GM may market a new range for Volt - UPI.com The Volt is to be marketed with a 50 mile range. The studies GM did said 80 percent of people drive less than 40 miles a day. When the battery runs down, the engine takes over for the next 3000 miles.
To get some of the similar options like GPS navigation screen, DVD and premium audio the cost for a similar Cruze is more like $24,000. Your point is valid however, the Volt is expensive.
If a super-commuter can plug in and charge while they are at work, then it’s even better. Once EVs and plug-in hybrids become more widespread, I think charging stations at parking garages and shopping centers will become commonplace.
This is kind of what I’m getting at. A 10 year payback doesn’t make economic sense. You also only get this level of payback if you drive the Volt 40+ miles per day. If you only drive 20 miles per day, you’ll save half this amount, for a 20 year break even point.
It is simply not more economical than a standard car, not at these price points, regardless of how you drive. I do think the prices will start to come down as the technology matures, then you’ll have an argument for buying one based on it being cheaper instead of simply greener.
BTW, for leases, I’m seeing the Accord and Camry advertised no money down $250/mo for 3 years. If you figure you can save $100/mo in gas that’s a wash, but the Volt is $2,500 down, so that’s the premium you’d pay. Definitely a smaller premium than an outright purchase, and there’s less risk on the residual value side, not too bad a deal.
What would be the expected maintenance for an electric car like the Volt? Is the drive train simpler?
Easier to answer for true battery electric vehicles:
It also costs a lot of money to charge them up if you are out driving around. No gas station, no store owner, nor anybody else, is going to let millions of strangers plug into their electric outlet for free. Electricity is not free.
Who knows what it will cost to buy a full battery charge of electric every other day, and nobody has any money to build the infrastructure all over America to charge electric cars - it would cost trillions of dollars to build enough charging stations to make them as common as gas stations. It is just ridiculous.
More realistic would be an employer who offers as a benefit to employees that they can plug in while they’re at work. It’s rare to spend a long enough time at any place other than work or home that plugging in anywhere else would be practical.
And again, the difficult part of the infrastructure already exists, and for night charging at least, is adequate.
I have not seen a Volt in person yet, so I can’t really say what I think of it. But I saw these same comments about the Prius back when I bought mine and they make no sense. The Prius is not a luxury car nor is it an econo-box. These kinds of analysis are almost as absurd as that study that tried to show that Hummers were more environmentally friendly than hybrids.
I paid the $23.5k sticker price on my Prius and got $3200 back as a tax credit and a sticker letting me drive in the car pool. That means for the same price my wife paid for her Jetta I got a bigger car, with more headroom, more storage space, and a peppier ride. I didn’t get leather heated seats or a sun roof, but she didn’t get a power seat or a back up camera. And she definitely didn’t get the car pool sticker, which last time I looked upped the resale of the car by $5000. I also got about 52 mpg (actual calculated by miles driven and gallons into the tank) to her <30 mpg which has saved me over $10k over the course of the 85k miles I have driven the car. Battery is still fine, and has 15k more miles of warranty. After that warranty is out, I might look into to upgrading the battery to make it a plug in. The last time I looked that was about $5k and had a range of 30 miles. Since my work has charging stations I could reduce my fuel consumption by almost 3/4s.
For me, driving the Prius does make economic sense. A Yaris is not practical with two toddlers. The Prius is about as small as I am willing to go. And I can afford to have a nice car, and not a box on wheels.
I actually think Tesla is doing it right. Pay for the R&D and development with a high end car. The Tesla roadster is $110k competing with $50-80k cars. In that price range people pay tens of thousand for the right decal. Their next car will be a sedan that seats 7 and can go up to 500 miles per charge, with a battery that can charge in 40 minutes or be swapped out in 10. It will be 50-65K and have features similar to 35-50k luxury cars. If the deal the worked out with Toyota delivers, they could be producing mass market cars in three years.
But there’s plenty of places we could put them that already exist and make sense. There’s no reason that gas stations and truck stops couldn’t install some sort of quick-charge system or a quick-exchange setup. Not to mention fast-food places like McDonald’s. Say it takes 30 minutes to charge up after about 300-400 miles. Charge your car, get a Big Mac, and by the time you’re done eating your car is ready to go.
I need a new car, but the Volt is not for me, at least not right now. It’s more than I can afford (but so is any 30k+ car), I don’t want to lease, and most importantly, I rent and have no good way to plug it in, so I’d spend the whole time using the generator. But if I can make it a couple more years before needing a new car, I have a good way to recharge it, and the Volt takes off and is still available, I would seriously consider one. At least take it for a test drive and see if I like it.
Actually, it is far easier to install a charging station anywhere with electricity than it would be to build and maintain gas pumps. I could see them popping up at truck stops, motels, rest areas, and other places someone going for a long trip might want to stop.
