CNN drives the Chevy Volt

[MikeMike]

http://money.cnn.com/galleries..._mule_drive/index.html

 

[Ktulu]

stupid vaporware

 

[LTC8K6]

I like the Cruze body better. Vaporware it isn't, but it isn't much of an electric car either, unfortunately.

 

[MBrown]

I'd rather them test the Cruze than the Volt.

 

[ElFenix]

i wonder if you have to add fuel stabilizer if you don't drive more than 40 miles a day on a regular basis?

 

[StageLeft]

Nifty.

Surely I'm not the only one concerned that, still, nobody seems to have driven an actual Volt, a car which is supposedly beginning production in a few months.

 

[CupCak3]

Originally posted by: MBrown
I'd rather them test the Cruze than the Volt.

ditto.

 

[MBrown]

Originally posted by: ElFenix
i wonder if you have to add fuel stabilizer if you don't drive more than 40 miles a day on a regular basis?

I was wondering that too.

 

[Bignate603]

Originally posted by: LTC8K6
Vaporware it isn't, but it isn't much of an electric car either, unfortunately.

Um, why not? The journalist only drove the car under electric power.

 

[heymrdj]

I still have to say what about KW costs. No one seems to talk about what it costs you per year to charge these things to drive them for x amount of miles compared to the fuel for x amount of miles. Around here where the average electric bill to keep your home at 72 degrees in winter is 350$, a car charging you 300$ in electricity a month to drive won't feel much better.

 

[thomsbrain]

That was a lot of pages for two sentences about how it drove.

 

[Bignate603]

Originally posted by: heymrdj
I still have to say what about KW costs. No one seems to talk about what it costs you per year to charge these things to drive them for x amount of miles compared to the fuel for x amount of miles. Around here where the average electric bill to keep your home at 72 degrees in winter is 350$, a car charging you 300$ in electricity a month to drive won't feel much better.

Do the math. The volt has a 16kWh battery, but to increase battery life you only use half of it. So you need to charge up 8kWh per 40 miles. Let's say the charger isn't terribly efficient and it actually takes 9kWh. The average cost per kWh for the US is about $.11 per kWhr but let's say you live in a place where costs are higher, so its $.14 per kWh. That means it would cost you $1.26 for a full charge. That's 3.15 cents a mile. At $2 a gallon gas you'd need a car that gets 63.5 mpg for it to be cheaper. That's not impossible if you hypermile a prius but the actual mpg rating by Toyota is only 48/45mpg. Also, gas has typically been significantly more volatile than electricity in terms of cost. If gas hits $3 a gallon you'd need a car that gets 95.2 miles per gallon to be as cheap per mile. At $4 a gallon it would need to get 127 miles per gallon.

 

[heymrdj]

Originally posted by: Bignate603

Originally posted by: heymrdj
I still have to say what about KW costs. No one seems to talk about what it costs you per year to charge these things to drive them for x amount of miles compared to the fuel for x amount of miles. Around here where the average electric bill to keep your home at 72 degrees in winter is 350$, a car charging you 300$ in electricity a month to drive won't feel much better.

Do the math. The volt has a 16kWh battery, but to increase battery life you only use half of it. So you need to charge up 8kWh per 40 miles. Let's say the charger isn't terribly efficient and it actually takes 9kWh. The average cost per kWh for the US is about $.11 per kWhr but let's say you live in a place where costs are higher, so its $.14 per kWh. That means it would cost you $1.26 for a full charge. That's 3.15 cents a mile. At $2 a gallon gas you'd need a car that gets 63.5 mpg for it to be cheaper. That's not impossible if you hypermile a prius but the actual mpg rating by Toyota is only 48/45mpg. Also, gas has typically been significantly more volatile than electricity in terms of cost. If gas hits $3 a gallon you'd need a car that gets 95.2 miles per gallon to be as cheap per mile. At $4 a gallon it would need to get 127 miles per gallon.

I see your point, for city dwellers, like the article said, it works well. But it would have no practicality for me. My Expedition can tow well, gets decent highway mileage, and I put about 600 miles a month on it. At 2$ a gallon I pay 10.3 cents per mile.

 

[LTC8K6]

The Volt always moves under electric power. Whether the engine is running or not.

November 2010 is still a long way off for sales, so production vehicles must also be close to that far off.

