– could be profound and ugly.
I’ll surprise everyone and go with the negative outlook. ;) Toss a serious energy crisis that makes the 72 Arab oil embargo look like a picnic on top of the rest of our problems.
Horse and buggies in 50 years baby! IT’s back to the late 19th century for the good old USA. Too bad we fucked up a lot of the good farmland around our major cities with suburban sprawl. The good thing is you can grow a shitload of veggies in those yards. Rabbits in pens don’t take up much room either.
USA! USA! We’re Number !!
And King Barry Obama is better than Jesus Christ and sliced bread made into a sandwich. He’s gonna save us all!
Jr
Fritz Henderson’s claim of 230 MPG on the EPA tests was correct when he made the claim. All of the EPA test cycles are very short and the Volt would have passed them on all/nearly all battery power. This is why the EPA is changing the test cycle and is in the process of creating the MPG-e rating.
WyldPirate
@DBrown:
gives good head?
Dennis SGMM
Our nineteen year old Ford Escort wagon gets 30MPG on the highway (5spd manual trans helps). While newer cars are definitely notching higher MPG numbers I wonder how long I would have to drive one before the increased MPG makes up for the carbon emissions involved in its manufacture
jehrler
@booferama:
The Leaf may get 100 miles *if* it is being used on the flats, *if* it is warm weather, *if* the a/c isn’t running and *if* there is no need for heat.
For the rest of us, the advantage of the Volt is that it can be the *only* car a family needs as it can be 100% electric for commuting and still able to take the family on a 500 mile trip to grandmas.
Being able to have 1 car instead of 2 saves a *whole lotta* energy in manufacturing and transportation.
The Leaf may be great, but it isn’t the only car 99% of families can have, which is why Nissan is talking about allowing Leaf owners to rent other cars.
Here in MN, the Leaf would be effectively unusable on those minus 30 degree days.
BTW, here in the uppermidwest we have a lot of wind power available so the Volt could, if you elect to buy only green power, be cruising on the wind, not coal.
Halteclere
A true test of a vehicle’s MPG should be over a 1000 mile test track. This way any benefit from starting with a fully charged power cell would not skew the results and lead to wild claims of 100+ MPG. If a car manufacture wanted to follow up and say that their car can go 230 miles without burning any fuel, 40 miles at a time between charges, more power to them. The consumer can make a factual decision based on the expected use of the car.
Now, about claims that a vehicle can reach 100MPG over a long test run (much longer than the travel distance afforded by an initial charged power cell): Not gonna happen for a comfortable and safe commuter car. 100+ MPG is possible, but in cars built like aircraft wings (see test solar cars). Any car that will accelerate to traffic speeds in a safe, quick manner will have to make design sacrifices that put the 100+ MPG out of reach.
But don’t take my word for it.
If you want a car that you can plug in at your home every night and use only for commuting a short way to work, then look for an electric car. If your commute is in constant stop-and-go traffic, with some longer trips mixed in, then look for a hybrid. But if you plan on traveling long distances at constant highway speeds, buy a compact vehicle with a normal engine for motivation.
georgia pig
Totally distorted hit piece. Yeah, the 230 mpg claim was puffery, but saying a Volt is another Prius is simply wrong. It’s a predominantly electric hybrid optimized for commuting 25-50 miles, with an extended range capability if you need to make a longer trip. If used for relatively short commutes with overnight charging, it will be more energy efficient than the Prius. The Prius could be modified to do something similar, but it probably wouldn’t have the same performance as the Volt unless Toyota ups its motor HP and changes its battery tech. The real test of the Volt is how well its battery technology holds up and can be improved to extend the electric range. It also sounds like GM’s mechanical assist at high speeds may actually be an improvement.
evinfuilt
GM lied, you can argue that if you drive it properly it’ll do great gas mileage. But all GM did with the Volt is charge an extra 20k and turn a Hybrid into a Plug-In hybrid, that’s not a revolution, and its nothing like what they said it would be.
