“In your airport example I would just park in the parking garage.”
Which costs $17 more per day at my airport. Real cars can be parked outside. Toys can’t.
“...and his speed was reduced to 57 mph...”
According to you, I am ‘rambling’ and this is ‘wild speculation’. So let me ramble on and speculate that a car that can only go 57 mph on the highway is silly slow...not ‘adequate’...in fact, as expertly described before: LIMPING HOME MODE.
But once again, you are erroneously drawing conclusions from scenarios that are nowhere near worse case (remember the heat stress test you cited...from a torturously hot day in April!?!?). Is driving around Arizona really the toughest test of mountain driving there is? I’m just speculating, I know, but those Colorado license plates lead to believe they might be known more for mountains that Arizona!
Here’s a very simple scenario, which would cripple the Volt. You live in Golden, Co and pick up a friend at the airport, to bring home - 72 mile round trip. Your buffer is empty, and your on the 89 hp ICE. Ok so far...until your friend gets a call, and you’ve got an invite and lift ticket waiting for you in Vail. Can you go to Vail? Nope. Didn’t plan ahead and use mountain mode. See how a last minute invite into the mountains is infinitely more challenging that driving to Flagstaff and back?
If it can’t do ordinary things, its not a real car. Its a toy. Now you neglected the pre-requisite preamble, so you just have to tell me: Why am I being forced to pay for other people’s Volt fetish? Can’t people pay for their own toys anymore? Why can’t you answer this simple question?
The fact that you have to come up with such a contrived situation only shows how desperate you are to find fault with the Volt. In my humble estimation, on average, American drivers will encounter a situation like the one you described somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.0001 times per lifetime.
Regardless, I'm not convinced that the situation you described would even result in Propulsion Power Reduced Mode! In the two examples I gave above, the driver who did encounter that mode did so while driving on a depleted battery from Camp Verde, AZ on the way to the turnoff to Prescott, highway 169. The endpoint on that map link is about the highest point on the journey according to what I can tell from this tool. It shows that it is an elevation change of about 2,000 feet over the course of about a 6 mile stretch of road. The contrived situation that you described is a much, much shallower climb of 2,500 feet over about 90 miles. I doubt you would dig too far into your buffer throughout that climb. Furthermore, if you turned on Mountain Mode after your “friend gets a call”, you whould have plenty of time throughout that journey to allow Mountain Mode to build up a large buffer.
“Why am I being forced to pay for other people’s Volt fetish?”
I did a rough, back-of-the-envelop calculation a few weeks ago that put the cost of EV subsidies at around $9 per taxpayer per year. Contrast that with how much our Navy spends playing rent-a-cop to Persian Gulf oil tankers: $50 billion a year, or around $480 per year for a household with an income of $80,000.
So in my view, spending $9 a year on an EV subsidy (until it expires in a few years) in order to invest in a technology that could a) save us $480 a year for decades and decades to come and b) screw over OPEC as well... is an incredibly smart taxpayer investment.
George W. Bush certainly thought so—he is the one who signed the EV subsidy into law. And this is from his 2006 State of the Union: “Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology.”