Chevy has been screwing America a LOOONG time. Just announced the Volt can do 230 MPG

[berni_mccoy]

Just heard this on Morning Joe. Chevy's going to announce that the new Volt can do over 230 MPG. I knew they've been holding onto this technology. There was a story once about a guy who developed an engine that could do over 200 mpg and sold it to GM. Nothing ever came of it. Guess timing is everything.

[madokie]

1. I doubt that there is any real truth in there at all

[greyl]

2. Somewhere Between Sixty and One Million Miles per Gallon:

http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/420/

edit: Another link referring to the 230 mpg rating: http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/11/autos/volt_mpg/?postversion=2009081108

[dysfunctional press]

34. no really- it was a guy in australia who developed a super-duper-secret carburetor...

until four guys with dark sunglasses pulled up an impala and stole the carburetor right out of the guy's car!!

:eyes:

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. How do they do the conversion from electricity use to gasoline mpg?

[berni_mccoy]

5. It has an on-board gas generator to recharge the batteries after you go 40 miles.

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. No, I meant how do they allow for the time during which it's using electricity

that was generated by the grid, not the gas engine in the car.

greyl's post above refers to this too; here's one guess as to how they arrived at this figure:

Reports quote sources as saying the number will be the Volt’s official MPG rating, but how they came to it remains a mystery; highway, city, average, none of the above? And if so how was it calculated? The EPA city cycle is 11.04 miles, the highway cycle is 10.26 miles. The car goes 40 mile without any gas, and 78% of drivers drive less than 40 miles per day (utility factor). Do your own math.

Here’s my guess:

Mike Duoba from Argonne National Lab devised a method to determine the MPG of an EREV; first the car is driven from a full battery until it reaches charge-sustaining mode, then one more cycle is driven. If we use the highway schedule, the first 40 miles are electric. One more cycle is 11 more miles. If the Volt gets 50 MPG in charge sustaining mode, it will use .22 gallons of gas for that 11 miles. Thus 51 miles/.22 gallons = 231.8 MPG.

http://gm-volt.com/2009/08/08/what-is-230/

Which would mean the '230 mpg' figure doesn't really tell you how efficient the car is at all; it tells you mainly how long the battery would last. If that way of doing the calculation is right, then a battery that lasts 80 miles before needing the engine at 50mpg would get 91 miles/.22 gallons = 413 mpg. But it might be using just as much electricity per mile, just with a battery twice the size.

So you see that 'how is the calculation done' is vital to knowing if this is hype using a dodgy figure, or if there is proper reason for claiming 230 mpg.

[zipplewrath]

17. The EPA is still working that

From the CNN article someone else linked to:

The Chevrolet Volt, on other hand, runs on electricity that comes from two sources -- a battery as well as a gasoline engine. How much is generated by burning gasoline depends on how far the car is driven.

The Volt's lithium-ion batteries will hold enough juice to drive the car for about 40 miles, GM has said. Once the car goes beyond that, a small gasoline engine will turn on, generating electricity to power the wheels for longer drives.

When gasoline is providing the power, the Volt might get as much as 50 mpg.

But that mpg figure would not take into account that the car has already gone 40 miles with no gas at all.

So let's say the car is driven 50 miles in a day. For the first 40 miles, no gas is used and during the last 10 miles, 0.2 gallons are used. That's the equivalent of 250 miles per gallon. But, if the driver continues on to 80 miles, total fuel economy would drop to about 100 mpg. And if the driver goes 300 miles, the fuel economy would be a just 62.5 mpg.

The EPA rating for the Volt is based on a draft report and applies to city driving.

[madokie]

22. I've got a little yard car I built that uses batteries and dc motors

and it is replacing a gas powered lawn tractor that I used to use for my yard work. I can run it all day for pennies where when I use the gas powered lawn tractor I will use more than a gallon of gas to do the same thing. 3 cents or so worth of electric verses $2.40 or so for a gallon of gas. True some things the little electric yard car can't do and I have to use the gas powered lawn tractor for but I haven't had to start it up now for over a month. In that month I've saved many dollars in gas and haven't used a quarters worth of electric yet. I have a kill-a-watt meter that I have the charger plugged into so I can keep track of how much electric I'm using.

If thats any help

[Shagbark Hickory]

4. I'll believe it when I see it n/t

[ThomWV]

6. That is an absurd claim

There are two things that take up most of the energy to move a vehicle, one is the resistance of the tires to roll on the ground and the other is moving air around the vehicle. Each of the sources of resistance can be dealt with, but in doing so you decrease the utility of the vehicle. For instance, you could put steel wheel on the vehicle to reduce rolling resistance, but as you might imagine the handling would suffer greatly, in fact the vehicle would be uncontrollable. You can also make one very small and style the body for the least resistance to air flow, but that will leave you with a vehicle that isn't very practical to take to the grocery store or haul kids to school in. So we compromise; rubber tires and body shapes that are large and designed for interior comfort as much as exterior aerodynamic efficiency at the cost of economy. Taken to an absurd extreme you get the Hummer on one end or experimental vehicles on the other.