This means the electric motor isn’t as strong as they said, it means the gas motor isn’t for just making electricity, it means they plainly and simply lied.
If you want an all Electric commuter car, get the Leaf, if you want excellent MPG with good range, get a Diesel.
GM has recreated the past, and they hope to make a ton of money off of people too foolish to not look properly. There really isn’t much of an advance in technology as they said. It’s just sad, it’s probably purposeful too.
jehrler
@Halteclere:
I’m not sure why a 1000 mile test track is a “true” test. That is not how most cars are driven most of the time.
I’ll agree that 1000 miles is a good total number of miles, but if the average daily commute is less than 40 miles and that’s what most of the driving is, shouldn’t the MPG test be 1000 miles of average driving?
If that means 25 days of 40 mile trips in the city, and the Volt does that using almost no gas, isn’t the correct gas mileage number nearly infinity for the average driver?
I’m amazed at the amount of hate here.
If you really want to be a good environmental citizen, for a suburban family, having 1 car that can be all things and run most of the time only on electricity is a real plus.
chopper
@Jebediah:
watts up with that?
PeakVT
Well, Jalopnik sure did find a way to boost their page hits. I wouldn’t take what it or TTAC says about PO, AGW, and especially GM all that seriously. Car sites tend to attract a conservative to libertarian crowd, resulting in rather predictable bias.
Fwiffo
It’s actually not a shocker that it’s not a pure series hybrid. A power-split hybrid like the Prius or Volt is more efficient and flexible than a pure series or parallel hybrid.
Martin
Yeah, this is a hit piece. The Volt covers a range of discrete operating conditions, and this represents only the worst conditions, which people are least likely to find themselves in day-to-day.
People have a rather hard time picking their regular lives apart and accurately categorizing it into these conditions, so the author of the piece needs to do that – and didn’t here.
Same rules apply to income taxes, health care, and a whole host of things. You can’t dumb this shit down. This is an article for teabaggers, who can’t accept that things might need to be complex.
catclub
@El Cid:
Wow, does anyone else remember the Chrysler effort to produce a 24 hr Lemans car that would have:
1. Turbine engine 2. Super high speed Flywheel energy storage 3.Electric
motors at the wheels?
Three revolutionary approaches in one vehicle! And do it for the 24 hours of Lemans – kind of a challenging environment.
Their success was limited. That was in the mid 80’s I believe.
Cat
Metaphor time.
The volt is a hammer screwdriver hybrid optimized for screws.
The Jolopnik test tried to use the volt as a nail gun and apparently was confused as to why it performed so badly compared to the other nail guns.
El Cruzado
Mostly hit piece, although disheartening that they keep the engine connected to the wheels (although in the conditions that they say it happens, I suspect it was the only decent engineering solution).
The Volt will shine mostly as a commuter car. Someone with a 10 mile each way commute might barely turn on the gasoline engine in daily driving, and in those cases the MPG number will go all the way to Ludicrousville. The road trip tests are probably the worst case scenario for a hybrid and even a Prius doesn’t do that great on those (as mentioned upthread, a diesel is probably the most efficient option for merely hitting the highway).
Also, car magazine testers have infamously leaden feet. I guess at some point they get used to driving things with 250hp+ and forget to take it easy with more mundane cars.
Bob L
@Jebediah: A friendly microwave to Jebadiah. We will cross that wheatstone bridge when it is time.
catclub
@chopper:
Currently, I’m seeing a lot of resistance to this article.
El Cid
@catclub: My understanding is that the biggest advance was in the developments and innovations of these recent microturbines, particularly the ability to make the blades out of a single piece of metal.
I believe there are buses, maybe even in the US, which use a combination of turbine power and flywheels as energy storage.
And of course there was the 2009-introduced Formula One option for KERS (regenerative braking), with flywheels as an energy storage method.
El Cid
@catclub: Ohm my god, will this continued capacitor for electricity puns ever short circuit, or will we remain ungrounded in our attempts at step down the writing quality here?
