Posted on 10/11/2010 11:09:18 AM PDT by KingOfVagabonds
The Chevy Volt has been hailed as General Motors' electric savior. Now, as GM officially rolls out the Volt this week for public consumption, we're told the much-touted fuel economy was misstated and GM "lied" about the car being all-electric.
(Excerpt) Read more at jalopnik.com ...
Well naturally GM lied...they’re owned by democrats now.
Boy, I’m sure glad we bailed out GM. They sure are doing great things!
Ping.
So Obama Motors has basically reinvented the Toyota Prius.
At twice the MSRP.
Fabulous.
The 230 MPG line was a lie from the beginning which was torn apart here as a fraud. I posted a formula here that the marketer could enter the electric vehicle range, the bare gasoline engine MPG and the desired MPG to get the total distance to drive. You could claim a million MPG if you only claimed to drive one foot past the electric range and burned a few drops of gasoline to get the electric range + one foot.
For a lot less money you could buy a variety of other hybrids that get almost as much “real mileage”, have a lot more interior space and aren’t made by Government Motors. The Chevy Volt is destined to be a huge flop.
“The Chevy Volt is destined to be a huge flop.”
It’ll be the mandated vehicle for every government agency if we don’t buy it. It may become the only vehicle a fed agency can buy no matter if we buy it or not!
Like getting eleven Susan B Anthony coins for change at the Post Office.
The new Segway.
I'd love to see the schematic of the drivetrain to see how they accomplished this.
In the Prius, the electric motor is directly engaged to the driveshaft, thus providing a one-to-one correlation between the electric motor speed and the car's speed. But they use a ring/sun gear system to attach the gas engine shaft to the same driveshaft (with a 2nd electric motor providing a variable-ratio connection using the sun gears), so that the gas engine can provide additional power to the driveshaft without regard to the speed of the driveshaft and gas engine.
Now, I'm not surprised the Volt puts the gas engine onto the drivetrain. Once you have a gas engine running, it's more efficient to connect it directly to the driveshaft than it is to use it to run a generator, store the power, and retrieve it. That's why the Prius does this -- it's the naturally best engineering solution once you put a gas engine in an electric car.
As to the rest, I'm not sure how much of a "lie" there is -- the "230 mpg" number was based on taking some short trip in which most of the trip would be by electric and which therefore would take "0" gallons of fuel (because the EPA has no way of measuring the gas-equivalent cost of electricity used to charge the battery).
Nobody who knew anything about the science would have thought the car could get 230 mpg while running the gas engine. The Prius is a highly advanced car with meticulous workmanship in this area, and can't do much better than 50 mpg. The Volt, being a larger car with more weight in batteries, wasn't going to do as well.
So the whole 230 mpg thing was hype to begin with. If you drive 50 miles, and 40 are on battery, and the last 10 get you 40 mpg, you will have used .25 gallons to go 50 miles, which is 200 mpg.
People have acheived these numbers in a Prius by modifying the car to add a second set of batteries and a charging unit, to extend the electric range and provide grid-electric replacement for some of the gasoline used. But I've not seen a full power utilization report so we could tell if it is more efficient to use electricity instead of gasoline in this instance.
Driving an electric car is gay.
Wow. WOW. I was sure this was just a misunderstanding by the tech-challenged, but after reading I realize what it is: the exposure of a baldfaced lie.
This is a step beyond the Prius, it is all electric in a sense, i.e. no transmission, pony motor/generator juice goes to electric motor. The battery is for the short term, i.e. they couldn't design an electric aero or light enough, so they came up with what I call a semi-electric. The sweet spot is the Lithium-Ion battery allow this where as if it was a lead acid battery it would be basically have the same range as these do it yourself electric conversion guys who tinker at home.
I got to meet a Volt Engineer in my social circles and had numerous conversions with him and another gnome in the business. The problem is the Batteries do not have the storage capacity to haul 4 large people up a hill in the cold or rain, or capture all re-gen braking @ 70 mph panic stop. So, until a miracle battery or an Ultra-capacitor comes along to do that, we will have a planform like this....
The trump card to this?
The 2012 Ford Fusion according to the auto press, gets a Gen III Hybrid Drive-train, Lithium Ion battery, Plug in capability and a new body on top or the Euro-Mondeo. My guess it makes the Volt look like yesterdays buffet cold cuts that stayed out without refrigeration.
Wouldn’t espect anything different from Government Motors. Of course they lied.
Good insight, thanks for contributing that. I don’t know much about the mechanics, all I know is this gubmint turd has been shrouded in lies and half-truths since its inception. If Toyota had done this, they’d be hauled in front of congress to embarrass them and increase GM’s market share.
What about pushing a dead one? ;-)
A plug-in Fusion would rock! As far as I know - Ford owns ALL of their hybrid technology now. Ford and Toyo were sharing some things but I think Ford owns all their own stuff now.
As far as electric cars gay etc. If Ford can sell a plug-in hybrid close to the gas powered one it will be awesome. Build nuke power plants and tell the Saudis to go to h*ll.
We have toins of nat gas. Nuke and nat gas power plants.
THe Prius has no transmission, and is "all electric" in the exact same sense, except the Prius has a smaller battery capacity.
The problem is the Batteries do not have the storage capacity to haul 4 large people up a hill in the cold or rain, or capture all re-gen braking @ 70 mph panic stop.
The Prius has the same issue, and resolves it in a similar fashion, by using the gas engine directly along with the electric motor to provide extra power when needed. The gas engine is there, so why put in a large electric motor?
So maybe the Volt has simply added more batteries, an external charger, and come up with some other way to connect the gas engine to the main drivetrain. That remains to be seen. But it's really just another hybrid, just with more batteries.
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