They might not, figuring the hit on battery life (ie number of cycles for a given degradation in capacity) isn’t worth the extra range.

Those with calculators will rapidly work out that if you have a nominal 16 kWh battery pack that is only ever charged to 85% full, and discharged to 30%, you are getting a lot less actual battery capacity than it says on the box. About 9 kWh.

He should have dumped it like Kerkorian…

Not when the battery has been topped off after being recharged overnight and starting off in the morning or whenever after being charged.

Given what Tesla has been able to do, asterisks and caveats notwithstanding, one of the Detroit Two and a Debtor oughta be able to produce a vehicle about the overall package size as an EV1, but designed as a small wagon or hatch sedan for greater utility, and a 150-200 mile range.

Also, there is an inherent problem with the Volt that I still haven’t heard the definitive answer to. The sales pitch is, if you drive less than 40 miles/day and plug the car in at home, you will be able to drive entirely on electricity. I suspect, though, that the car will be programmed to run the ICE every so often even if it is not “needed,” just in order to keep the ICE operational. Anyone who has tried to awaken a “ran when parked” barn-find car knows that the worst thing you can do to an engine is let it sit. The gasoline will turn to varnish, the dry cylinder walls will corrode and the engine might seize up entirely. I can see it now, GM fighting with owners over warranty claims where the owner failed to add Sta-Bil to every tank of infrequently used gas. Kinda like the mandatory coolant additive for 4.1 and 4.5 liter Cadillacs in the 1980’s.

It charges on his household 110v. He said that he can also charge on his 220v circuit too if he needs it fast. He just plugs it into the 220 outlet.

He gets over 50 miles range on it and loves it. Goes plenty fast, 70+ mph.

Oddly, he kept the tranny (5 speed standard). He said he only uses 2nd and 3rd gear.

He said it cost him about $15k.

The only downside is that the car has no HVAC. Being Tucson, he doesn’t need the heater. But he said he missed A/C. But not enough to send money to Mid East and South American dictators.

As he was showing me all the inner workings of his car I could not help but think of GM’s Volt project. This guy is a retired professor of art, not an engineer. Yet he has managed to do in 6 months and for less than $20k (used Ford Escort included) what GM can’t figure out after billions and years of development.

Farago: If you want, I can take some pics and you can interview him. He is really cool guy, a friend of my mothers.

You drive one of your other cars. Seriously. How many families or couples do you know who have the means to buy a new car (electric or no) and only one car? A short-range electric car as a second car is a decent size market, if the price is right. Even my wife would go for one. The subject of the Volt has come up and, on hearing $40K, “No way!”

The ‘range extending’ ICE allows the Volt (should it ever see the light of day) to be the only car in your garage.

At the extreme end of the scale is the Nautilus E30 Electric Class 8 Truck that weighs in at a hefty scales at a hefty $210,000. For comparison a regular ICE Class 8 costs $80-120k new.

Somehow I didn’t think this was supposed to be a niche product. I really don’t know, was it meant to be this expensive or was there to be some kind of battery breakthrough?

Obama wants a clean car future. Since US taxpayers now own the thing indirectly (the Treasury is not a federal agency) the Obama guys will direct them to build these new cars. Why else would they be allowing California to set their own CAFE standards of nearly 40mpg? It’s because they got small electric cars lining the future product portfolios.

Volt, yes it needs an all electric variant to compete and hopefully come in at a cheaper price. Lutz was trying to tell people since it had 2 powertrains it was x2 as expensive. I’d like them to use that logic with just an electric only model.

The TRUTH about the VOLT; GM for now is sticking an ICE into it, while entrepreneurs in Israel are adding small efficient turbines that can spin up to charge the batteries.

People don’t realize this but, the EV1 was designed with a trailer for a range-extender, but GM axed that, the electric car was not supposed to be successful. Remember GM lost spent taxpayer money to build that car!! $500 MILLION from the Clinton administration. So Lutz’s statement we lost a billion is incorrect, they lost 500m of GM dollars and 500m of grants from Uncle Sam….

So really the Volt is a step backwards and we should of had an electric car by now…

GM can sell an all electric Volt car and rent range extenders or sell them to people who need to go more than 90 miles. That covers the electric car market much better than combining both functions as a niche product with limited appeal at $47,499 price tag… oops, I mean $39,999 with federal tax credit….

According to my GM engineer friend testing the volt’s electric engine, they’re testing it to the limit to see how fast they can let the car go…. over 110mph. They also computed the cost of the engine right now,.. over $11,000… maybe in mass manufacturing it will cut that down… with a battery pack costing nearly $20,000 plus a Chevy Cruz equals 46K (15k + 20K+11K =46K) without the ICE, it’s more like $36 base, that would take the Tesla S-model to town at that price. If they want to competitive, GM should go after this Niche…

Didn’t GM wind up that program because even they recognized it was costing too much?

How many of you think there will ever actually be a VOLT for sale?

This is from an earlier comment of mine about this seemingly irrepressible issue:

The Volt is/was always designed to run (hopefully, in city driving) forty miles in all-electric mode, drawing down the battery from its “full” 80% state-of-charge (SOC) down to its “empty” 30% SOC. At that point the 1.4 liter ICE engine starts spinning the generator at one of five fixed rpm levels, depending on the given power requirements of the car’s electric motor. There is no reason to “recharge” the battery, since that would be giving money to those OPEC terrorists. That is, “not recharge” as defined in the usual sense. In actuality, the battery will always be charged/discharged somewhat during this “charge-sustaining mode”, because of two (primary) factors. There will be small mismatches between the generator’s output and the electric motor’s requirements, moment-to-moment. Excess juice from the generator will be shunted to the battery; power demand in excess of the generator’s output will come from the battery. Additionally, regenerative braking will always charge the battery. So while the whole system is designed to maintain an approximate 30% SOC in charge-sustaining mode, in reality that level will fluctuate due to these and other factors. And unlike the body of the Volt, this never changed: GM always said from the (virtual) get-go that “a gasoline/E85-powered engine generator seamlessly provides electricity to power the Volt’s electric drive unit while simultaneously sustaining (at 30%) the charge of the battery.”

The “original Volt” microcar is now planned as a 2012 Europe-only model. But why?

A tiny car won’t fair well in the USA. We all know that.

I have an economic explanation for why the all-electric cars are all tiny little things. An ICE has a large fixed cost of manufacturing and a small incremental cost of a more powerful engine if you want to scale up to a huge SUV instead of having a microcar. Contrast that with an EV engine and battery setup, where the fixed cost is relatively small but adding more batteries to get a decent range from a huge SUV adds a huge cost.

Given this cost structure, EV has a competitive cost advantage in smaller vehicles and ICE has the lead in larger ones. As the EV technology gets better, the competitive advantage will move up the food change to the larger vehicles. Unfortuantely, the USA Volt has the worst of both worlds: fairly large car (lots of batteries and/or short range) coupled with an ICE (for high fixed costs).

Another practical advantage of small EVs is that the smaller batteries in a small EV will charge in a more reasonable amount of time from a standard house electrical system. Retrofitting the electrical system in your house to charge an SUV EV in just a few hours would be a large expense and thus a large barrier to adoption.

You mean the EV-1?

TTAC seems to choke on saying that name.