Maybe I’m contradicting my own earlier point a little here, but it is very possible to break even with a non-plug-in hybrid provided you do mostly city driving and do a damned lot of it. But your average hybrid buyer is (not to disparage present company) an eco-yuppie who either lives in the 'burbs and has an interstate commute or lives right downtown and hardly drives at all. Fleets are really the only large segment of the automotive market that regularly does the kind of driving that normal hybrids excel in. (I’ve sort of half-seriously said that since the last remnant of Checker recently went out of business, Toyota should buy the name up for cheap and start making classic Checker-styled cabs with Prius drivetrains). But fleet sales are low profit-margin and so if car makers can sell them to normal folks, they will.
A plug in hybrid with a significant range on electric-only conforms much more closely with actual peoples’ driving habits and so that break even point will come much closer for most “normal” drivers.
Also regarding the batteries, one of the surprises of the long-term experience with Priuses has been that the batteries appear to be for all practical purposes lifetime parts. There are plenty of first-generation Priuses still running around with their original batteries including ones used as cabs that have racked up many hundreds of thousands of miles. Not that they never go out, but they seem to be more like a transmission or something that might go out as the car gets old, as opposed to a wear-and-tear part with a predictable lifespan.
The current grid, strained though it is, is still adequate for supplying over half of the nation’s transportation needs. That probably sounds like a contradiction, but the key is that it’s only strained at peak usage, which comes during the day: Off-peak usage hardly makes any difference at all. And most electric (exclusively or plug-in hybrid) vehicles would be charged overnight.
Plug-in hybrids are definitely the way to go for the next few decades, until we manage to get electrical storage technologies to the point where you can go hundreds of miles on a charge (it’ll happen eventually). And it’s worth noting that even if the electric-only range is shorter than your commute, it’ll still stretch your gasoline pretty far. I’m just not sure that the Volt is the car that’ll make that happen.
A plug-in hybrid (or EREV to give GM’s preferred nomenclature a nod) is, at the right price point, going to appeal to a wider swath of Americans. I’d still prefer the simplicity of a true BEV, if the total cost of ownership was comparable: my household has another car for the road trip to drop off and pick up the college kid. And in truth most who will be the first several years market for these cars will also.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that the Volt is going to save GM based on sales volume, or even really that it’s going to end up profitable at all. But that was true of the early days of the Prius too-- Toyota was supposedly losing around $5,000 a car on the first-gen Priuses. Even though they became modestly profitable as the cost of making them came down and volume picked up, the real bonanza for Toyota has undoubtely been to their corporate image. Now considering that big car companies like GM and Toyota spend billions and billions of dollars a year on marketing to often questionable effect, the return Toyota got on that “investment” they made by selling hybrids at a loss was pretty darn good. That the car eventually became profitable and they did some extremely valuable R&D work in the process is just icing on the cake.
Hell, a big reason why GM got into this mess in the first place is that they spent so much money on marketing and so little on R&D and they fell behind in some key areas. If they start pissing away money on pie-in-the-sky projects like this instead of product placement in Transformers movies, Superbowl ads and crap like that they’re going to be all the better off for it, IMHO.
Well we just built an expensive solar array in my area so people can rest comfortably knowing they can recharge the Volt at night.
This is a cake that isn’t done baking yet. When the fast charge batteries hit the market and the power grid is upgraded to handle a fair number of the cars then these things will be great. Until then, a big thank-you to all the [del]beta testers [/del] buyers who take the plunge.
Dealers are already planning to price the Volt at thousands over sticker. GM will sell every one it can produce, and production will be increased to meet demand. This car is going to sell like hotcakes to the Prius crowd. It will be the ultimate status symbol for those who fancy themselves green, and it actually makes economic sense for a certain driving profile. It is a total game changer. It may save GM.
Since the car will be charged mainly at night when there is plenty of excess capacity, your “generating power” argument holds no water.
Check back in a year or two, and we’ll see who is right.
I don’t know about solar panels, but electric cars works great with wind mills (or an intelligent electric grid in general), since it tends to be more windy at night, so a mass of car batteries could work as a giant distributed battery soaking up the electricity that would otherwise have to be sold off at a very low price.
Yeah, and people will naturally avoid battery charging during the day based on the higher costs for power during the peak time. Also, as for the power generating infrastructure not being up to it, what’s envisioned in the future is a system whereby car batteries that are charged off-peak are utilized as buffers to the system during peak time when the car is not in use.
I linked to this “Smart Grid” DOE report (PDF) before in another thread - it makes for a good skim if you’re interested in such things:
Got a cite for that? I believe most wind occurs in the daytime when the solar energy is heating the atmosphere and pushing things around. That is sure true here in SoCal. As a cyclist, I often encounter wind in the daytime, but seldom at night.
I agree with this, as a niche product, a status symbol, this car can do very well.
No, it doesn’t.
I don’t think you can expect more than 40 miles per day of electric only travel. If you do that 5 days a week 50 weeks a year, that’s 10,000 miles electric only travel per year.
If you assume, for a modestly sized car, 33mpg, that’s 300 gallons of gas per year replaced by electric. Assume again that charging electrically saves you $2 per equivalent gallon of gas, you’ve saved yourself $600 per year. $600 per year in savings, and I have to pay thousands of dollars over a sticker price that’s already $15,000 more than a similar non electric vehicle. It’ll take you 25 years to break even.
If you want to assume more than 40 miles of electric travel per day, you also have to factor in $2,000 for a quick charging station, which effectively negates the additional gasoline savings.
