GM: Volt reaches 2 million miles, 1.3 million of them gas-free

Important thing is - 22,000 gallons of gas saved compared to Prius - 55%.

 

If you were to compare the same number of vehicles. But from an overall impact view, Prius saves far more. It comes down to how many total are on the road. If a person doesn't buy a Volt, they'll buy something like a Cruze instead.

In other words, for every 1 Volt, there would the impact of 9 Cruze to include too... just to balance out the difference Prius makes, since it is being purchased (assuming 16,000 to 150,000) roughly 9 times as much.
.

 

Saved? It was really a trade with 491,429 kWh of electricity.

Is it good? Is it bad? How do we know?

 

**note**

for those you that think buying an EV is a "toy" for the "rich"

i am not rich. my personal income is less than half the average income of the people on this board.

i bought an EV because i am a patriot. i care about the United States. like many who seem to care a LOT more than people actually born here, i am a Naturalized American. having been other places in this World, it still amazes me how much better Americans have it over nearly every other place in the world. our continuing to burn foreign oil will destroy this country.

now we cant stop using oil. that would be too hard and we dont have to. we produce our own. to make that work we need to reduce our consumption about 75%. that means stop buying 3 barrels of every 4 we consume. our domestic production will provide us that one barrel and allow us to stockpile for the future.

there is very little i agree with as far as going to another country to fight under the pretense of protecting our country. there is nothing we can do to stop the urge of another human being to kill other human beings. this has been going on since Cain and Able and its laughable to think our military might will change that fact.

terrorism starts here. ends here and affects here. nothing we do over there will change that. if it were not for oil, then we would not be there. that i can guarantee.

so back to my "rich, superfluous, proving a point" purchase of my Leaf. lets break it down.

as an early adopter; i got a good price. my cost was $34,573. now i leased to get the $7500 fed tax credit instantly. price now 27,573.

WA State waived the sales tax which in my area is 8.8% which saved me $3042. so now cost is $24,531.

i have had the car for exactly one week short of 6 months today. if calculating REAL cost of savings over my dearly departed 50 mpg Prius, i have saved $60 a month is reduced transportation costs (which is actually a low ball figure. after 6300 miles there is STILL not an oil change in sight!!) so savings are about $318,84 thus far and this figure is not some sort of BS worksheet based on average anything. i have been pretty anal about tracking my real transportation costs over 6 vehicles since Thanksgiving Weekend 2003 when i put down my $500 deposit for my first Prius.

so now my cost is $24,212.20 and that is dropping daily.

so besides the saving of the environment, the economy, and my monthly expenses, i have to say, i bought a Leaf because for the money as compared to any other new car purchase i could have made in the State of WA,

i simply could not afford (my 2010 Prius also bought at a discount and tax free cost me $28,512 out the door on may 18, 2009) any other option.

so i did not buy rich, i bought cheap

 

Thank you for your service!
If your definition of "holier than thou" is that someone wants to reduce the number of times and places we put our armed forces in harms way the I guess many of us are.
I don't see a desire for our country to be less reliant on foreign countries as a bad thing. As a former serviceman I would think you would also want a stronger country, not weaker?

 

Dave: I agree with your post #64 above, except for one thing: The sales tax waiver is not "money saved." It is money not spent. The cost of buying a car is the purchase price plus tax. No sales tax means one less chunk of money spent. It cannot be subtracted from the price paid. It simply does not get added to the price paid. I.E., your cost for the car did not include state sales tax. Subtracting the amount of sales tax you'd have paid if there had been a sales tax is double-dipping.

This is different than the federal tax credit, which since you leased, the finance division of Nissan subtracted from your price.

The correct way to account for the sales tax exemption is to add it to the hypothetical price of the car you didn't buy, for cost comparison.

In your case, since you leased the Leaf, your actual cost is the final amount they charged you INCLUDING interest on the loan.

I agree with everything you said about the ramifications of using electricity vs. gasoline as transportation fuel. My car is a toy for the rich, though it also uses domestic electricity rather than foreign oil. Your car definitely is not a toy for the rich.

 

daniel; i post it as such because if i had bought any other type of car, that is what it would have cost me...sort of. you do bring up a point in that my sales tax savings would not have been as much because a cheaper gas car would not have had the same tax burden.

but now, even the Prius no longer has the tax waiver. its 100% electric or nothing which is the way it should have been.

 

I'm sorry. I still say you cannot subtract the sales tax you did not pay. You can only add that tax to the cost of the hypothetical car you are comparing to. What the car cost you is what they charged you. Not what they charged you minus some arbitrary amount.

You can subtract the federal tax credit because that is money you would have owed the government had you not bought the car. Or in the case of the lease, it's money the lessor actually subtracted from the purchase price.

But the sales tax is not money you would have paid had you not bought the car. If you are comparing to a hypothetical purchase of a gas car, the sales tax is part of the cost of that car, and can only be used when comparing the costs of the two cars. And it can only be used by adding it to the cost of the hypothetical car, not by subtracting it from the cost of the Leaf.

You can say: "If I had bought car X I'd have paid MSRP + sales tax; but with the Leaf I only paid MSRP."

If you say: "If I had bought car X I'd have paid MSRP + sales tax; but with the Leaf I paid MSRP - sales tax," you are counting the sales tax advantage twice!

 

ok, so if i bought a regular $24,212 car it would actually cost me $26,342 because of tax so would you rather i say my Leaf was like any other $26,342 car?

ok, whatever you feel right, i am ok with it. we all look at things a certain way and whether its half full or half empty it does not take away from the hidden costs of oil or the hidden benefits of driving EV.

