# Chevy Volt - What Were They Thinking? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 22, 2012, 5:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515 "2012-03-22T17:01:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Chessic\_Sense](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/7c8e57/32.png) [@Chessic\_Sense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chessic_Sense)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/21 "2012-03-22T19:35:24Z")
Ohm an, that was bad. ---
**Author:** ![Rand\_Rover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/db5fbb/32.png) [@Rand\_Rover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rand_Rover)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/22 "2012-03-22T19:37:22Z")
Geez, I didn’t realize the tax credit was so much. There’s your $20k, OP. ---
**Author:** ![Lobohan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobohan/32/79_2.png) [@Lobohan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobohan)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/23 "2012-03-22T19:44:11Z")
These puns are reVolting. ---
**Author:** ![steronz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steronz/32/11765_2.png) [@steronz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/steronz)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/24 "2012-03-22T19:44:34Z")
> [@GEEPERS](#): > > my camry Why’d you buy a Camry over a Yaris? What an economic disaster! Do you know how long it will take to make up the difference there? Never! It’s like negative 25 years! And don’t tell me you bought it new and ate all that depreciation yourself… ---
**Author:** ![Rand\_Rover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/db5fbb/32.png) [@Rand\_Rover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rand_Rover)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/25 "2012-03-22T19:50:16Z")
> [@Rand\_Rover](#): > > Geez, I didn’t realize the tax credit was so much. There’s your $20k, OP. News flash–I’m an idiot. I was thinking that $7500 is about the tax on $20k of income, so. . . something. But really the value of a $7500 tax credit is just $7500. Back to your regularly scheduled programming. ---
**Author:** ![Jas09](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d07c76/32.png) [@Jas09](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jas09)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/26 "2012-03-22T20:08:12Z")
> [@GEEPERS](#): > > I get around 30 MPG with my camry, and I didn’t account for the cost to charge the thing. If my math is right, I use 833 gallons of fuel a year. At 5 bucks a gallon, that’s $4,165 a year spent on gas. Yeah, that’s what I got too (using 30mpg). Which means it’ll take 7.75 years to break even if you discount the tax credit. If you include it that drops to 6 years (you save about $2,840 a year on gas). It’s really not that bad a deal if you are likely to keep it for about 100k miles considering that it has quite a few more features than a $20k Camry. Any “overcharge” is probably mitigated by the early adopter “cool” factor, IMO. ---
**Author:** ![GreasyJack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/df705f/32.png) [@GreasyJack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreasyJack)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 8:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/27 "2012-03-22T20:12:01Z")
> [@Saint\_Cad](#): > > I priced out one electric car and for my driveing, it hits the break even point just in time to replace the battery. Oh really? What car is that? As far as I know none of the electric or hybrid vehicles have any set schedule for battery replacements and the experience with older Priuses and such has shown that the batteries will pretty much last the life of the vehicle. Not that they never fail, but it’s more like a transmission or something where failure becomes more likely with age, but is never really certain or even probable. Nissan has said with the Leaf that after 5 years or 60k miles there is a _slight possibility_ of individual modules failing, but that’s significantly cheaper than replacing the whole battery. And of course in the meantime you’ve saved thousands on oil changes, brake jobs, transmission services, etc. [QUOTE=erislover] Given replacement battery costs aren’t really coming down too fast, you’ll never come out ahead, period. [/QUOTE] It may be too soon to say with the Volt because they’re so new, but again looking at the experience with the Prius and other older PEV’s, replacement batteries have consistently become much cheaper after the vehicles have been on the market for a while. Part of it is because (see above) battery failure is extremely rare and so there’s a steady supply of used batteries out of wrecked cars, but there’s also cheaper rebuilt batteries and even the price of new factory replacements have been coming down steadily as technology improves. People have been spouting doom and gloom about EV batteries ever since the first-gen Prius and absolutely none of it has come to pass, even as many other companies have moved into the hybrid and electric market. I guess you could say maybe GM will be the ones to finally screw it up, but I wouldn’t really bet on it. ---