The home-spun plug in kits don’t give you an electric-only range of 30 miles, they just boost the fuel economy for 30 miles. The actual electric-only range on them is more like 10 miles, and you can’t go any faster than you can in a normal Prius’ creep mode. When Consumer Reports tested one, they got about 60% better mileage (67 mpg vs. 42 mpg), but after the first 30 miles it dropped to 40 MPG. Their conclusion was that with the cost of electricty factored in, it was about 20% cheaper to run than a normal Priuselectricity (in the first 30 miles) but that it would be darn-near impossible to recoup the $10k price tag in most situations.
I would be really skeptical of the $5k kit. There are hucksters out there selling kits that don’t upgrade the batteries significantly and can actually cause damage in addition to not really improving the mileage. I suppose it’s possible that they are benefiting from the same improvements in battery technology that are making the Volt and Toyota’s plug-in Prius possible, but it doesn’t really pass my sniff test that some new upstart company scooped both the major auto makers and the established plug-in conversion people who are still selling $10-20k kits.
I could imagine a future in which when your old-fashioned non-plug-in hybrid’s battery finally bites the dust, getting an upgraded battery and a plug in kit to make it a Volt-like vehicle becomes a common procedure. But that technology simply hasn’t trickled down from the huge companies yet. And I like entrepreneurship as much as the next guy but realistically when the conversions are ready for prime-time, they’re probably going to be made by Delco or Nippondenso or some other huge auto parts company-- not some guy in a garage in California. They’ll still have the business putting them in, but they just don’t have the leverage to get the lower priced components.
A reasonably critical review of the vehicle.
I am hoping that a reasonable kit with new firmware will be available when the battery does bite the dust. For now, I would not even consider it until the warranty on the hybrid train expires unless it came from Toyota.
I think the big hold up right now is this is too big a part for a major player to invest in before a demand exists. If battery prices come down, or as the market matures, I expect to see more players in the after market upgrade business.
I will buy a car I can plug in when I next buy a car (although my 2003 Civic hybrid is doing me just fine for the foreseeable future) but I am not so sure the Volt will be the way I would go.
Well at only 10,000 units they will sell at the premium even without me. And they will lease better than they sell. Will they get the price down or will gas go high enough to make it a more cost-effective choice, enough to justify ramping up to 50K/yr production or more? Not sure. It’s getting competition from two directions:
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Comparable ICE only cars (or HEVs for that matter) are still cheaper in total cost of ownership. And while you save maintenance and parts wear on a pure BEV, this thing seems to have many moving parts, which will need to maintained and repaired. The lease option gets it in the ballpark though. A couple of hundred more than an Accord per year and hardly ever stop for gas again … and feel good that you are sticking it to the oil companies and the oil producers … doing your part to make us less beholden to those countries. That feeling is worth a couple of hundred a year.
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Pure battery electric vehicles (BEVs), like Nissan’s Leaf at under $26K after tax rebate, and soon to come, Ford’s BEV Focus. Until fast charge is available on interstates there will be some who will not get these, but a many tens of thousands can be sold each year to those with another car to go cross country with, or who are willing to rent for that once in five year occurrence. For those of us who fit that profile, and who do not want to lease, a car anyway (the battery may be another story*), the Volt’s extra $7K to buy freedom from range anxiety and freedom to drive cross country when we want in that car, may be too much. Part of the attraction of a pure BEV is the fewer moving parts. If the battery lasts the car should last for decades with little need for scheduled maintenance in addition to never having to stop at a gas station.
*Nissan’s partner, Renault, apparently plans that approach:
How would the lease work? You have people ready to lease for $350 a month through GMs financing deal, and others queing up ready to pay $10,000 over sticker. Won’t the dealer be able to collect the $10,000 from the lease customer as an addition to the $2500 down that is part of the lease deal from GM? Not much of a deal (or a lease) if I have to put $12,500 down.
I hope I am looking at this wrong somehow.
[quote=“Strassia, post:48, topic:557643”]
I paid the $23.5k sticker price on my Prius and got $3200 back as a tax credit and a sticker letting me drive in the car pool. That means for the same price my wife paid for her Jetta I got a bigger car, with more headroom, more storage space, and a peppier ride. I didn’t get leather heated seats or a sun roof, but she didn’t get a power seat or a back up camera. And she definitely didn’t get the car pool sticker, which last time I looked upped the resale of the car by $5000. I also got about 52 mpg (actual calculated by miles driven and gallons into the tank) to her <30 mpg which has saved me over $10k over the course of the 85k miles I have driven the car. Battery is still fine, and has 15k more miles of warranty. After that warranty is out, I might look into to upgrading the battery to make it a plug in. The last time I looked that was about $5k and had a range of 30 miles. Since my work has charging stations I could reduce my fuel consumption by almost 3/4s.
For me, driving the Prius does make economic sense. A Yaris is not practical with two toddlers. The Prius is about as small as I am willing to go. And I can afford to have a nice car, and not a box on wheels.
