Chevy Volt Dissed - Compared to 56k Modem

Absolutely. The faster you charge the Volt, the quicker the battery will die. The bottleneck isn't just the plug but also the battery.

 

New cars do have warranties. Now if a company does not want to honor them for a part that should last 4 years + then I have a problem. LED taillights should (I am not saying they are) be warranted for the full length of the cars warranty.

 

Funny, I thought the article was quite reasonable and well researched. The author clearly likes the car but does not like some implementation details or the price, and bemoans the effect a cold winter has on EV range if cabin heating is used. My only nitpick would be the angst over the charging time. If a customer does not have enough time to stuff the required energy into the car using 110V then switch to 220V. What is the big deal ?

His complaints are not mine except for the price, but each to their own.

The author did stick GM subtly on one point. He wrote "GM now says the Volt’s range is between 25 and 50 miles rather than the 40 miles discussed previously." GM said 25 miles/charge would be very unusual, the worse of high speed driving going uphill. Now consumers are understanding that 25 miles/charge is cold winter range.

 

I have all CFLs, energy star appliances, no pool, heat only with pellets, occupancy sensor timeouts throughout the house and automatic lights off in every room if someone forgets to turn them off.

My home automation turns off all lights and standby power to all televisions whenever the alarm is armed in away mode.I've used a kill-o-watt to log the consumption of every plugin item in the house. I've used the smart meter isolated to each circuit breaker to log how much everything uses in the house. I know down to the watt what everything consumes in both standby and active modes.

I've cut my power consumption to 1/3 of what it was but that still gets me just into the 4th tier.

The baseline tier is a joke. My video suerveillance and home automation PC use 300 kWh alone. It's the only thing up 24 hours a day and it still puts me over my baseline. Try owning a 5000 sf home and how low you can drop you pg&e bill. I think I've done a pretty good job.

The Volt is a joke.

 

*cough*

Kudos for dropping consumption 1/3rd. Keep going!

As for me, I am as likely to own a 5000 sft house as I am to own an SUV. My already-too-big 2850 sft house uses under 100 kwh a month once house water heating is discounted. Works out like this:

Fridge: 40 kwh/month
Lignts: 5 kwh/month
Microwave: 15 kwh/month
Computers: 5 kwh/month
Odds and Ends: Not much.

Yes, the Volt is a joke.

 

If the Volt is a good and desirable car, it will sell no matter what the critics say. Just like a good movie, word of mouth gets around and people flock to see it, despite what critics say.

The Volt sales will tell how good or not the car is.

 

Not by 1/3, to 1/3. Since buying my house 8 years ago, I've cut my consumption by 2/3rds. My bill went from 300+ each month to $80. This still keeps me knocking at the 41 cent / kWh door. Some months I'm a few watts below it and others I barely cross over. Any increase is all 41 cents / kWh.

Your PC and monitor take about 300 watts. At 5 kWh / month, you are using your PC about 33 minutes a day. Most use their PC far more than that.

15 kWh for microwave. Ours runs about 2.5 kWh / month. Are you cooking whole meals in it or just using it for a few minutes to heat things up?

 

You should buy a laptop. Based on what you are saying it will pay for itself. You can buy a decent laptop for $500, and it won't use more than 100 watts on average. Keep it hardwired to the network, turn off the wireless & bluetooth, and it will use fewer watts.

For your home surveillance, use Samsung EcoGreen hard drives. You don't need fast seek times so 5400 RPM drives are fine. Hardwire your cameras if they are wireless.

Use the smallest switch possible for your network. Most switches are dumb and don't revert to a low power state.

Remove cordless phones and replace them with unpowered corded phones. Keep only 1-2 cordless phones to use throughout the house.

Paint your walls a lighter color and you won't need as many lights.

You will double your savings in summer without having to further pump out waste heat out of your house.

 

I have two notebooks in the house that use about 10 watts each for 2 - 5 hours a day. Soon one of the notebooks will be replaced by an iPad that consumes 2.5 watts -- about 1 kwh a YEAR if used one hour every day. I also have a mac-mini that snoozes most of time at 2 watts when it is not serving up media or performing back-up duties. I don't upgrade in general to decrease consumption, but when I buy something I strive to buy the most energy conserving available.

My microwave is 900 watts, used about 30 minutes a day.

Kudos twice over for knocking consumption down 2/3rds ! It does sound like the computer related electronics in your house are the major guzzler.

 

Yeah, my entire house (which includes a 60" plasma, a 50" plasma and a PHEV prius) uses just under 300kwh a month. using that much for a pc and some cameras is just......... crazy.

 

The Prius must be half that. What source provides hot water, heat and cooking? That seems outrageously low! I use about 150kWh on the Prius alone.

 

"The baseline tier is a joke. My video suerveillance and home automation PC use 300 kWh alone. It's the only thing up 24 hours a day and it still puts me over my baseline. Try owning a 5000 sf home and how low you can drop you pg&e bill. I think I've done a pretty good job."

I have the opposite problem. The rate structure around here is such that I pay for the first 100 kWh whether I use them or not. So, since there are only the two of us rattling around in this large 1600 square foot house, when we don't use 100 kWh, we are paying too much. Additionally, there is no incentive to reduce our consumption.

 

We don't have a hot water system, but have an electric shower. there's only two of us and we dont need hot water for anything else. heating is gas fired, and excluded from the 300kwh figure. we are south facing, so do rely on the sun for heating the house a bit as well (the heating will hopefully be off until october time unless there's another cold snap)
cooking is electric, but again there is only two of us, and our diet is mainly vegetables, and they don't take long to cook.

the prius is about 4kwh per day.

 

That's impressive. I think I'm at about $130/month which is appx. 1300 kWh a month. That includes about 6/day for the Prius, I have a family of 5 (3 teens), we heat and pump our water with electricity, the stove/oven is electric and we live in Miami with (or so I'm told) enormous air conditioning needs.

 

Disingenuous, since charging the Leaf to 75 miles on 120 volt takes what a full day?

I admit I feel a little guilt over all this. I've wanted EV cars for a while and now that the Volt (kind of EV) and Leaf are out I've become pretty critical of them. I was with the Volt already because on paper it looked like a mess (and IRL it is a mess) but the Leaf looked good. However, I'm more or less joining in on the boos and taunts. There are so many drawbacks with these vehicles and caveats, it's really no surprise they've taken so long to go mainstream and perhaps Toyota has been very wise indeed to be so patient--previously I called them dragging their heels with EV, but now I kind of see why.

Toyota has proven to take the correct approach: master ICE-based momentum first, then see about throwing some EV-range on top. The Volt went with EV first, gas as second, and the Leaf ev first and both have incredible draw backs in utility and/or cost.

 

public acceptance, maybe. Not the technology.

 

the "duck sound" has already been done on Subarus

 

lol!