**Author:** ![erislover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/71e660/32.png) [@erislover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/erislover)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/28 "2012-03-22T20:13:42Z")
> [@Rand\_Rover](#): > > But it also comes with $20k worth of smug. Which explains a lot of vehicle purchases, actually. ---
**Author:** ![LonghornDave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@LonghornDave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LonghornDave)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/29 "2012-03-22T20:32:48Z")
> [@erislover](#): > > I think “oil barons” have had an effect, **xtisme**. If oil companies were regulated as heavily as electric companies, and at the same time, I’d be interested to see how things evolved differently. I don’t think there’s a massive conspiracy or anything, but the landscape is biased heavily towards gasoline and not electricity. The bias is simply that it is a whole lot easier to transport gasoline than it is electricity. ---
**Author:** ![erislover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/71e660/32.png) [@erislover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/erislover)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/30 "2012-03-22T21:30:31Z")
> [@xtisme](#): > > How are they regulated differently? Electric companies are heavily regulated by the federal government in the US. They were also very regulated by the states but deregulation efforts have taken much of that authority away. You can start [here](http://energy.about.com/od/federal/a/Energy-Law-A-Timeline-From-2001-To-2010.htm) though I thought this was common knowledge. > [@](#): > > What regulations do you think need to be put in, and why would it balance the equation wrt electric verse internal combustion using fossil fuels? Nothing now. It’s already done. > [@](#): > > The only way all of that built up momentum is going to be overcome is if the rising cost of oil gets to some point where other technologies CAN compete with them. Even all the deregulation efforts cannot overcome this momentum, especially since the electric grid was organized first to work in the regulated monopoly environment, not in the market environment. Predictably, deregulation [then created a lot of problems](http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/workshops/energymarkets/background/slocum_dereg.pdf) rather than solutions (warning: pdf). > [@](#): > > That’s because right now, and in the past they simply couldn’t…oil and oil based fuels are just cheaper and logistically support, and have been since pretty much the turn of the LAST century. Otherwise steam or hydrogen or all electric vehicles would have won the market and have dominated it ever since. The history of regulation in the electricity market means this conclusion cannot be supported that way. ETA: **LonghornDave** , this post explains the bias I refer to. It is not easier to transport oil at all. You only have to put up the grid once and maintain it to transport electricity. ---
**Author:** ![Procrustus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/procrustus/32/2994_2.png) [@Procrustus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Procrustus)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/31 "2012-03-22T22:10:33Z")
> [@GEEPERS](#): > > I’m a heavy driver averaging 25,000 miles a year also. > > . The Volt makes sense only if most of of driving is under 50 miles between charges. Otherwise, you’ll spend too much time in gas mode, which isn’t nearly as efficient. For long distance drives, a Prius gets much better mileage. We get between 46 and 50 mpg on our Prius no matter how far we’re going. So, the Volt is fine if you only occasionally go on a long trip, but if that’s your daily routine, I wouldn’t recommend it. ---
**Author:** ![LonghornDave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@LonghornDave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LonghornDave)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/32 "2012-03-22T22:17:25Z")
> [@erislover](#): > > ETA: **LonghornDave** , this post explains the bias I refer to. It is not easier to transport oil at all. You only have to put up the grid once and maintain it to transport electricity. Compare both the transportation of electricity plus the transportation of all of its raw materials (coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind) versus gasoline (or diesel) plus the transportation of its raw material (oil). ---
**Author:** ![erislover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/71e660/32.png) [@erislover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/erislover)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/33 "2012-03-22T22:25:06Z")
> [@LonghornDave](#): > > Compare both the transportation of electricity plus the transportation of all of its raw materials (coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind) versus gasoline (or diesel) plus the transportation of its raw material (oil). Compare the cost of reducing emissions on every single automobile with the cost of reducing it only at power generation stations. I mean we can go back and forth on this all day. These are very difficult to compare in a really meaningful way except in marginal dollars per mile, including expected maintenance and such but not purchase price, and we don’t really have a good gauge of what that will cost on the Volt yet. The only point I cared to make was that there was never really a market balance between electricity and fuel so it doesn’t really make sense to say one beat the other. ---
