Posted on 04/03/2013 8:08:52 AM PDT by lacrew
Steady Voltage Chevy Volt sales have been consistent lately, with no wild ups and downs as experienced by the Nissan LEAF during the production changeover. Sales of the Volt had hit a 12-month low of 1,140 units in January 2013, but rebounded to 1,620 units in February. For March 2013, Volt sales check in at 1,478 units.
(Excerpt) Read more at plugincars.com ...
Not to mention the market share it is losing to the LEAF.
How about year to year: They sold 2,289 in March 2012...so the year to year sales drop is 35%....or 'steady'.
The Volt is technically a very good car.
However, given it comes from ObamaMoters and therefore has the trustability of Al Capone coupled with the financial stability of Yugo...it is doomed.
Should electric cars actually survive, they’ll most probably not come from ObamaMotors.
I am superior to all others, I drive a LEAF—gag me with a spoon
Dead is stable.......
How many Volts were bought by government?
“Volt Remains Stable”
Except for the garage fires, other than that.............
Dead is about as “stable” as it gets.
As a pure electric the Volt only gets 35 to 38 per charge. That technically makes for a not very good car!
In other words: Electric cars STILL are not selling. Duh.
“Voltage Chevy Volt sales have been consistent lately,”
Since all the sales are to the same bulk buyers, that only means that their production has been steady. No great feat when you’re operating at only a couple percent of operating capacity.
“The Volt is technically a very good car.”
I disagree. I’ve rambled on about this before, but the Volt is fundamentally different than any other plug in/gas engine hybrid out there.
Lets look at the Prius: Its primary power source is a gasoline engine. However, wasted kinetic energy is stored in a small battery and used to supplement to primary powertrain.
Now lets look at the Volt: Its primary power source is the electric motor. The electric motor has a higher horsepower than the gas engine...and the engine is called a ‘generator’, because its primary purpose is to recharge batteries, and not directly drive the car.
I can ramble on for hours about why this difference is important. But just understand that once the charge is gone in a Volt, the gas engine is really no more than a life preserver - it keeps the car afloat, but that’s about it. For comparison’s sake, the Volt’s gas engine is 74 hp and the car weighs 3,781 lbs...or 51 lb per hp. A 1972 Pinto, worst model, is 54 hp and 2,015 lbs...or 37 lb per hp. That’s right, once your Volt runs out of juice, it will have poorer acceleration than a 1972 Pinto.
Its a bad design. The other manufacturers are getting astonishing mileage using the Prius model. And I can go on about how the Volt’s advertised mileage of 93 mpge is incorrect (hint: give a full charge and put a gallon of gas in it, and you won’t go 93 miles). And, I could talk about the Volt’s ‘mountain mode’ which clearly indicates it could not make a sustained climb up a mountain. And the cost is not marketable, which by definition makes it a very bad design.
Really, its just bad all the way around, and there will never be a substantial number of this style car on the road ever.
PFFFFT! BWAHAHAHAHA!
I have a 1980 Honda C70 scooter with a 1 gallon gas tank that drives at 55 MPH and gets nearly 85 miles to a tank. It cost me nothing, as it was a gift, but similar, newer scooters are under $5,000.
I can’t find any reliable numbers on that. The ‘fleet sales’ are around 100-200 sales a month...but when the federal government gives the town of Mayberry a grant to go buy a Volt, I don’t think that counts as a fleet sale.
And, I don’t think the sales to GE are considered fleet sales, because of the way the employees purchase their own car and are compensated for its use.
So, I assume that most of those ‘fleet’ sales are part of the Pentagon’s pledge to buy 1,500 of them - you know, because the pentagon has plenty of money, and the Volt is obviously the best car for their fleet :(.
How many of these golf carts are sold to scumbag liberal municipal governments who want to look “green” with other people’s green?
If you look at an exploded view of the Volt’s drive-train, the gas engine actually is hooked directly to the drive wheels above a certain MPH.
"Exploded view" takes on a whole new meaning with the Volt.
I am aware of that. For some reason Volt enthusiasts (and GM) have not been very straight-forward about the parameters for when this direct drive would occur...as they deem it more ‘green’ to use the engine as a ‘generator’, so they can say the car is driven by electricity. Of course this is inefficient and makes no sense.
Its still a 74 hp engine, so direct drive or not, its underpowered.
And, because of the batteries, its an exceptionally heavy car for its class, leading to incredibly poor performance once the juice runs out, direct drive or not.
BTW - I think the batteries weigh around 800 lbs, and allegedly power the car for 40 miles. In some cars, a 7 lb gallon of gasoline can power a car for 40 miles. So, which is a better medium for storing potential energy by over a 100:1 margin?
The car is a terrible design.
Agree with all your points.
The fact is, Chevy took the cheap way out on the drivetrain. Instead of setting it up like they promised (like a diesel electric locomotive) they cheaped out and used a simple planetary gear to link the engine to the generator to the wheels and as soon as they published the exploded view, those of us that rebuilt auto trannys or those who know how planetary gears work knew what they had done.
Oh yeah, I ran into a Leaf owner in Folsom, Ca. that he used locally and he loved it, had nothing but praise and I believed him as I normally wouldn’t expect the pius owners to own up to having a POS. And he had four big guys in the car. It’s a pretty cool car but limited for its range.
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