Joseph Nobles
They lied about this as recently as a week ago at the Texas State Fair. The Volt was on display and the same “gas engine only charges the batteries” copy was prominent in the car’s information. Sigh.
ThresherK
Good thing I clicked here first.
After GM’s “run it to ruin it” with things like half-baked diesels in the ’70s and variable displacement in the ’80s, I will always suspect GM of wrecking a trend (of something it thinks it can’t make money at) by building one like crap, and therefore poisoning the well for the car mags and the American buyer for a generation. That way GM doesn’t have to put any more effort into it, and can go back to what they make well and can sell, like trucks. (But newer family cars are seeming to buck that trend.)
So, like I said, good thing I clicked here first.
Zach
@evinfuilt:
What hybrid goes to 70 mph without motor assist? The Volt’s electric motor has twice the horsepower of a Prius and the Volt has something like 8 times the battery capacity. It’s a fundamentally different car.
Halteclere
@jehrler:
I threw out 1000 miles just as a way to provide a better comparison between full gas, hybrid, and full electric vehicles. I’d get 250 MPG out of my Lexus SUV if I pushed it up every hill, which is a similar (thought not as realistic) method of maximizing the vehicle’s MPG as only driving the Volt only 40 miles between recharges. The trick is to get a true apples-to-apples comparison between all vehicles that is meaningful to the consumer.
For a true evaluation of a vehicle’s efficiency, the total energy used going from Point A to Point B should be provided. Since kilowatts isn’t as tangible a metric to most people as gallons of gasoline, I would like to see the equivalent of how many gallons of gasoline is needed to charge the Volt’s battery after a 40-mile drive.
jehrler
@Halteclere:
The problem with that is that is not how the car is designed to be used, nor is it how most drivers will use it.
The mileage for this car is, as others have noted, not a simple calculation. It *can* get infinite miles per gallon and it *can* get 30 mpg.
My argument is that using an average daily car use cycle as the baseline number is more accurate than using a 1000 mile drive cycle.
Thus the baseline daily use mileage might be 230mpg with trips of 1000 getting (guessing here) 35 mpg.
You seemed to suggest the baseline should be 35 with a comment that it can be higher if you drive less per day.
And I am really unclear how you would use your test with a fully electric car. Does the Leaf get 0 mpg? Since, once the charge is depleted, it can’t finish your test.
Given the design and the intended market, that is not the most relevant metric.
MPG is, in my world, a way to compare like vehicles to like for a given need. Thus you compare pickups to pickups and commuter cars to commuter cars.
jehrler
I meant to add that, yes, a simple mpg calculation does not capture the electricity needed to run the vehicle but it does still provide information to the consumer about how often they will need to fill up at a station and what those costs may look like for their usage scenario.
To pretend that they won’t be charging it nightly when it is, after all, an electric car named the Volt would, in my mind, actually be more inaccurate than acknowledging the anticipated use cycle.
Buyers can look at the Leaf with infinite mileage, Volt with 230 and Prius with 40 and get a more accurate feel for the possibilities and tradeoffs than if the mileage was Leaf unknown, Volt 35 and Prius 40.
alhutch
The Jalopnik article has some basic flaws in dealing with their claim that GM lied. GM says that the gas engine is not directly connected (i.e. with a fixed gearset for dedicated driving) to the drive wheels:
If the Volt is used as a commuter car and your round trip is 40 miles or less, the gas motor may never start up (depending on your throttle demands, etc.). This assumes, of course, you plug it in every night. It’s pretty much what GM has been saying all along (if you’ve been paying attention).
This is really a non-story.
Halteclere
Jehrler,
I think we are talking past each other. Don’t fixate on a 1000 mile test. I threw that concept out as one method of leveling the efficiency testing of an electric vs. non-electric car. If the stored charge of an electric car is not properly evaluated as part of any efficiency test then unrealistic results are realized such as OMG a 230MPG car!
