Freepmail "Lazlo in PA" to be added or removed.
Posted on 04/02/2012 4:00:31 PM PDT by Iam1ru1-2
Eric Bolling (Fox Business Channel's Follow the Money) test drove the Chevy Volt at the invitation of General Motors.
For four days in a row, the fully charged battery lasted only 25 miles before the Volt switched to the reserve gasoline engine. Eric calculated the car got 30 mpg including the 25 miles it ran on the battery. So, the range including the 9 gallon gas tank and the 16 kwh battery is approximately 270 miles. It will take you 4 1/2 hours to drive 270 miles at 60 mph. Then add 10 hours to charge the battery and you have a total trip time of 14.5 hours. In a typical road trip your average speed (including charging time) would be 20 mph.
According to General Motors, the Volt battery hold 16 kwh of electricity. It takes a full 10 hours to charge a drained battery.
The cost for the electricity to charge the Volt is never mentioned so I looked up what I pay for electricity.
I pay approximately (it varies with amount used and the seasons) $1.16 per kwh.
16 kwh x $1.16 per kwh = $18.56 to charge the battery.
$18.56 per charge divided by 25 miles = $0.74 per mile to operate the Volt using the battery.
Compare this to a similar size car with a gasoline engine only that gets 32 mpg.
$3.19 per gallon divided by 32 mpg = $0.10 per mile.
The gasoline powered car cost about $15,000 while the Volt costs $46,000.
So Obama wants us to pay 3 times as much for a car that costs more that 7 times as much to run and takes 3 times as long to drive across country.
REALLY? --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The problem with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples' money." --Margaret Thatcher
The cost of a kwh is a tenth of that in the email.
Yeah that jumped out at me too. Since he is off by at least an order of magnitude in the price of electricity this post is worthless. The electrical part of the usage of a Volt is cheaper than the gasoline part on a basic cost basis. It is all the other costs that bear against the Volt.
We have high electric rates per Kwh here in Maine, $.20 per hour. The rate listed in the article seems to be way to high.
95% of those lib morons don’t even know where electricity comes from. It ain’t coming from solar or wind or algae! When 0bummer shuts down all of the coal-fired plants, the Govt Mtrs Dolts won’t run or catch fire, at least. They’ll be wonderful lawn ornaments.
All I know is this:
THe battery gives you about what 1 gallon of gas gets you in terms of miles traveled.
1 gallon of gas is about 8 pounds. 1 rack of batteries that drives you as far as a gallon of gas is 560 pounds. That means you’re always hauling around 3-4-5 extra people in your car even when the batteries aren’t charged anymore.
1 gallon of gas costs $4.00 now, a relative high price for gas. The battery pack itself costs thousands of dollars, and charging it for ten hours at your rate of whatever per kw/h costs triple or quadruple a gallon of gas.
The physical volume of a gallon of gas is far less than the physical volume of the batteries required to store the electrical energy equivalent of one gallon of gas.
You can put one gallon of gas into your car in about 10 seconds. It takes ten hours to charge the batteries on a 120 volt line, about 5 on a 240 volt line.
You can store a gallon or more of gas in your garage and add it to your car as you need it, or even sell it to someone else who needs it if you don’t. You can’t keep spare battery packs around and just swap in a charged one while the other charges up. You can trade excess battery power to anyone else.
I can keep an emergency gallon of gas in my trunk if I need it. I can’t keep an emergency battery pack around to use when my current 560 pound battery pack runs out.
My gas car is not a much more severe electrical hazard in an accident setting. Can’t say that for hybrids or the volt.
And why is this car superior to hybrids that recharge the battery while driving and don’t require taxing the neighborhood grid for ten hours of power?
Freepmail "Lazlo in PA" to be added or removed.
Regardless of the math its still at the mercy of rolling blackouts and disconnects from any smart meter.
meant to say “you can’t trade excess battery power to someone else”, obviously.
That's $6.30 to recharge a discharged Volt battery pack. Boy, look at those savings roll on in... Betcha that Volt will pay for itself in, umm, well, never at that rate.
In case anyone’s interested, here’s Bolling’s report (video starts automatically on loading the page): http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/1428781506001
Where I live in Washington state it’s $0.08 per KWH (that’s including all taxes).
If my memory is correct they took a Corvair Transmission / Engine mounted it up front ( think about it, it would put the engine behind the front wheels) and that tied to Citroen Suspension, Front and Rear. I am curious with those "bag" suspension bits how this drove and handled...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F
Who Killed the Electric Car? is a 2006 documentary film that explores the creation, limited commercialization, and subsequent destruction of the battery electric vehicle in the United States, specifically the General Motors EV1 of the mid 1990s. The film explores the roles of automobile manufacturers, the oil industry, the US government, the Californian government, batteries, hydrogen vehicles, and consumers in limiting the development and adoption of this technology. After a premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, it was released theatrically by Sony Pictures Classics in June, 2006 and then on DVD by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment on November 14, 2006.
Utilities offer special time-of-day rates for EV owners. If you do it just right then you can pay maybe 10 cents per kWh, and therefore your first 30 miles will cost you $2 to $3 - compared to $4.33 that I paid a few hours ago.
This would be great if the car itself is free or, say, is under $10K. But it isn't, and as result it will never be practical in financial sense, regardless of who you are and what is your travel pattern. If you drive a lot then you will be mostly burning gas (premium gas!) and if you drive a little then the car will rust and fall apart (7 to 10 years for batteries) before you reach the break-even distance.
In principle, an EV could be a good car for a city. But it has to be much, much cheaper than Volt and Leaf are. Perhaps they will become financially appealing if sold for under $10K. But that's not likely - the battery alone costs far more. We need better batteries before a pure EV becomes a viable option.
It is not just finished, it maybe even more of a laughing stock soon because of the new Ford Fusion. The question begs will the 2013 Fusion vs. The Volt become a political issue? Free market vs. almost Fascist sales tactics and push ( when sadly in actuality the Volt Engrs worked their hearts out )
Auto Extremist says it is a game changer and even the Honda Accord and Camry look old ( if my memory is correct )
The question is when is the comparison made, before or after November?
The electricity may be "cheaper" than the gas (especially if you steal it). The hours held hostage waiting for the charge are a really bad trade off. Life is too short to be wasted waiting for a battery to charge.
Two things: 1) Where is the motor vehicle tax in this scheme? Here in California there is a combined state and federal fuel tax of more than 60 cents a gallon, and 2) if we had significant numbers of EV’s, where do these idiots think we would get the power to charge everyone up? It would be one thing if we had an abundant supply of cheap nuclear power, but we don’t so EV’s do nothing for either energy independence or emissions.
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