Only integration protoypes are supposed to ready in a couple months, not the production car.

The car is still not very impressive, though.

I'd like to see it without the battery pack, actually. The battery pack isn't doing much anyway. Let it operate like a locomotive does.

 

[StageLeft]

Originally posted by: heymrdj
I still have to say what about KW costs. No one seems to talk about what it costs you per year to charge these things to drive them for x amount of miles compared to the fuel for x amount of miles. Around here where the average electric bill to keep your home at 72 degrees in winter is 350$, a car charging you 300$ in electricity a month to drive won't feel much better.

It probably wouldn't cost that much, though.

I am sure a comparison or many have been done. I guess maybe this needs 50 horsepower, or 35KW to maintain highway speed. At $.10/KW hour that's $3.50/hour. A gas car might go through 2-3 gallons depending on mileage in that period, or $4.20-6.30 at current prices. My numbers may be off on what the volt needs to maintain 70 mph, though. It will be a lot cheaper to operate, however. The upfront costs are brutal, of course. Very brutal.

Just read bignate's numbers. I guess my guess really wasn't that far off! If the volt can do 40 miles, is that city? Probably....I wonder what it can do on highway running straight with those high drag speeds.

My Expedition can tow well

This thing has no relevance to an expedition in a comparison

I'd be stoked for an electric with this thing's range. I work 10 miles away or so and even with trips at lunch it would spend only a minority of its life actually running the gas engine.

 

[imported_Imp]

So has anyone crash-tested and set this thing on fire yet? Guess it wouldn't be too different from a hybrid, and those have been around for a while.

 

[Bignate603]

Originally posted by: LTC8K6
The Volt always moves under electric power. Whether the engine is running or not.

November 2010 is still a long way off for sales, so production vehicles must also be close to that far off.

Only integration protoypes are supposed to ready in a couple months, not the production car.

The car is still not very impressive, though.

I'd like to see it without the battery pack, actually. The battery pack isn't doing much anyway. Let it operate like a locomotive does.

It wouldn't really work well without an energy storage system. The locomotive engines run all out all the time. They're terribly inefficient off the one point that they are designed for but at that point they have amazing efficiency. The engines are so optimized for that single point that they never run it at any other performance point. Basically, if the engine is running its at full power. When the train is going along the countryside and they need more power they just kick on another engine. If they need something in between they literally turn on heaters to waste the electricity by just heating air. While this works for trains which are running at constant speeds and can usually work in increments of whole engines it won't work for cars. Car's power requirements are completely different. If your car took 15 minutes to get to full speed after it was at a full stop I think you'd have a problem with it.

You can tune a car for the same idea, a very highly efficient performance point. Normal car engines are full of compromises because they have to work across a huge RPM band and at different power levels. You could optimize the engine for that single point like they do for train engines but the engine would be basically useless at any other RPM or power level. For the car to have enough power to actually accelerate acceptably the car would have to be as powerful as a normal car engine and running at 100% power all the time and just dump the excess electricity off like the locomotives do. However, if you have some sort of energy storage you can turn on the engine and run it at that incredibly efficient point while storing up the energy, and then turn it off when you've filled up your energy storage. For the volt to actually work efficiently it needs some sort of energy storage. They could get away with smaller storage if they didn't want to have 40 miles of electric only driving but it still needs a battery.

 

[Mr.IncrediblyBored]

$40k for a GM slow POS? die


Paging Louisss.

 

[LTC8K6]

I'd still like to see the Volt without the battery, with an efficient diesel, and maybe even with dynamic braking. Or possibly with only a small battery system which only runs the accessories and kicks the car into motion when decent acceleration is required. A locomotive designed/tweaked for the road.

 

[Bignate603]

Originally posted by: LTC8K6
I'd still like to see the Volt without the battery, with an efficient diesel, and maybe even with dynamic braking. Or possibly with only a small battery system which only runs the accessories and kicks the car into motion when decent acceleration is required. A locomotive designed/tweaked for the road.

A locomotive style system in an automobile just won't work.

By dynamic braking do you mean regenerative braking? Where exactly would the power go without a battery? You can't turn an engine backwards to get your fuel back.