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Judging by testimonials like yours, the volt might make sense for some people, and that is probably all you need. Pretty much any model is really only an option for a sub-set of the car buying public. Somebody wants 4wd, someone wants a couple, someone wants a full size sedan, whatever. If a model is in the running for 5% of the market, it is probably a viable economic proposition.
Where do you live that the carpool sticker is worth $5000 in resale? Here in Massachusetts the value of the HOV lane is close to zero. But I see a lot of people driving around in the Prius.
My brother’s family and mine are running more or less accidental side by side tests of hybrid vs conventional. I have a Highlander Hybrid, my wife a Honda Pilot. Very comparable cars. She gets about 20mpg in mixed use, and I get about 26. We are saving about $400 in gas per year on the hybrid. The premium I paid for the highlander was around $5500, net of the tax credit (now expired, I think). When I bought the car, I thought the payback might be 8-10 years, now it looks like it will be more like 12-15 years.
My brother has a Prius and his wife a Camry. He insists they are comparable, I am not so sure, but whatever. He gets around 40mpg on the Prius and she gets around 25 on the Camry. The original prices were only about $3000 different. They are saving about $600 a year, so they are getting a payback in some reasonable amount of time, even with gas prices in the $2.50 to $3.00 range. Problem is, I don’t think the Prius is the same class of car as the Camry. The Corolla
So YMMMReallyV on the Hybrid vs Conventional, and I am sure this will be true for the electrics, only more so, and initially in the US for a small subset of the market.
I am confused by some of this as well. In the last twenty years, I have not had a single engine repair. Most of the maintenance on my cars have been for things that are not the engine. Brakes, tires, wheels, steering, A/C, etc. All of which you have on the EVs, right?
I can see that if I bought an EV I could avoid two or three maintenance visits a year, and I would trade this for having to recharge every day. If I have a pure BEV, no recharge, no car. In case of a volt, don’t I have a gasonline powered generator that I am carrying around. Having had a generator for the last six years, I can tell you that it is not maintenance free. Has lots of moving parts.
After reading through this thread it seems like pepole are picking us the desirable features of the pure BEVs, Hybrids and whatever-you-call-the-Volt and comparing that to a conventional car. You have to look at the pluses and minuses of each type separately.
routine maint. on gas engines and transmissions (pure electrics don’t have nearly as many moving parts) is considerable. There are regular intervals at 30k, 60k etc for things like fuel injector cleaning, o2 sensor replacement, transmission fluid change, air filter replacement in addition to oil changes. I’m gonna WAG on about 3-5K extra maintenance on an internal combustion in a 5 year period. That stuff should be included in all this napkin math.
Solar panels on the garage would eliminate a lot of the drawbacks. If you drove less than 40 miles a day,and more than 80 percent do, it would be almost free.
For the Volt, the battery can store a total of ~16kwh. A “full” charge would take the battery from about 30% state of charge (SOC) to 85% SOC. The battery only operates at 30-85% SOC to prolong its life, and has electronics that assure it operates in this range.
That means a “full” charge is about 8-9 kwh. During charging at home, I assumed that 80% of the electricity gets stored in the battery, and the other 20% powers electronics or gets wasted as heat. (80% seems reasonable to me, but its a guess… if someone knows a better, i’d love a better number) Your home electric meter would register 11 kwh or so for a “full” charge. If you are billed $0.10/kwh (I actually get billed less than this in KY) the price would be ~$1.10 for a full charge.
GM claims the electric-only range of the Volt is 40-50 miles. We don’t know how realistic this is yet, because not enough people have driven the Volt in real world circumstances, and GM has not always been 100% accurate with their claims. Most articles I’ve read so far seem to support the 40 mile claim, so I’ll go with that for now.
Therefore, ~$1.10 gets you 40 miles. So even if you had a car that got 40mpg, you will pay something like $2.70-3.00 for a gallon of gas to go the same distance. Unfortunately, as has been discussed, the fuel savings probably do not currently make up for the initial cost of the Volt unless you fit a very specific driving profile, and gas prices jump above $4.00/gal over then next few years. That’s not to say one shouldn’t buy it, just that if your only reason for buying it is to save money its probably not going to.
The volt comes with “a portable 120 V unit (R) that can be plugged into any standard receptacle. It will be able to recharge the car fully in 6 hours at 12 amps or 8 hours at 8 amps.”–Source. There is an optional 240V “quick” (3 hr) charge station at $2000, but since the Volt also runs on gas, I wouldn’t expect ‘stations’ to be needed. People will just charge at home overnight with the included 120V charger and get gas on the road if needed.
The adoption of electric cars will be gradual. While the electrical grid would probably need upgraded for large quantities of electric cars, I expect that will happen as the electric cars gain market share. I wouldn’t be surprised if, at some point, a car/road tax gets added to electricity used for transportation, but that seems at least a few years off for now.