You don’t need a quick charge if you drive more than 40 miles… The volt has a gasoline engine that can generate electricity to power the vehicle when the battery is depleted. In this mode the Volt averages 32 mpg according to a Popular Mechanics test drive. (The engine is not mechanically connected to the drive wheels. It powers a generator which charges the batteries and turns the wheels, a little like a diesel train engine)
Well it depends on what your assumptions are…But it is possible, though you have to make some unlikely assumptions.
The Volt uses about 8.8 kwh over its 40 mile electric-only range (the batt is 16.something kwh and operates something like between 30 and 85% state of charge). Assuming a charge efficiency of 80% (i have no idea what the charge eff is, 80% is a total wag on my part) and .10/kwh (its actually .07/kwh where I live, but I’ve also got some of the cheapest elec in the country), then it costs about $1.10 per every 40 miles. Depending on the comparison vehicle, residual value of the used cars, miles driven per day, and what the price of gas and electricity does over then next several years, its possible. I’m not making that bet, but it is possible.
I will bet that it sells pretty good, will lead to improvements that make future plug-in vehicles a more realistic alternative, and will spur competition (which it already has).
I was working for an automotive parts supplier to GM for some hybrid components a while ago (now I’m in a different industry altogether), and GM has made a huge investment in the technology development for the Volt. I seriously think the cost of future engineering and manufacturing of electric vehicles is going to be much reduced because of this investment. Its going to be an interesting next decade in the automotive industry, and I think the market for electric cars going to grow steadily.
This article describes a different way of making an electric car run without the problems associated with battery charge times. Essentially the idea is to have a removable battery pack that could be swapped in and out in the amount of time it would normally take to fill your car with gas. Imagine a car-wash-like building where you drive into one end with a tired battery and drive out with a freshly charged one.
Feasible?
That is a LOT of infrastructure to deal with. Rolling it out would be expensive, I think.
No, but if you want to drive much more than 40 miles per day off of grid electricity, having the ability to do a 4 hour charge is a big deal.
The problem is that you can only save money on the gas you don’t buy, and 40 miles per day just doesn’t save enough gas to justify $15,000+ of additional purchase price.
Honest question: Why wouldn’t you just use the gas engine after 40 miles? I don’t understand.
Depends on your assumptions and what vehicle you’re comparing it to. If you compare it to a vehicle getting 30mpg, $23,000, 4.00/gal gas, and .10/kwh, equal resale value, 80% charge efficiency, 40 miles/day driving, you could make up the $10,500 price difference in about 8 yrs. realistic? probably not. Possible? yes.
I’m not explaining it well. You can only save money on gas for the first 40 miles you drive every day. Once you pass that length of drive, you don’t save money anymore since you’re now burning gas, just like a regular car. If you want to save money on more than 40 miles of driving per day, you probably need access to a midday quick charge.
This is the point, even with assumptions like a $4 per gallon average price, and including a large tax credit, it’s still not realistic to think that the savings make up for the higher price.
This type of technology isn’t going to become widespread until it is realistic for an average driver to see some savings.
Right, maybe not realistic, but possible… I’m glad we agree then.
True. But I see the Volt as one of the vehicles that will help make it realistic for an average driver to see some savings. I think there is a market for the Volt (even if its not me). Enough people will say, “So what if the price savings on fuel don’t completely make up for the price?” They are willing to pay a premium to have the latest technology, or they just think it’s cool. For 2012 GM is upping the sales forecast from 30k units to 45k units (then again GM is always way optimistic on those kind of numbers)
Either way, even if it only sells 15k units/yr, it is new technology and is helping reduce the price for future electrics and plug-in hybrids. In that regard, I say it will be a success and is ‘game-changing’.
I realize that’s all modes, but I know if you dig around that site somewhere you can find the data for just auto commuters. The biggest number of car commuters drive somewhere between 5 and 10 miles one way, and the vast majority drive fewer than 25 miles. There’s another peak of “super commuters” who drive more than 40 miles each way and while they may represent a large number of miles driven, they don’t represent a large portion of drivers. Condolences if you have one of these commutes, but the fact is that most people don’t drive more than 40 miles a day. I think we can agree the Volt probably isn’t for super-commuters (they should probably look at diesels), but for most drivers it’ll be mostly electric-only driving.
Furthermore, even if you had (say) a 50 mile round-trip commute, so what if you run out of electricity on the way home? You’re burning gas for 10 miles instead of 50, or burning a third of a gallon instead of almost two gallons. That’s like moped commuting in mid-size car comfort and safety!
Another way to look at the numbers you guys have been throwing around is that driving the Volt out of electricity costs $1.10 in electricity, or $5.33 in gas if you drove the same distance. So every time you run the Volt out of juice you save $4.23. If you do indeed do this 5 days a week, you save about $1,100 a year. Even if you have a 100 mile commute and are running on gas most of the time. So if we take the $10,500 as the price difference, you break even a tad under 10 years.
Okay, I’ll grant you that’s probably about as long as most people keep a car for, but if you do like the gadget factor, or the “green” factor, or just like how the car looks/feels/drives, you can pretty easily justify buying it over a comparable mid-size car.
Again, do the same analysis for the lease option. $350/month 36 months. About the same as an Accord or a Camry.
Add in the value of your time not having to pull into a gas station every week and instead just plugging it in as you pullinto your garage. And fewer oil changes (none for pure BEVs) and fewer other maintenance visits and expenses … Me, I value my time. (Though one wouldn’t think it given the time I waste here!)