 

Here is how I look at the above numbers:
Coal fired power plant ~= 1-lb/coal per kW-hr or = 491,429-lbs coal
Divide this by 2 if you want to say coal is just 50% of USA power

Multiply the gallons of gasoline by 6.25-lbs/gal to convert to pounds.

Therefore, Volt is 1.43x more pounds fossil fuel consumption, even if I divide coal by 2.

So I feel Volt MPGe is ~48/1.4 = 34 MPG both modes, fossil fuel equivs.
If your region is less coal, OK can be cleaner.
Then it's all personal political belief, whether you think the Volt fuel trade-off is good or not.

 

Of course the Leaf is not like any other car! The Leaf costs you $7,500 and sales tax less than a gas car with the same MSRP. But YOUR COST, the cost out of your pocket, is MSRP plus financing minus $7,500, NOT MSRP plus financing minus $7,500 minus again sales tax not paid.

The sales tax enters the cost equation when it IS paid, NOT when it is NOT paid.

What I would like is for you not to claim that the car cost you less than you paid, merely because you didn't pay sales tax. What you paid is what you paid. The fact that you didn't pay sales tax already lowered your total cost to what you actually paid. You cannot subtract a hypothetical sales tax from what you actually paid because, as I said before, that's counting the effects of the sales tax exemption twice.

 

A question to Volt owners:

Did you have the chance of testing how the Volt performs in CS mode (after battery is depleted)?
Do you feel you have enouph power for accelaration needed? Like when overtaking or in winding roads? or to maintain desired speed climbing a hill?
In where I live, due to very high purchase tax on cars, people tend to look for "one car for all purposes".

 

Yes, in fact there is more power available available in CS mode because of the funky parallel -series-hybrid boondoggle.

 

"More power available in CS mode..."
More than what?
What is "boondogle"?

 

Volt was hyped for years as a purist solution, being able to experience only EV driving without any compromise... despite having an engine. Then it was revealed that there would be times which the transmission would utilize direct thrust from that engine rather than always converting it to electricity first. Now, enthusiasts are torn about this. It makes those who supported the purity hypocrites and positioned them against other enthusiasts who think the hybrid enhancement is just fine.

Some us saw this coming years ago, which is why we focused on business goals too... rather than engineering achievement exclusively. And just a quick glance at the topic title is all it takes to confirm those "gas free" claims of the past were quite unrealistic.

In short, the boondogle" is another way of pointing out the corner some have backed themselves into.
.

 

boondoggle - definition of boondoggle by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.

Not really the right word. More bamboozling or a foofaraw, depending on your position.

 

Thanks for the explanation John.

My basic question is still without answer (by Volt owners), I'll try and rephrase it:
The Volt engine is not that powerful (84 hp or so?), the car is heavy and battery is depleted. How the car performs in this situation? I know, there is a regen here and there and the battery can help in short demands, but that also means the car is unexpected doesn't it?
Say you are climbing a hill without pre-pressing the "hill assist" button (because of unknown terrain or your attention was to the conversation inside the car or whatever) then how it performs?
Or say you want to overtake another car, will it give you the same accelaration everytime?

 

I think he meant the redundancy of the engines. The traction motor is 150hp. The battery pack must also feed it 150hp. Gas engine is 80hp. The generator motor is 74hp. The total combined output is around 150hp.

For Prius, you can add the gas engine (98hp) and the battery (36hp) to get the total output of 134hp. This is the performance benefit of the parallel hybrid. Keep in mind, Prius is a series-parallel hybrid so it also has advantages of a series hybrid.

You can't add Volt's 80hp gas engine with the 150hp battery to get the total output of 230hp. That's a boondoggle.

 

More power is available at over 40mph in CS mode than in CD (EV) mode. This is because the engine and battery are supplying more power in either series or parallel/series hybrid mode than then the battery can alone. This is also much more power than the prius, but the charts should be scaled for vehicle weight (hp/lb). See the link bellow

2011 Chevrolet Volt Horsepower Graph Photo 43

I would say boondoggle is the wrong term, and would not use it. The English language is being butchered. Because of the way gm implemented the series/parallel, you can see a blip up in power at 70mph. Here they are getting more power than the motors could alone. I would say there has been too much discussion about this on other threads to repeat it here.

I would say if you are happy with prius acceleration you should be more than happy with volt acceleration. That is if you are staying bellow 150kph. When the car goes into charge sustain mode there is plenty of power in the battery for hill climbing and acceleration. The battery will then recharge. There are some long stretches in the US of just up hills, where the battery would not have a chance to recharge. That is what mountain mode is for. It kicks in the gasoline engine at a higher state of charge and tries to maintain that. If you don't plan ahead here the car may slow down to around 50mph like many trucks on these roads. I don't think you have any roads in isreal where mountain mode is needed.

 

"My basic question is still without answer (by Volt owners), I'll try and rephrase it:
The Volt engine is not that powerful (84 hp or so?), the car is heavy and battery is depleted. How the car performs in this situation? "

The battery is not depleted, if by that you mean no battery output is possible. In CS mode the Volt is quite similar (QUITE similar) in design and operation to a Prius. While the battery in either car can be depleted to a point where no further power from the battery is possible for a while, that is an unusual situation only seen in certain prolonged uphill driving routes.

If you think in terms of battery SOC, then approximately (the numbers are off a bit, but the general mode of operation is correct):
In CS mode (aka pseudo Prius mode) the car tries to keep the SOC at 35%, but can be drawn down to 25%. When possible, the car bumps the SOC back up to 35%.

I think this graph is from the MT magazine review of the Volt:


The Volt is surely a boondoggle, but not for that reason.