ggravant

It still seems to me that many people who would want a car like the Volt or Leaf would choose it because they really want to drive a car powered by electricity as much as possible. All the Volt does is eliminate the range anxiety and I am sure many owners would be disappointed every time the gas engine had to kick on. Is it worth the price ... probably not for many people. All I know is that I live near and work in one of the biggest tree hugging cities in America (Boulder) and I know many people here would think it was. Colorado Springs ... uuh, not so much

bitkahuna

iTrader: (20)

stop, not as in, stop and not work, right?

i mean, even if the battery is flat, the car can work with the gas 'generator' powering the batteries pretty much in a passthru mode, right?

bitkahuna

iTrader: (20)

got a laugh at the picture of the burning money.

spwolf

no, but you will have 74hp engine powering Lexus GS basically.

spwolf

well probably less than 74hp since it powers generators that power the wheels and that also wastes some horsepower... thats why that "mountain" mode was develop, so gas engine would charge the battery when not needed (otherwise it will never charge it) and you would have enough juice to go up the hill.

And thats why many mags got around 30mpg in their "real world" testing when out of juice. It is just inefficient.

What bugs me that they could have avoided it but they decided not to so they can market it as EV and not Hybrid, as if people care what you call it.

SLegacy99

I still talk to people who don't know what a hybrid is or how it works. Its been over 10 years, how does one not at least have an inkling of what a hybrid does.

I do agree, the 1.4L is inefficient. Amazingly, it bests the competition in the lightweight Cruze. GM wanted an engine to charge batteries, run at an ideal speed and they chose a small 4 cylinder that is nearly ten year old. Why not save the weight and presumably the fuel and utilize a 3 cylinder engine? Why no direct injection. It's already an expensive vehicle and the early adopters will buy no matter what, so why not make it as best as you can? The Volt is just too heavy for the current 1.4L.

spwolf

because making it power generator makes no sense... it is more inefficient like that than driving wheels directly, which is rather obvious.

this is why 1.8l in Prius gets better mileage.

only reason they wanted "power generator" is to claim it is pure EV, which is dumb - who cares what you call it? and so inefficient that at the end, they made it hybrid otherwise it wouldnt be able to go over 70mph :-).

ggravant

I am not sure if it is that obvious actually. A train locomotive has a big old diesel engine that drives a generator, which then drives the DC motors at each drive wheel. For a train, however, they need lots of torque to get going, which you can get from the DC motors. This also means they do not need a traditional transmission. If the volt already has DC motors driving the wheels, why not just drive them directly rather than having to accommodate the complexity of both an electric motor and a drive axle from the engine.

Maybe it is a trade off of a bit less efficiency for a simpler and more reliable system. After all, the engine is really there as a range extender, rather than an integral part of normal operation.

SLegacy99

And with a consensus of owners reported over 100 MPG average, the Volt is being used as it was intended.

mmarshall

Yeah. I posted that image under the deal-signing. That was just a little humor to show that, IMO, this car will probably burn up more dollars on the initial sale and (if applicable) monthly-payments than it ultimately saves in gas, even with the extremely high MPG that it is capable of. 40K and a dealer-mark-up, even with the Federal tax-credit, IMO, is just too much for a small compact car.

mmarshall

I agree that a 3-cylinder powerplant to charge the batteries, if it makes enough power to do so, wouldn't be a bad idea. Correct me if I'm wrong, though, but I don't know of any available GM production-3-cylinder powerplants in the American market. Years ago, GM marketed the 3-cylinder Suzuki-built Chevy/Geo Metro/Sprint, but I don't think that GM has the rights to that powerplant anymore. The Smart-for-Two has a three-cylinder, but it is a Mercedes-licensed engine.

Fizzboy7

Good review. What turns me off from this car is the styling. It tries to look futuristic, but falls short. As mentioned, the center stack looks cheap. Which home computer, stereo, or micrwave has this same finish? Have crowds of people begged car manufacturers to design their interiors to look like appliances? I've never heard of it. The rear and, especially taillights, we saw 20 years ago on the Subaru SVX. Are simple rectangular shapes all they could think of? Then, the gimmicky beltline trim underneath the windows is unecessary and looks heavy. Don't care for the grille either. It looks like a plastic shield off a Revell car model kit. Cheap.
Maybe I'd have a better opinion if we hadn't seen this car for the last five/six years. It looked interesting the first few years, but no big deal now after all this time (ditto showing the new Camaro four years prematurely).

rcf8000

As I recall, GM started advertising the Volt a couple of years before it came on the market. It was obviously intended as a PR exercise, not as a vehicle that makes sense. Well, it did what it was intended to do: helped the company to get the government bailout.

rcf8000

The review fails to mention the important fact that in high-cost electricity states, like California, it costs more to run the Volt in pure electric mode than it costs to run it using the gasoline engine!

Habious

And, in most states, this is a coal-burning car (since that's the primary source of the electricity coming from the average home power outlet).

It may be extremely efficient at burning coal, but it's still essentially a coal-burning car.