Dinhternet

I was watch­ing the Col­bert Report the other day, and his guest on the show was GM’s Vice Chair­man Lutz to talk about the Chevy Volt. I have to say, every­thing I hear about this car makes me not want to get it. If you haven’t heard about it, the Volt is GM’s big move into the elec­tric car mar­ket. (If you ignore the EV1 from the 90s, which I’ll give them, failed at least in large part due to poor mar­ket conditions.)

Here are some things I’ve learned about the Volt, either from Lutz’s inter­view or GM’s website…

• The Volt will con­tain a 400 lb lithium-ion bat­tery to power the elec­tric engine.
• That bat­tery will power the car for 40 miles.
• After that, a 1.7 L engine will spin up to power the car. (I’m not sure if it pow­ers the car directly or by recharg­ing the battery)
• The bat­tery takes 6 hours to recharge off a wall socket.
• GM offers an optional solar panel on the roof, which will take 2 weeks to give a full charge.

I’ve also found from unof­fi­cial sources that despite all the ads say­ing the Volt will be avail­able in 2010, GM is think­ing of push­ing it back to 2011. Also, some sources say that GM will not be able to hit their goal MSRP of $30k with­out gov­ern­ment subsidies.

Know­ing all this, I have some con­cerns about the car…

• How will the car han­dle with 400 lb bat­tery pack in the engine bay along­side the elec­tric engine and the gas engine? (For com­par­i­son, a Prius has a 150 lb bat­tery and a 1.5 L engine.)
• Lithium bat­ter­ies get hot after extended dis­charge, how will the Volt han­dle the heat load?
• Bad lithium bat­ter­ies inex­plic­a­bly catch on fire, (but even good ones can explode when over­heated or punc­tured), how are pas­sen­gers protected?
• Lithium bat­ter­ies can only be recharged a cer­tain num­ber of times, after which you must replace the bat­tery. How much will a replace­ment bat­tery for the Volt cost? Will it be cov­ered under warranty?
• Is that 40 mile range with the elec­tric engine con­tin­u­ously run­ning? (Since the engine is only run­ning when you accel­er­ate.) Also, how heav­ily loaded is the car to get the 40 mile range?
• What is the 0–60 and top speed of the Volt?
• How exactly does the gas engine inter­act with the elec­tric engine after the 40 mile limit?
• What amper­age does the wall socket charge at, and do I need a sep­a­rate cir­cuit for it in my house?
• If the car is fully charged, can the solar pan­els send excess power back through the plug?
• What will final MSRP be if the sub­si­dies aren’t set yet?
• How does Chevy plan to com­pete with the Prius, which is hugely pop­u­lar and almost $10k cheaper?
• Why doesn’t Chevy talk about sec­ondary techs on the car like how the Prius has a sys­tem to recharge from brak­ing heat? Are they merely not talk­ing about it, or do they not have it?

I under­stand that not every­one has the same pri­or­i­ties in cars as I do, so some of these con­cerns might not apply to you. I also don’t mean to sound like a Prius fan­boy, because I’m not; I don’t have one and don’t plan on get­ting one any time soon. It was just the log­i­cal comparison.

Per­son­ally, I feel like if your daily com­mute is less than 40 miles round trip, which GM says is true for most Amer­i­cans (I actu­ally find that hard to believe, with all the sprawl we have in Amer­ica), and you really care about sav­ing the envi­ron­ment, there is prob­a­bly a form of pub­lic trans­porta­tion you can take advan­tage of that would be even more envi­ron­men­tally friendly.