Posted on 10/22/2009 5:04:30 PM PDT by Red in Blue PA
General Motors made a stir earlier this year when it announced that the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid would get the equivalent of an eye-popping 230 mpg in city driving. That figure was reached using a rather complicated calculation that takes into account the car's ability to travel 40 miles in all-electric mode, using no fuel at all.
One of the mysteries of the Volt has been what kind of mileage it will get after those 40 miles, when the onboard internal combustion engine kicks in to provide electricity for the electric motor, allowing it to travel up to 300 miles on a tank of fuel of an unspecified capacity. While that exact figure is still unknown, the man in charge of the project has opened up the gates to the ballpark.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
GM is toast
It is so over.
GM and Chrysler = killed by the UAW.
My Honda Civic is getting better than that...
LOL!
Govt at work.
It’s an exotic pollution machine.
Not to mention some extraordinarily poor management.
>> Chevy Volt to Get 32 MPG? (GM claimed 230 MPG)
Want good mileage, get a diesel.
Hold on now.
Don’t forget the EPA changed the way they calculate MPG. No car is going to get as good as they used to. NOtice the teeny tiny toyota yaris gets 32MPH? Before that change in the way they calculated it, that was probably a 40+MPG vehicle.
The original 230 mile per gallon stats were a complete lie though. On one of the original threads about this I came up with the formula where you could plug in the gasoline engine mileage, the desired total mileage and it would calculate how many miles over the 40 you should use as your standard trip. If your trip was 40.01 miles, you could get in the thousands of miles per gallon.
The headline is misleading — as the article states, they don’t have a figure yet.
When do we get our damn money back from GM?
I don’t know what’s so difficult about this today.
My 1987 Chevrolet Sprint (long gone) got 50 mpg and was reasonably comfortable in contrast with VW beetles and other competitors of its time who got worse gas mileage.
Why can’t they get that now, more than 20 years afterwards?
certainly in Europe
the amount of claptrap for an on-highway diesel to meet USEPA emissions for 2010 and beyond is stunning
I thing DI gasoline engines will be the design most used going forward
Electric vehicles have relatively poor energy density due to the weight of their battery packs. This unpalatable fact of physics dooms all current electric vehicles and hybrids to being little more than a boutique form of transportation.
Ef GM, buy a TDI. Barry Obama can shove GM up his tail pipe.
I was going to say the same thing about my Civic. But did the test with the Volt factor in that the car will be in the shop 1-2 times a month? :)
Well said.
And those will happen.
And eventually US will be able to purchase them from the entrepreneurial countries of the world, assuming we still have enough wealth to do so.
This thing is a piece of junk. Which was predicatable.
I had a VW Rabbit Diesel back when they were allowed, and it got around 40-45 MPG, was comfortable, handled well, and was pretty good in a crash according to the statistics.
I wouldn’t get one of these hybrids if you paid me.
Also, after Obama shuts down all the coal plants and the nuclear plants, where is the electricity supposed to come from to keep the batteries charged?
Don’t forget the EPA changed the way they calculate MPG. No car is going to get as good as they used to. NOtice the teeny tiny toyota yaris gets 32MPH? Before that change in the way they calculated it, that was probably a 40+MPG vehicle.
Yeah... but the EPA formula changed well before the details of the Volt began leaking out. GM used some kind of harebrained formula that cherry-picked bits and pieces of the EPA drive cycle to get that absurd number. Even the EPA referred to it as sheer speculation, pointing out that they've not yet tested the car.
Why can’t they get that now, more than 20 years afterwards?
The emissions and crash-resistance standards changed a lot in the early '90s, IIRC. Look at the VW Golf - it is 50% heavier than the original model in the mid-'80s. Airbags, side-impact crash beams - it adds up.
I had a diesel Rabbit while I was in college. I could drive from home to State College (about a 60 mile drive) on a dollar’s worth of diesel. This was early-mid 80’s. I loved that car except when going up a mountain. I had truckers passing me.
I’m just as interested in the barrier crash performance and environmental hazard issues after a crash.
I’m thinking GM is pushing on a string with this - a bit like Saturn - something that ate up a lot of cash and never proved able to find the sweet spot of profitability.
Give me a half dozen amens!!!!!!!!
I had a VW Golf diesel which went anywhere to the tune 44 mpg with the A/C on. I could make a round trip - Miami to Tampa for pocket change.
I drove that thing till the front end fell apart but I could not kill the engine.
So.....once again - who’s the big holdup in attaining decent mileage per gallon??????
Hey Washington......get out of the way, you’re holding up progress.
Seriously. I had an ‘89 Mercury Tracer when I was in college. Considering that it was an economy car, it was actually a comfortable for it’s size and had lots of extras...intermittent wipers, power mirrors, lumbar support, rear defroster, etc. Not like a stripped econobox at all.
Once I crammed 3 6’4” guys in it for a weekend camping trip about 6 hours away. On the trip, which was four lane highway through WV, VA, and NC, I got about 43 MPG.
Later on, I had a Ford Festiva as a work car. Good grief did that thing ever get the gas mileage!
