As most of you have probably heard by now, General Motors has announced pricing for the Chevy Volt as their electric car nears launch. If you haven’t heard, it’s going to cost $41,000. Start filling that piggy-bank!
Color me a bit skepical about the Volt. Here’s how the car is going to work, if you are not in the know. It will run entirely on an electric motor. The car can be plugged into a standard outlet to charge this motor; it will travel up to 40 miles on a full charge. Once the battery has been exhausted, an eight-gallon gasoline tank powers a separate engine that kicks in to recharge the battery and keep the car going for about 300 more miles.
Many people have commutes of under 40 miles, so in theory, they could do all their daily driving without using a drop of gas. Here’s the obvious problem, though: that 40 mile number is under ideal conditions. These details come courtesy of hybridcars.com:
Edmunds’ John O’Dell yesterday took a brief test drive of the Volt, and grilled Volt Chief Engineer Andrew Farah. O’Dell discovered that the 2011 will indeed deliver 40 miles of battery-only range on the EPA city cycle, a driving circuit with an average speed of just under 20 mph. But the Volt’s battery range will be diminished under these conditions:
- Aggressive acceleration
- Sustain high-speed driving
- Exceptionally hot or cold ambient temperatures
- Driving in hilly or mountainous terrain
O’Dell writes, “If you pull out of the driveway with a full charge, hop on an uncrowded freeway and motor away at 65 miles an hour, you won’t get 40 miles on battery power alone.”
Basically, under any normal driving conditions, you won’t get anywhere close to 40 miles in before the gas tank gets used. It’s really impossible to know what sort of numbers will be the norm until this car gets into real-world use.
That’s not the only question that won’t be answered until this car gets into the wild. How long will these batteries last under normal use? GM is offering a generous warranty for them, at least. However, I will be very curious to see how many years the batteries can not only work, but work well and continue to hold a strong charge.
Furthermore, I wonder if this car is truly going to benefit the environment. A large amount of electricity in the United States comes from coal, so will this truly be much cleaner? Instead of having a belching tailpipe on the car, there will be a belching coal power plant miles away from the power outlet. I could see the benefit of an electric car if we had other viable electricity sources, but that’s simply not the case right now. Solar and wind are not viable on a large scale, and nobody wants nuclear near them.
From an energy standpoint, the argument can at least be made that the Volt and other electric vehicles help reduce our dependence on foreign oil. While there is some truth in that, it doesn’t appear that this is what the Volt is primarily being marketed as. The primarily appeal of the Volt is supposed to be its environmental benefits. Furthermore, if the goal was to reduce dependency on foreign oil suppliers, we have plenty of ability to expand domestic oil drilling easily and safely (and more cheaply than developing an electric car). That’s an argument for another time, but this isn’t the only fuel-related issue with the Volt.
The Volt is still going to use foreign oil if it’s being driven more than 40 miles (again, in ideal circumstances). Not only that, but it requires premium fuel, adding to the cost of the vehicle (more on cost in a minute). And if the driver drives short distances and recharges daily, that gas could sit unused in the tank for quite awhile – that can’t be good, either. In addition, I have some qualms about the conversion from gas to motion employed by the Volt. The gas is going to power an engine that will recharge the battery, which will in turn power the car’s electric engine. It seems to me that this can’t possibly be the most energy-efficient process; I’d imagine efficiency is lost along the way with the multiple conversions between heat, mechanical, and electrical energy.
Finally, I want to go full circle to the beginning of this post. My biggest issue with this car is the cost. The base price is $41,000, putting it well out of budget for most people. However, there is a $7,500 government rebate offered, which is of course paid for by the taxpaying public. The people that can afford the Volt likely don’t need this tax break, but we’ll be helping buy their electric cars anyhow. The middle and lower classes will be subsidizing the upper-class, and apartment dwellers who can’t reasonably charge a Volt will be subsidizing home owners. The rebate applies to all electric cars, but I’m especially frustrated by it in this case because GM has already been propped up by federal funds via the bailout. They’ve also received other federal funding to help them develop and build the Volt. Here’s a painful summary, courtesy of the New York Times:
Quantifying just how much taxpayer money will have been wasted on the hastily developed Volt is no easy feat. Start with the $50 billion bailout (without which none of this would have been necessary), add $240 million in Energy Department grants doled out to G.M. last summer, $150 million in federal money to the Volt’s Korean battery supplier, up to $1.5 billion in tax breaks for purchasers and other consumer incentives, and some significant portion of the $14 billion loan G.M. got in 2008 for “retooling” its plants, and you’ve got some idea of how much taxpayer cash is built into every Volt.
On top of that, nobody really knows yet how much a Volt’s actually going to cost to maintain, given the abundance of new parts it contains. There’s also the issue of increased electricity bills (and the aforementioned need for premium fuel when you want to travel more than 40 miles).
Maybe I’m being pessimistic and doubting a new technology. Maybe the early adopters will help bring the price down. Maybe the next-generation will be improved and gain footing in the general market. Maybe nuclear energy will finally take off and make an electric car worthwhile in terms of environmental impact…
…Whoa, I think I just dozed off for a second there. Back to reality. GM already struck out once, but we decided to give them another at-bat. Unfortunately for them, I think the Volt’s going to be another swing and a miss. And I think calling President Obama’s goal of one million plug-in cars by 2015 a pipe dream is an insult to pipes.