Volt's intrument display panel

Jan 2004 is barely before the Gen ii prius came out and became incredibly successful.

GM is just an inept company that, by chance, happened to be in the USA and therefore had much protection. If GM were in any other country there would be massive uprisings and revolts. People would torch the CEOs homes. But not here unfortunately. They have no creativity or philosophy andnever made many good cars.

The Volt is just another poor child to these rotten parents.

 

Quote:
It just doesn't make environmental or economic sense to try to put an expensive dual-powertrain system into less expensive cars which already get good mileage, Lutz said

Well, that explains the high price and the deafening silence on CS mpg.

 

Before calling things stupid you should learn more about them. If you leave the car on and open the hood the ICE will start. if the car is off it doesn't.

You should have just said, I HATE GM THEY ARE STUPID.

And to your last statment. About having a ICE, gas tank, while driving in electric.
let me try to think of a few good reasons.

1. You can drive farther than the 30-40 mile range.
2. You could have a loved on in a hospital 100 miles away!!!
3. You could loose power and not be able to charge your car, but you can still get to work with the ICE.
4. I just got stuck in a three hour traffic jam, it was over 90 out, i had the ac on. The prius ended up getting 35mpg during this time, it had to keep starting up to keep the ac going and to let me stop and go. WHAT WOULD A ELECTRIC CAR DO? just die right in the middle of the road? Are you going to pull off onto the side of the road and wait 3 hours in hot temps to save your battery so you can make it home? And i promise you in bad traffic jams where ac is needed the volt will only get maybe 10 miles, and even the leaf will get less than 25. I'm talking about when you go 10 feet then stop then go ten feet then stop. SO THE ICE IS VERY MUCH NEEDDED UNTIL THEY CAN GET THE ELECTRIC RANGE up into the 100's of miles.

 

I took 2,806 photos. So, it may take a little while to sort through all that, especially when I'm trying to document at the same time.

Long story short though, the real purpose of the ratio is that it does an excellent job of pointing out (educating the typical consumer from the driver's seat) how the plug provides a MPG BOOST rather than being only a function of EV.
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there would be no point to a non plug in volt, it gets mediocre mileage. the whole idea is you can drive most of the time on electric, but you don't have to have a second car when you need to go further than electric will allow.

 

GM engineers did so many things and went great distance NOT use the gas engine while the car is running. There will be a reminder light if the gas engine is not used for about a year. Volt also has "Maintenance" mode to force run the gas engine.

If you need to check brake fluid or THREE coolant reservoirs, you'll need to turn off the car. Otherwise, the gas engine would come on. If it was for safety, why not just sound the horn or some other mean? Turning on the gas engine due to the hood being popped just does not support the "first 40 miles EV" goal. GM likes to market it as an electric car with a range extender. Why would the range extender comes on when the car isn't moving and there is enough charge left in the battery? The only way to explain this is that Volt is not an EV and the gas engine is not a range extender.

All I was saying is that use both gas and battery wisely. Use them when they are best suitable. PHV Prius does it but the Volt does not.

Don't underestimate Nissan Leaf. It has the screen that tells you the remaining range and the breakdown of the energy consumption to ensure you can make necessary adjustments to arrive at your destination.

 

Great observation Tony. The Battery Range (32mi -> 51km) and the Total Range (295mi -> 474km) got converted to km. The ODO number did not get converted. This either a bug or someone forgot to photoshop it.

The Volt doesn't appear to be production ready.

 

How many families will be ok with just a single 4 seater compact car? Even Corolla, Civic or Cruze can seat 5. Volt owners will likely need a second car (most likely SUV).

 

ya, families are probably not the target market for volt, leaf or prius.

 

Prius is a great mid-size family car without compromises. A family with 2 or 3 kids should be ok with the Prius or Leaf.

Volt's cargo volume is only half the size of the Prius. 10.6 vs. 21.6 cubic feet. Even the Corolla has a 12.3 cubic feet trunk.

