The Volt is a hybrid. It uses gasoline. Without the gas it can go 40 miles without a long recharge. Wow, thats practical!
Just to make clear. The fact that GM sucks or consumers are dumb, has nothing to do with battery technology. Once portable electronics started going crazy in the 80's, battery technology has been R&D'ed full tilt. Don't you think Sanyo or Sony sees good it would be to have a laptop battery that can work for 48 hours without being plugged in? Or a phone that does not need to be charged for a year? This is the level of performance we need to have a car that can equal a gas car.
As much as i would like it to be, electric cars are not THE answer. It doesn't solve the pollution or the foreign oil problem because much of electricity is created by burning fossil fuels, anyway. And, to make up the difference, oil companies will over charge you for electricity. It's more important for us to become more efficient in transporting energy than it is to find "different" ways to consume it.
The vast majority of drivers drive less than 40 miles a day. It would work without using any gas for the majority of people - maybe not in Houston since it's so spread out, but in most other cities, it's fairly practical. And then the gas is only a backup so you don't have a car that can only go 40 miles at a time.
40 miles is an estimate based on a test based on who knows what. How many people here get their EPA MPG? Not I! Also with every cycle battery cells go downhill. Anyone notice how their year old notebook no longer runs for 4 hours on a battery?
I get the EPA with my Honda Odyssey van. So what is your point? There's a huge market for electric cars that can drive around town and commute to work. You don't need "space age" batteries for that. You simply need them to be built, and sold at a reasonable price.
Which EPA? City? Cause thats what i average when I do mixed driving. The thing you did not get from my first post is, THEY CANNOT BE BUILT FOR A REASONABLE PRICE! The good ones, Li-Ions, require huge balancing circuits. The Volt that can only go for 40 miles has 220 cells! that is 220 possibilities of a cell going bad and needed bigtime repair. why bigtime repair? because to make the battery small it has to be hard to change one cell. To make it easy to change one cell it has to be huge and heavier. It also weighs almost 400 pounds and Li-Ion offers the BEST in terms of power to weight ratio right now.
Another thing I would like to mention is Li-Ions do not last forever. If your pack has the ability to barely get you to work, go to lunch then come home, that means you need to charge every night. Basically after a year of that your battery will be toast. Cycle life is based on how many cycles (discharge then charge) the battery can do till it has only 75% or 80% of its initial capacity. These batteries lasting a year and going downhill for that year of service is not gonna work. No one will be willing to swap their battery (3.5K or so) once per year.
How much will in cost in terms of electricity to recharge the battery? Will it be worth the savings in gas? I want a Chevy Volt, but I'd have to give it a few years on the market before I would buy one.
I'm not sure about the pollution problem, but I think (if electric cars become popular) it would help the foreign oil problem, as the % of oil used for electric production is miniscule. Coal, nuclear, hydro and natural gas account for around 90% of US electricity production.
I don't have the exact figures, but the price of the electricity would be much cheaper compared to gas. Whether you'd save enough on gas to compensate for the high price of the volt is another thing.
Window is the wrong word choice on my part. It'll take a while before all the existing cars are converted to a zero emission model. Full conversion could take 40 years. In the meanwhile, there are a lot of competing technologies that could make the current hybrid model obsolete. Certainly no excuse not to upgrade, but the current battery model isn't as clean as it could be once production impacts are factored in.
That would reduce my gas consumption tremendously....I live and work blocks from home and from where my kids go to school...close enough to most of the things I do on a weekend for entertainment that it wouldn't be a problem. I could literally go months without buying gas.
There are some battery technologies out there that are still in very early R&D stages that can be potentially 10 times more powerful than Li-ion batteries, based on things like carbon nanotubes. http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/nanowire-010908.html It's definitely far from being able to commercialize right now, but who knows how far technologies like this would go in 10 years? It took about 10 years from the invention of transistors to semiconductor based computers, and then in another 10 years personal computers were out there on the market.
I get around 20 in the city and around 24 on the highway, which was the EPA when I bought it. Obviously, if I drive like a lunatic, the mileage can change!
