Chevys Volt Hybrid. Could get hundreds of miles 2 the gallon

Dan998 · Tar Sands Joined: Mar 07, 2005 Posts: 54

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Autos/story?id=2782289&page=1
Chevy's Volt Hybrid Holds Promise -- at a Steep Price
Dean Reynolds
1/9/07

Hybrid Technology Could Reduce Gas Fill-Ups, but Battery-Powered Engine Still Runs Expensive

Chevrolet's new Volt a concept hybrid that could conceivably get hundreds of miles to the gallon

Chevrolet's new hybrid car, called the Volt, has generated a lot of buzz this week at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.

It's different from the hybrids currently on the market, making it the newest of the new technology in the car market.

Whereas other hybrid cars, such as Toyota's Prius or Ford's Explorer, use a mix of battery power and a conventional gasoline engine to move the wheels of the vehicle, the Volt runs only on electricity.

The electricity is provided by either plugging into a standard wall socket or by fuel which can be gasoline or some more environmentally friendly alternative that recharges the car's battery. General Motors said the Volt's technology could nearly eliminate the need to fuel up at the pump.

"When you get to the end of a range of the battery, which is 40 miles, you just continue to move along, and the only thing that you notice is the engine comes on and it generates more electricity," said John Lauckner, GM's vice president of global programs.

GM said research showed that almost 80 percent of American motorists drive less than 40 miles a day.

"Many, if not most, consumers in the United states would never need to buy gasoline, or buy gasoline very rarely," Lauckner said.

600 Miles on a Tank, but Engine's Expensive Using a full tank of fuel to power the motor, you could conceivably drive from Detroit to New York about 600 miles with no need to stop.

The only problem is that the battery needed to do all this is prohibitively expensive right now. If you wanted to buy this flashy concept version of the Volt today, it would set you back several hundred thousand dollars. So the success or failure of the Volt hinges on GM's ability to mass produce the battery and bring its cost down way down.

"Those batteries have to be developed, and the cost has to come down probably tenfold from where it is now," said Csaba Csere, editor in chief of Car and Driver magazine.

It remains to be seen whether it will ever be realistic to purchase one of these cars at a reasonable price.

GM says it's serious and not just trying to win public relations points.

"We really want to sell a lot of these," said Lauckner.

But the company becomes vague on exactly when you'll be able to buy a Volt.

"It's not as soon as some of us hope. But it's a lot sooner than a lot of people may think," Lauckner said.

That's likely to translate into four years at least

the_sword · Tar Sands Joined: Jan 19, 2006 Posts: 60

Why can Tesla Motors make a sports car that can go 250 miles per charge and do 0-6 in under 5 seconds and sell it profitably @ 100,000 dollars and GM says the volt which only goes 40 miles on battery will cost several hundred thousand and is years away from production?

alpha480v

Yeah, let me take that 200,000 out of petty cash and buy one of those.
Until the price of this technology comes down to the level that working slobs like me can afford it, this makes for interesting reading. Nothing more.

JRP3 · Heavy Crude Joined: Oct 23, 2006 Posts: 396

Typical GM BS. Altairnano sold 35KW, (130mile), packs to Phoenix motors for 75K, including one time developmental costs. So lets say they now cost 60K in volume for a 130 mile pack. A 40 mile pack would be around one third of that, so lets say it should be about $20,000.00 per pack. I'll bet with GM type volume they could get the price down even more. Several hundred thousand? Not.

Give me those batteries, a 15 KW generator from Home Depot, and a used car and I'll build you one for less than 50 grand Razz

JustinFrankl · Intermediate Crude Joined: Aug 22, 2005 Posts: 657

The several hundred thousand dollar cost is respresentative of the energy needed to design, engineer, test and produce a vehicle that uses a different energy-source than high-EROEI oil/gasoline.

But oil and gas are high-EROEI only from our limited perspective. Oil is actually hugely expensive, when you account for the millions of years required for it to form. Since it was already done when we arrived, we don't have to account for the energy investment.

But we do need to account for the energy investment in designing a vehicle that runs on something other than oil.

Because, really, there are no free lunches.

The energy we get out of our transportation is less than what we put in. The energy we have been putting in (oil) has been so fantastically dense, portable, and efficient, that we have designed a system dependent on it, moving a few thousand pounds from zero to sixty in x.x seconds.

In order to keep on moving a few thousand pounds from zero to sixty in x.x seconds without oil, there will have to be a similarly dense, portable, efficient energy source to use in its place, which we must now account for if we're not using the good, free stuff.

These super-efficient cars, though, were built using the good, free stuff. So while they save oil in their use, they consume it (and other non-renewable fossil fuels) heavily in their construction. This heavy use is represented in the car's high cost.

And electricity, much like hydrogen, much like the batteries themselves, are energy-carriers, not sources. The sources of power for the Volt are gasoline and the grid, or in the US, gasoline, and 50% coal, 19% nuclear, 19% natural gas, 7% hydro, and 3% oil.

If 80% of Americans drive less than 40 miles a day, they could be bicycling. Self-power is the most energy-efficient way of moving people around. And, since physical exertion gets to be somewhat unpleasant the longer you do it, we shouldn't see a problem with Jevon's Paradox because the activity should be self-limiting. In theory, anyway.
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kjmclark · Heavy Crude Joined: Dec 09, 2005 Posts: 326

Remember, GM has to build big to make any profit. They can't build small cars at a profit; their labor costs are too high. I expect they're really thinking of this for the small SUV market.

The joke is that it really doesn't need much of any battery pack to be worth doing. Even a 5 mile range is enough. The other advantages of series hybrid would make it more efficient than its competitors at a much better price that way. Incredible low-end torque, great peak horsepower, lots of design flexibility, as well as better efficiency, lighter weight, and regenerative braking. You only need an engine powerful enough to produce enough electricity for highway speed cruise.

Remember that fuel cell vehicles are series hybrids. In that case, the fuel cell stack takes the place of the engine/generator. The volt is the same as a fuel cell vehicle but with a high-efficiency internal combustion engine running at peak efficiency instead of the fuel cells.

JRP3 · Heavy Crude Joined: Oct 23, 2006 Posts: 396

ohanian · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Oct 17, 2004 Posts: 1148

Amzed · Coal Joined: Dec 17, 2006 Posts: 2

The technology is well enough established that GM could produce this if they want to. If a company like Tesla (or others) can do this, than GM can as well. They have the access to capital, the engineering talent, the production facilities, etc. They just choose not to. They throw these concept cars out there to keep the govt.-funded cash cow that a fuel cell is, on the needle.

Their current business model doesn't allow for them to produce this car, so they won't. There are way to few moving parts, and as a result, way too few merchandising opportunities when said parts fail (think "value engineering" or "planned obsolescence").

This car is all about PR, nothing more.

Frank

GM announced this because of all the activity by other manufacturers in the plug-in hybrid arena. I think they realize that fuel cell vehicles aren't going to work in the near term (if ever) and that they didn't have a Plan B.

The will produce this vehicle IF the battery technology they "need" is ready. Let's hope that A123 and the others can ramp-up production and ramp-down costs enough to make it viable.

PolestaR · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Jun 21, 2005 Posts: 1047

Why don't they just use supercapacitors as the "inbetween" in the volt? With $40000 of currently available supercaps (retail prices) you could provide roughly 3 million watt seconds of storage. Which is Fark all really, about 150 seconds at 20KW output. However it provides the same "thing" if you still use gas for long trips. It also means you have the caps there ready to be used for regenerative breaking, etc.

I'm not sure how many miles you could get with 3M watt seconds in a car, but it wouldn't be 40 miles.
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