 

OK well you should always shut off a car when going under the hood to check fluids. It's the only way to check them correctly. I don't know their reasons for the ICE starting when the car is on and you open the hood but i would think safety might big one reason. the prius does nothing to warn you the car is still on.

Sound the horn? have you ever had someone that was sitting in a car when you got under the hood and honk the horn at you? Bad idea in my book. It would scare alot of people too. And you act like people will be opening their hoods everyday burning gas. I doubt people will even open the hood once a month. Big deal if a little gas gets burned.

And on what i was saying with the leaf, if it says you have 30miles left on it's charge, and you hit a bad accident/traffic jam and your just sitting i'm sure the car will then start saying you only have 10 miles left then 5 miles left on the charge, but yet you still have 20 miles to get home. Sitting in hot weather needing the ac and stop and go traffic might put people on the side of the road with dead leafs waiting for a tow truck to get them. All i was saying at least in the volt you can burn gas and get home without problems. I like the idea of the ICE. And yes i will admit if the leaf had that option it might be a better car overall for everyone, but the limited range will be fine for some people, but alot of people wont buy if because of it, and alot of people like me could never drive that car because it can't get me through a whole day of driving.

 

i have never seen a survey, but i would bet most prius owners are single drivers and leaf will probably be the same way. i don't know any families driving smaller than a minivan or small suv/crossover, but that's just anecdotal. is the prius larger than the volt? i'll take your word for it, no argument there.

 

Sure, that's range anxiety. I have seen the chart for the Leaf. It said Leaf can still get 46 miles range in that condition, probably more than the Volt's ideal conditions. If the traffic jam is moving at 5 MPH, you'll be stuck there for 9 hours. That kind of jam is not realistic and implying it is just out of fear.

If a Leaf owner has 70 miles one way trip and ran into a dead heat traffic jam, he may have to call a toll truck. That simply mean he bought the wrong car.

As far as comparison between the Leaf and the Volt, we should use 40 miles trip.

 

'course, right after i post, i see Kathryn2010 is looking for a car seat.

 

Drive "most" of the time on electric? That presumes a primarily 20 mile commute. It'd be wonderful if GM would be forth coming about NON EV mpg's for the Volt. Many are saying the Volt non EV mpg secrecy is due to a disapointing number. I'm hoping the ICE mpg is as nice as the photoshoped dash pictures.

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Fair enough. These beasts are new. I did not mean to sound negative to the phv prius. The point of the thread was really about the interface which could use some improvement. A prettier screen is always welcome, and it would be nice to have more information which could easily be added to a high res display. Various modes that give the driver control like ev mode on the prius or mountain mode on the volt are good rather than bad things.

I think you misunderstood what I wrote there. A parrellel/series phev has efficiency advantages over a series phev when in charge sustain mode. The trade off is in complexity, weight, and cost during ev mode. Since toyota already had the hsd designed in the prius, simply using it lowers risk and design complexity and because of using the existing prius likely lowers cost. For other manufactures like gm this is a different story. I would rather talk about whether ideas are good or bad in and of themselves. Many of the criticisms of the good things on the volt seem to stem from gm making it instead of problems with the actual design.

 

Have you noticed how their promotion only mentions "commute" distance? What about driving somewhere else that same day? The devil is in the details.
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average commute distances would be interesting. please don't construe anything i say to infer that we will ever see a volt or what it would be like if we do. i am only going by what gm is putting out there, same as any other companies make claims with no production vehicles to back them up.

 

It may be more complex to mix and combine both drivetrains but I disagree the weight and cost.

A series requires electric powertrain as robust as an EV. That means big electric motor, powerful inverter and powerful battery to feed them. In the Volt's case, the system has to handle 150 hp. In addition, you need a powerful generator as powerful as the ICE.

HSD (Series-Parallel) should cost less because it only has 80 hp electric motor, less powerful generator (57 hp vs 74 hp) and lower power / lighter battery pack. Gas engine is a bit larger but the cost and weight is minimal compared to the expensive electrical propulsion.