As I said at the end of my last post, a true evaluation of a vehicle’s efficiency, the total energy used going from Point A to Point B, should be provided. Because electric vehicles get their power from another source than their gas tanks, only looking at the energy coming from the gas tank is a flawed approach. If the Volt required charging energy the equivalent of 3 gallons of gasoline to go 40 miles, then, really, that isn’t a zero MPG trip, and is a pretty sucky vehicle to purchase for commuting to work.
All I am asking for is a real, non-hyped way to accurately compare electric, hybrid and gas-only vehicles that doesn’t require reading the fine print.
Cackalacka
Chevy Volt- questionable numbers on the MPG (30?), seats only 4, cost: $40k
My 1996 Honda Accord 215k on the odo; last 20 fill ups exceeded 31 mpg mixed (mostly going 0-10 mph in heavy traffic highway), seats 5, cost: needs a new transmission, but for $500 it’s yours. Brand new it retailed for just over 1/2 of what GM is asking for their Volt.
Sure, my Honda has had it’s share of technical issues the last two years, but I’d like all the GM sedan-owners who have seen the other side of 200,000 miles to please speak up.
Yeah, thought so.
stormhit
So many of you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about but are still shooting your mouth off. The same goes for mistermix’s original post too. It’s ridiculous.
stormhit
@ThresherK:
Well, everything here was BS, so you might want to dig a little deeper.
El Cid
I don’t look at the Volt as a truly valuable deal for reducing fuel consumption, but as a technological advance (of a degree) over standard hybrids which is likely to be bought by early adopters, and its success might encourage greater use of other alternative powertrains among other US manufacturers, particularly in the heavy and work vehicle categories, always with exceptions.
El Cid
@Halteclere: FWIW, EPA fuel economy stats have always been unrealistic too, not necessarily inaccurate compared to real measurements of usage, but in that the vehicles are also tested under ideal conditions — temperature, flat surfaces, no A/C or electrical accessories or lights powered, tested while at speed rather than acceleration. (My ’93 Civic got exactly the rated mileage no matter what the conditions or my driving styles, 38 mpg. Too bad it eventually died.)
jehrler
@Halteclere:
I agree that that would be nice. But, how would you do it? Even if you were able to get an mpj$ (mile per joule dollar) where you could convert electricity $ spent and gas $ spent you still would have a problem comparing a Prius to a Volt.
What % of your joules for the Volt would be from the outlet and what % from the pump? That likely will make a big difference in ultimate cost.
I’ve read that charging the Volt for its 40 mile range will cost in the neighborhood of 1.50 or less depending on rates and discounts for off-peak charging (note that though the battery is 16KWH it charges to only 85% and discharges down to 30% when the generator kicks in, thus max charge is just over 8KWH).
If you drive 40 miles a day, and assuming $3 a gallon for gas, you are getting more mpj$ then the Prius (it’s as if the Prius was getting 80 mpg). Great! If you are doing a long trip, then you are getting worse mpj$ (it’s as if the Prius were only getting 35).
So are you getting the 80mpg equivalent mpj$ or the 35 mpg mpj$?
jehrler
@jehrler:
Ugh, typo. I meant in the last paragraph that it’s as if the Volt were getting 80 mpg or 35 mpg depending on how much it’s running off the battery vs. the motor.
Anyway, my point is that *how* you use the Volt makes a big difference in it’s mpj$ or mpg and you can’t just assume a non-normal usage to push mpj$ down (running the Volt almost all on gas) or up (pushing your Lexus to the top of every hill).
John - A Motley Moose
That article is so error-filled and contradicted by the actual tests it links to that I’m surprised to see it still on the front page here without an edit. I love BJ, but this is the kind of misinformation pimping and misleading headline I’d expect to see on the Huffington Post.
Steaming Pile
My brand-spanking new Honda Civic that I just bought last month gets (get this) 40 MPG driving 70 MPH on the expressway (around 30 in town). Erie, Pennsylvania, to Louisville, Kentucky, 440 miles, on 10.6 gallons. 41.5 MPG.
Thought it was a fluke, so I did it again on the return trip. Sure enough. Just a hair under 40 MPG @ around 70 MPH, but that was because I had to let my frau drive, and she refuses to use the cruise control.