You could do it with a smaller battery, smaller than what the volt has, but not an incredibly small one. Locomotives are based on long durations at full power. They'll accept taking 15+ minutes to get to full speed. If a car takes 15 seconds to get to 60 we consider it a dog. You can't compare a diesel electric to an automobile. The demands for power on locomotives is relatively constant (if you hit a hill you just kick on another engine with it at max power), demands for power on automobile engines is horribly erratic. You need a large amount of power accelerating, a decent amount while cruising, and none while sitting at a light or coasting. You could design the system for any one of those points but it would be lousy at

Also, there is a balance between battery size and the losses involved in starting up and warming up the engine. You want the engine to start up and get it warmed up so that it's running efficiently. That means you want to have a relatively large battery so you have less cycling of the engine with a warm up period each time. You have to balance that against the weight of the batteries. There is a balancing act to get the most efficiency, and the volt has probably erred on the side of too much battery weight. However, they did that so the majority of people would burn zero gas the majority of days.

 

[LTC8K6]

Locomotives use dynamic braking, you described it earlier as wasting the energy. That's what the giant fans are doing on top of a modern locomotive, cooling off the load coils of the dynamic braking system. The excess power is basically shunted into heating elements to slow the locomotive down. Basically a controlled shorting of the generator. These load coils then get hot and have to be cooled off with the giant fans.

And I know it won't really work that's why it needs to be adjusted for use on the road. I added the small battery for short term quick acceleration but it could also be a hydraulic accumulator or something new. It's a work in progress. I just need some funding from the government for my green experiments.

The Volt really doesn't work either and apparently if you take in the whole cycle of costs, hybrids barely work.

 

[Bignate603]

Originally posted by: LTC8K6
Locomotives use dynamic braking, you described it earlier as wasting the energy. That's what the giant fans are doing on top of a modern locomotive, cooling off the load coils of the dynamic braking system. The excess power is basically shunted into heating elements to slow the locomotive down. Basically a controlled shorting of the generator. These load coils then get hot and have to be cooled off with the giant fans.

If you just wanted to brake by turning the energy into heat its much cheaper just to use standard disc brakes. There's no need to get fancy with it. Trains dump the heat out of the heaters because they're dealing with huge amounts of energy and its easier to control where it it goes if they just waste it like that.

Anyways, I still say any locomotive style system where the engine is running all out all the time will have lousy efficiency. Trying to size it would be a nightmare. You can't just have a second or third engine that kicks on when you need extra power like the train does.

 

[LTC8K6]

You seem to keep missing the fact that I have given a couple of solutions for acceleration...

Anyway, when Obama gives me a few billion of your tax dollars for my green efforts, these little hurdles won't matter any more.

Being green, it just has to look good, it doesn't have to be clear, to paraphrase Don Henley...

 

[StageLeft]

What if the Volt did away with its batteries and just an array of capacitors with enough juice to take a full highway speed brake and through charging/discharging of those and the engine either on at 100% or off, we get a similar effect, so even at highway speed say you need 50 horsepower and the engine is making 150, it will turn on for 20 seconds to charge the capacitors and then off for 40 as they quickly drain out, then on again. I imagine it was considered or ignored outright (maybe capacitors are too heavy or useless for discharges as long as 60 seconds).

The only reason the batteries are really in the volt is so that a) it can be plugged in for short trips and b) allows the engine to be off or running at full power.

 

[PingSpike]

Originally posted by: Bignate603

Originally posted by: LTC8K6
Locomotives use dynamic braking, you described it earlier as wasting the energy. That's what the giant fans are doing on top of a modern locomotive, cooling off the load coils of the dynamic braking system. The excess power is basically shunted into heating elements to slow the locomotive down. Basically a controlled shorting of the generator. These load coils then get hot and have to be cooled off with the giant fans.

If you just wanted to brake by turning the energy into heat its much cheaper just to use standard disc brakes. There's no need to get fancy with it. Trains dump the heat out of the heaters because they're dealing with huge amounts of energy and its easier to control where it it goes if they just waste it like that.

Anyways, I still say any locomotive style system where the engine is running all out all the time will have lousy efficiency. Trying to size it would be a nightmare. You can't just have a second or third engine that kicks on when you need extra power like the train does.

Isn't that kind of the purpose of the battery though? It lets you store "bursts"?

I dunno, I think the principle is sound...it just isn't cost effective for the average man at this point in time. Cripes, conventional hybrids cost half that and still can't really pay for themselves.