Ford Fusion, ftw.
I have to follow that up by saying that ever since Cash For Clunkers, I’ve been driving all my cars a little harder to keep the CO2 levels up...if they start falling now, we might get Cash for Clunkers II!!!
Maybe I need to carry around a charcoal grill to burn while I’m not driving.
I don’t see any sense in your post at all.
I’m saying under the current formula, 32 is probably pretty darn good. People here are comparing the current EPA 32 to their old cars that were rated as 40+ with the old formula.
You can’t do that.
I dare you to count how many current model cars(non hybrid) beat 32MPG. I bet it’s only about 5 and they are all tin cans under a ton curb weight.
The 230mpg figure for the volt is obviously BS. We all knew that all along. tHat number was for a driver that never used the gasoline engine. However, there are probably lots of car owners out there that will get 100+ MPG with the volt. Plenty of people rarely drive more than ten miles one way. My mom probably drives more than 5 miles one way only once a month. IN the winter, her car burns probably twice as much fuel sitting in the driveway than it does driving around.
Oh, please. Rabbits were junk, diesel or gas. They regularly overheated and blew head gaskets, or leaked injection pumps, or rusted out fuse boxes. Struts would wear out then pound out the strut towers. Differential spider gears would break clips and send the pins through transmissions. Their passive belts were a joke - wouldn’t do anything in a rollover.Holy cow, I don’t think there was a single thing on those things that wouldn’t break on the first owner. There’s a reason why you never see them on the road.
I got 150,000 miles on mine, with only regular maintenance.
That said, 32 MPG won't make me go out and learn how to spell 'splendiferous' just so I can write home about it.
Still, zero miles per gallon to and from work is better thn a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
Gee, my Grand Caravan gets 28 on the highway.
I wasn’t the Saturn target market, but I did a lot of research before getting my mom a car, and have been into about four Saturn dealerships. Every time I walked into one, the first thing they’d tell me is, “We don’t negotiate on price. What’s on the sticker is what you pay.”
It seemed arbitrary to me, especially since they had these “dealer add ons” like undercarriage rustproofing, scotchguarding the seats and sticking those asinine strips of moulding on the doors as “paint protection.” Whenever I see a dealership that does that, I don’t buy from them anyway. The manufacturer scotchguards the seats and all manufacturers provide underbody rustproofing now. This is just a way to jack up the price. There’s no need for the dealer to add stuff, other than to increase their own profit by spraying a $5.00 can of Scotchguard on the seats and charging $250 for it.
Anyway, the no haggle price was a scam. You just negotiated on the price of the trade in. Honda used to make the same claim, that they wouldn’t negotiate on price. I got a dealer to pay $2500 in trade for a GM X car that you could buy all day for $750. BUT I paid sticker for the car.
The silliest thing that GM did (and does) is to stick different badges on, for example, a Pontiac Solstice and a Saturn Sky and pretend they’re two different vehicles. Or the GMC and Chevy truck lines.
LOL in-deed
My 1995 ‘Zuki Sidekick get 30mpg around town, and it has 4x4 drive....
There are many cars for half the price that get that kind of mileage so why fork over $40,000 for a Volt?
Well it’s sort of a cool name but frankly a car named Freeper Zot would probably sell well among us here.
I've owned Explorers my entire adult life and everyone tells me how bad THEY are, yet I've never had a problem with them either. Maybe I'm just lucky. Now I also own an 85 AMC Jeep Scrambler (fully restored - on the outside). The drive train on THAT vehicle is a nightmare. A beautiful vehicle, but I have work to do:
For sure. The 92 Metro I still drive could not legally be sold in the US today. I'll drive it till it disintegrates, which it's well on its way to doing; corrosion being a huge hazard to lightweight steel construction. It still delivers 50+ MPG over the road, and it's paid for. Always got me to work whatever the weather. I'd drive one of these cars if they were offered here.
Oh, didn’t you get the memo? You have to install the “optional” roof mounted wind generator. That way you will be charging your battery while going down the road. Of course, you will not be able to pass under bridges and overpasses. /S
Jerry Lundegaard: And I can give it to you with a heck of a sealant. This TruCoat stuff, it’ll keep the salt off.
Customer: I don’t need no sealant.
Jerry Lundegaard: Yah, you don’t need that.
Ahh, but there is always the prospect of federal subsidies. And why worry about profit when you are federally owned?
You must be thinking of US (Penn) made Rabbits .. The German made Rabbits were fine as were the US made Golf/2's (beginning in 1985) .. I campaigned a G2 GTI in SCCA Solo2 events for more than a decade ,, no tranny problems , no strut tower issues , no rust .. (of course the GTI had a stronger tranny with about a 30% limited slip, not quite a torsen but useful!) ...
1984 (Golf 1) GTI commercial
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zcm4oS9IaM
LOL!
I like a lot of the Coen brothers films but they can be really depressing. Poor Jerry - what a sap.
I never saw that, I’m pretty easy on equipment ,, but I did go through 2 sets of front wheel bearings in 3 years (they would last through about 10 sets of tires) before I discovered synthetic wheel bearing grease.
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