So I need a hybrid car because…?
I wondered why the Volt was lugging around a four-cylinder engine around just to charge batteries. Now I know.
jehrler
@Steaming Pile:
Because you can get the equivalent of 80 mpg around town and that the “gallon” could come, not from the middle east and be full of carbon, but carbon free from the sun/wind/hydro/geo etc.
And, unlike the Leaf, you could use the Volt to make the Erie Louisville trip.
(BTW, I hail from Erie though currently in MN)
El Cid
It’s not like a Tesla is that practical, but people with enough money buy those. They’ll probably buy the Fisker Karma too, if it ever comes out and it works. Because people who want to have the leading edge in cool of consumer products aren’t trying to have the most practical purchase.
Jeff N
Yes, there was/is a lot of confusion about the Volt.
The business about a mechanical connection between the gas engine and the wheels only happens when the battery pack is empty. If you are still driving on battery power, the gas engine never starts no matter how fast you drive, how quickly you accelerate, or how steep the incline. The same cannot be said for the 2012 Plugin Prius which has to start the gas engine under those circumstances (speeds over 62 MPH, etc.). The exception in the Volt is that the gas engine will be started if the battery is colder than 32F in winter and then it will turn off as soon as the battery pack is warmed up a bit.
Once you have an empty battery and are running on the gas engine it really doesn’t matter whether the power flows electrically from the generator to the primary electric motor or partially through a mechanical connection. They should do whatever is more efficient.
As for the 230 MPG claim, a better way to think about that is to ask yourself how many gallons of gas you are burning per month. If you drive a Volt 30 miles a day and recharge overnight and then do an occasional longer weekend drive you could very realistically drive 690 miles in a month but only use 3 gallons of gas and therefore get “230 miles per gallon” of gas.
Finally, the reports about the Volt getting low 30 MPG after the battery is depleted came from car magazine reviewers who were driving (literally) 78+ MPH on the highway. The EPA highway tests are run at speeds around 50-65. Other real-world reports coming out say the Volt is getting around 38-42 MPG. That is better than almost all other gasoline cars other than the Prius and a few others. The Ford Fusion hybrid and the Camry hybrid get EPA highway numbers of 36 and 34 respectively yet weight about the same (3700 pounds). GM expects Volt customers to drive 2/3 of the time or better on electricity so getting gas mileage that can’t quite match the Prius in the first generation is not a significant problem when averaged out.
RobertB
Jalopnik’s done that Volt article before.
http://jalopnik.com/5335315/epa-backs-away-from-gms-230-mpg-chevy-volt-claim
They have a serious hate for electric cars over there, so you have to take anything they say about them with a grain of salt.
Crusty Dem
Late to the party, but the big disappointment should be that they’ve equipped the car with a planetary drive, in direct violation to everything they ever initially stated. This makes it no different from a prius with an extra battery pack, which is nice, but nowhere near as valuable as planned. They’ve also put in an engine that is larger and less efficient than desirable, I’m sure so everyone is pleased with the performance, but it shoots their main goal (mileage) square in the ass. Bigger engine/mechanical transmission equals a lot more weight, which equals more waste/less efficiency.
So the first production car with a true electric transmission will be the Nissan Leaf. I wonder if/when we’ll see a car w/a gasoline engine and an electric transmission.
Mr Furious
Those guys at Jalopnik are after one thing and that’s page views.
Mission. Accomplished.
They are doing more stretching of the truth in that piece than GM has. Not two hours ago, I just sat through an in-depth explanation of the Volt and the Leaf from an actual, objective 30-plus year veteran automotive journalist who is also an engineer—not a half-assed blogger.
I’ll be running this Jalopnik post by that expert first thing tomorrow.
Oh. And I’ll also be driving the Volt tomorrow. You’ll here back from me one way or the other.
Triassic Sands
It comes as a real surprisen’t [sic] that GM failed to deliver something revolutionary. They aren’t the car company I’d bet on for the future.
At $40K the Volt sounds like a pretty lousy deal.