Prius Plug-in and Volt Pros and Cons

No, asking questions doesn't offend. Making statements not based in fact, and coming to a Prius forum to tout the supposed Volt advantages are offensive.

 

It is probably more toward 10 MPG difference. Remember, gasoline is very energy dense. The difference between 40 MPG and 50 MPG is 6.75 kWh of energy. That amount in electricity can charge PiP battery twice.

 

Alright...we've gone about 12 hours now without anyone responding to him. Let's keep it that way. That may be the only way he will go away.

 

"Talk of the Devil, and he's presently at your elbow."

Profile / "People You Ignore" is the right solution.

 

When do you plan to change the three clutches in your Volt transmission? Are they in the maintenance schedule? How about ATF change?

 

That's a great example of perspective & detail.

Toyota expended a great deal of effort to optimize their entire system. Having to deal with GM's choice of more battery to overcome engine inefficiencies is a waste. They're trapped with a complex design heavily dependent on ample battery capacity. Meantime, Prius holds its own just fine without.

In other words, which has the greater potential to compete with the actual competition (traditional vehicles) ?

 

Ah, that's MUCH better!

 

This is an important point, and hangs on the definition of 'compete'.

One can do an endless analysis, and 'its turtles all the way down.' What is the actual metric?

Probably the most obvious competition would be sales numbers. Another obvious, but more subtle, is 'total use of energy' (although it is important to realize that the most efficient propulsion is shank's mare.) Another might by total cost of ownership -- although that misses an important component of ownership in pleasure.

It is rather fun hearing the discussion, though.

 

I've seen zero evidence in support of your apparent theory that GM designed the Volt with a large battery pack due to having a less efficient engine.

Everything I've ever read consistently paints a different theory -- that they designed the Volt with a large near-EV sized rechargeable battery pack and then chose an already available small engine used in their European small cars that would require minimal additional engineering cost and risk.

You seem to be having a hard time grasping the obvious -- the Volt was designed to compete with 70-100 mile range EVs while providing a range extending gas engine. The Volt was never intended to be an engine-focused hybrid with a smaller battery. It was intended to be an EV-focused hybrid.

They no doubt wanted to compete with Toyota with a car that minimized gasoline consumption and demonstrated advanced technology competence but they entered at a different product design point. GM was obviously not trying to just make their own near-identical Prius clone.

You seem to think that GM should build a Prius competitive engine-focused hybrid and I agree with you. But that hypothetical future GM one-mode engine-focused hybrid is a different car. Please stop pushing the line that the Volt was supposed to be that vehicle.

That being said, it seems likely that future versions of the Prius Plugin will get somewhat bigger batteries and reports indicate that a trim line or variant of the Volt next year will offer lower cost and possibly somewhat less battery capacity (but not much less) than the 1st gen Volt. It makes good marketing sense for two cars in somewhat different but related product points to stretch towards each other at a market point that will capture additional customers. In addition, it seems there will be a higher trim line or variant Volt with a higher battery capacity than the 1st gen.

It's still the same story even as it evolves over time. The Volt brand is focused on providing higher, more EV-like battery capacities than the Prius brand and the Energi brand and unsurprisingly this means different tradeoffs in the engineering design.

 

duplicate post

 

There are 4 choices:
1) Extract more energy from gasoline that is on-board.
2) Replace it with another fuel (electricity from various sources).
3) Do #1 and also mix in as much electricity as possible.
4) Do #2 but get less energy from the gasoline, due to heavy battery.

A regular Prius is #1.
BEV like Leaf is #2.
PiP is #3.
Volt is #4.

 

I wouldn't blame him...you have to be one of the most annoying people (at your own choosing) I've ever came across on this site.

 

You seem to keep forgetting that my push is for diversity, offering choice. That means additional models with other configurations... not the one-size-fits all we ended up getting.

As for the "intended", we have already left that past behind. Goals changed along the way. Being different now means identifying the intended audience, the consumers who will be buying it and when.

 

I cannot imagine what you would call 'evidence,' but really, consider GM's alternatives:

They only had crappy small ICE engines, so their choices boiled down to two:

Larg(er) battery with a crappy ICE;
Small(er) battery with a crappy ICE.

That only seems like one real choice to me.
As for why 40 miles range, that is easy: it matched a study done at the time, and GM was kissing the US government's nice person while begging for another 70 billion or so in bailout funds.

 

Btw, the 70-100 mile category didn't even exist back when Volt was introduced. So, there's no way that could have been an original goal.

 

I've seen no journalist or even any credible other source dispute Lutz's statements that he originally conceived of the Volt as a BEV and then was talked into a PHEV design with EV first followed by a range extension mode.

I'm not aware of anything stopping GM from adapting one of their small engines to operate with a pseudo-Atkinson cycle and then build a one-mode hybrid transmission to compete with Ford and Toyota. They know how to do that and seem to have the relevant patent coverage. They could have chosen to do that instead of the Volt.

But GM has evidently chosen to compete at a unique product point rather than spend time doing another Prius-like hybrid first. They don't have infinite engineering resources. Neither does Toyota which could have also chosen to focus on hybrid trucks and large battery plugin hybrids first but wisely worked on small hybrid cars first when they started nearly 20 years ago.

The 40-mile EV range target and 16 kWh battery size has been consistent since the Volt concept car was first displayed at the Detroit auto show in January 2007 well before the economy collapsed in the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930's.