[berni_mccoy]

7. I respectfully disagree. We've had the technology to do far better MPG for a very long time.

[ThomWV]

9. Show me. Where is it? Who developed it? Where was it tested?

If you make a claim like that you really need to back it up.

I will grant you that a vehicle can be made that will go 250, or more, mile on a gallon of gas, but the vehicle would be essentially useless.

[mucifer]

15. It goes 40 miles without any gas then the gas kicks in to charge the battery:

Chevy Volt is designed to move more than 75 percent of America's daily commuters without a single drop of gas.3 That means for someone who drives less than 40 miles a day, Chevy Volt will use zero gasoline and produce zero emissions.2

Unlike traditional electric cars, Chevy Volt has a revolutionary propulsion system that takes you beyond the power of the battery. It will use a lithium-ion battery with a gasoline-powered, range-extending engine that drives a generator to provide electric power when you drive beyond the 40-mile battery range.

Chevy Volt. Launching 2010.
"We have devoted significant resources to this project: Over 200 engineers and 50 designers are working on the Volt alone, and another 400 are working on related subsystems and electric components. That's how important we think this is, and that's how much stock we place in the future of extended-range electric vehicles like the Chevy Volt."—Tony Posawatz, Vehicle Line Director — E-Flex Systems and the Chevy Volt, General Motors Corp.
http://www.chevrolet.com/pages/open/default/fuel/electric.do

[ThomWV]

18. So, the first 40 miles are free, no battery had to be charged, no fuel expended?

Does the phrase 'perpetual motion machine' mean anything to you?

[greyl]

32. Don't forget to mention how much oil is needed to produce the food

someone has to eat to power a bicycle.

[freebrew]

24. In 1950's GM prototyped

a mechanically operated fuel injection system. I saw it on a 327 CI motor in a 1956 Chevy Nomad.
The car got 30+ mpg and that was in 1978. For those of you youngsters that don't know it, Nomads are extremely heavy cars and the 327 engine was not known for getting good mileage. The owner was some bigwig at GM, that's how he got his hands on the thing.
He said that the system was too simple and GM mechanics refused to learn how to maintain and tune the cars that used it.
So, it never got out of the prototype stage. I often wondered if the 'too simple' excuse was real. I expect that the real reason was the good mileage that it offered. Especially since GM and the rest of the auto companies were in bed with the oil guys.

[ThomWV]

31. That is utter nonsense

They didn't make the 327 until 1962 if I remember corretly, though it may have been a couple of years later. You might be interested to learn though that a very simple fuel injection system was available on big block Pontiacs in the early 1960's, I had one on a 389 in a 2+2 Catilina in 1965. It got roughly 12~15 mpg.

[teranchala]

27. Is that about the 200 mpg carburetor that got suppressed by the oil companies?

P.T. Barnum sure nailed it.

[zipplewrath]

39. Better than what?

Not 230 mpg. Yes, we've had the technology to do better than the typical 25- 30 that alot of current cars are designed around. I've been frustrated for a couple of decades while I watched the cars grow in weight, and horsepower, without any particular growth in fuel economy. If we had stuck to our guns and increased CAFE standards over the last 2 decades, we'd have a typical 4 door sedan doing about 45 mpg right now, with the small economy cars doing more like 60-65. But they'd have less horsepower and weight alot less.

Do be careful about some estimates you see, especially a decade or more ago. There was alot of unreasonable expectations about what could be achieved with some technologies. CVT was supposed to be a big source of improvement, but it never really panned out for a variety of reasons. A big problem with all of these attempts is that cars tend to operate in one of two modes, stop and go or constant, high speed, cruising. Neither is going to be advantageous to high efficiency. The high speed cruising suffers from aerodynamic issues that aren't easily going away from good engines or other drive train technologies (the losses are something like 90% aerodynamic @ 55 mph IIRC). Stop and go is a case of too much idle time or continuous speed changes and the former is a 100% loss of efficiency and the other is typically lost to braking losses. Again, most of the technologies weren't gonna do much about that. Even with hybrids, which can "turn off" during idle, the stop and go really eats up their advantage. (A Prius owner I know gets about the same mph on the highway as in traffic. The aero just tends to trade with the stop and go).

There are certain laws of thermo dynamics which limit the ability of heat engines to deliver the kinds of efficiencies we'd like to see. Combined with certain limits of materials to handle the high temperatures one would want in heat engines (the higher the temperature a heat engine can achieve, the more efficient it will be) the reality starts to be that 40-60% efficient is going to be about the upper limit.

Mobile heat engines gotta go for most surface driving. We'll use them in a transition phase here as we get the storage capacity and recharging infrastructure worked out. But ultimately we want to get to a place where heat engines operate at insanely high temperatures to achieve the kinds of efficiencies we need to justify their use at all. That almost assuredly means stationary operation.

[greyl]

10. No, there's evidence backing it up.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/11/autos/volt_mpg/?postversion=2009081108

[ThomWV]

19. For christ's sakes, did you read the first sentence in the article you linked to?

Here, this is in the first sentence of the article you gave a link for:

"is projected to get an estimated 230 miles per gallon,"

Did you notice these two words in there

"Projected"
"Estimated"

[greyl]

26. Right. 230 mpg. Read the entire article to clear up your misunderstanding. nt

[Kalyke]

8. Screwing us over?

The reason the Volt is just now coming out is because they had to find a way to package the technology in an AFFORDABLE manner.

Just a few short years ago, most electric cars would cost far too much for most of us to afford one - and most of those who could wouldn't buy them because they were far too involved in the status symbols of Hummers, BMW X5s and Lexus RX 350s.

[NNN0LHI]

11. So you are with Rush Limbaugh and his boycott American car companies crowd?

Smooth move.

Don

[Yes We Did]

20. Funny...

I didn't read that in there. I didn't read that ANYWHERE in that post. You must work for Chevy...

[sellitman]

13. GM is not anything but a corporation seeking profit but...

Battery technologies have made many things possible that were not even a few years ago.

[Rebubula]

14. The 230 is only accurate...

...if you do not drive very much.

From a CNN\Money article

"The Volt's lithium-ion batteries will hold enough juice to drive the car for about 40 miles, GM has said. Once the car goes beyond that, a small gasoline engine will turn on, generating electricity to power the wheels for longer drives.

When gasoline is providing the power, the Volt might get as much as 50 mpg.

But that mpg figure would not take into account that the car has already gone 40 miles with no gas at all.

So let's say the car is driven 50 miles in a day. For the first 40 miles, no gas is used and during the last 10 miles, 0.2 gallons are used. That's the equivalent of 250 miles per gallon. But, if the driver continues on to 80 miles, total fuel economy would drop to about 100 mpg. And if the driver goes 300 miles, the fuel economy would be a just 62.5 mpg."

On edit - 62.5 MPG is still pretty damned good, but the 230 is just flashy marketing.

[MissB]

25. It is attractive if you only live say 12 miles from work.

Like I do. However, the price tag is um, a bit high. Maybe it will drive the cost of a used Prius down, though.

[Statistical]

37. How far is your roundtrip commute?

Mine is 27 miles each way. So say 60 miles roundtrip to make it even.


40 miles on electic @ 3 miles per KWH = 13KWH * $0.11 per KWH = $1.47 in electic usage.
20 miles on gas @ 50 mpg = 0.4 gallons * $4.00 per gallon = $1.60 in gas usage
Total cost of commute = $3.07 / 60 miles = $0.05 per mile

Compare that to a Prius 46mpg combined.
60 miles / 46 mpg = 1.30 gallons of gas * $4.00 per gallon = $5.20
Total cost of commute = $5.20 / 60 miles = $0.09 per mile

So the fuel operating cost w/ a 66/33 electric/gas split is about half that of a Prius and about one quarter that of the aversge 25mpg vehicle.

Right tool for the right job.

Obviously someone in rural America working on a farm with 2 hours drives in each direction routinely would be ill suited for the Volt.
The more frequent short trips you make the more economical the Volt is.

[Freddie Stubbs]

16. Lots of people have had this technology, but the challenge has been to build a car using it that

people can afford. If the car needs a $30,000 battery, it will not be a big seller.

[sailor65]

21. TANSTAAFL

The 200mpg legend has been around for a long time.

As to the Volt, it may be able to pull 230 miles from a gallon of gas taken from its tank (Under the most ideal conditions and creative statistics), but that's supplemented by electric energy drawn from (And required to be generated by) somewhere else.

Even though it may help the driver's pocketbook, something, somewhere still has to be burned/split in order to make the thing move.

[teranchala]

30. Maybe it runs on farts. I hope the hose isn't too uncomfortable.

:shrug:

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

36. It worked with motorcycles...

[deadmessengers]

23. Prove it. n/t

[teranchala]

28. My GEM car gets an infinite number of miles per gallon.

And it's 8 years old.

[gatorboy]

29. I think Chevy is nervous about Nissan's Leaf.

Hey electric car wars is a good thing. I'll be interested to see how successful this is and just how cheap they can get the vehicles. My main worry is maintenance..

[hatrack]

33. Yes, I saw a whole row of them at our local GM dealer this morning . . .

Oh, I'm sorry, that must have been before I woke up - silly me!

But GM should feel free to let us all know when it's actually, you know, out there and available for purchase!!

:boring:

[Statistical]

35. Lithium Ion batteries are only now just barely getting economical.

As it is the Volt is $40K. 10 years ago it likely would have been double that.

230mpg for $80K. Would you buy it?

[Thrill]

38. Ok lets start building the factories to build the batteries now in the US

[muriel_volestrangler]

40. The good news is some stimulus money was awarded for that last month

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=aGLimFvAF98A

[rhett o rick]

41. See "Who Killed the Electric Car", if you haven't already. GM had a state of the art battery

and sold it to Standard Oil, who killed it.