**Author:** ![AtomicDog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ac91a4/32.png) [@AtomicDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AtomicDog)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/34 "2012-03-22T22:25:14Z")
> [@Procrustus](#): > > I bought one two weeks ago. I was thinking of starting an “ask the Volt buyer” thread, but never got around to it. > > Buying a Volt is not about trying to get your money back in fuel savings to equal a $20,000 car. It’s an upscale car, and competes with $40,000+ vehicles. And, you get $7,500 tax credit and the ability to be “smug” about very low emissions. I’m getting 103.5 mpg since I bought it. This. It’s a $40,000 car. Compare it against $40,000 cars. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/35 "2012-03-22T22:30:30Z")
[QUOTE=erislover] Electric companies are heavily regulated by the federal government in the US. They were also very regulated by the states but deregulation efforts have taken much of that authority away. You can start here though I thought this was common knowledge. [/QUOTE] I’m sorry…maybe I worded that badly as you didn’t seem to understand the question. I wasn’t asking you how electric power is or was regulated in the past, nor the history of such regulation, I asked you how they are different, and what regulations you feel could be put on the oil industry (an international industry that is beyond regulation in the US) to balance the equation, in your mind, and put oil and electric personal transport (I assume this is what you are getting at) on the same basic economic footing. > [@](#): > > Nothing now. It’s already done. Ok…what regulations in the past do you see as being key to why oil and fossil fuels based products have dominated the personal transport industry? What COULD they have done in the past to make electrical vehicles competitive with hydrocarbon based vehicles? For the life of me, I have no idea what you think could have been done to make them competitive. Electrification of the transport grid? Surly you realize that even today’s technology doesn’t bring electrical vehicles even close to the performance and cost envelops of ICE technology??? > [@](#): > > Even all the deregulation efforts cannot overcome this momentum, especially since the electric grid was organized first to work in the regulated monopoly environment, not in the market environment. Predictably, deregulation then created a lot of problems rather than solutions (warning: pdf). Um…huh? Let’s pretend that there was zero regulation of either the oil or electrical industries. How does that make electrical technology for personal transport viable or competitive with hydrocarbon based technologies a century ago? Or are we talking about different things here? I’m talking about basically the fact that battery technology TODAY isn’t really competitive with ICE from a cost OR performance envelop perspective, let alone where things were in the early 20th century. And I can’t, for the life of me, see how regulation could have changed that at all, even assuming that folks a century ago would have even known about the environmental costs TO regulate emissions (I again assume this is what you are talking about…I’m genuinely not sure) and factor that into the overall cost equation. > [@](#): > > The history of regulation in the electricity market means this conclusion cannot be supported that way. The technology available, the real world costs and the performance envelop differences between electrical and hydrocarbon pretty much make this conclusion the reality we are at today. Even TODAY the technology just isn’t there even if we take cost out of the equation and say that hydrocarbon based tech really costs the same due to emissions and environmental damage. If you totally deregulated electrical power generation tomorrow it STILL wouldn’t change the fact that battery technology still doesn’t match performance of ICE technology, even at the highest end (i.e. something like the Tesla high end vehicles and battery tech). Unless you are talking about an electrified transport grid or something like that you need to be able to put the electricity into the car somehow…and if you are thinking electrified transport grid then you are talking about orders of magnitude difference in both initial capital costs for putting the thing in AND maintaining it. I must be missing something in all this because this doesn’t make any sense to me at all. -XT ---
**Author:** ![erislover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/71e660/32.png) [@erislover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/erislover)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 10:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/36 "2012-03-22T22:43:18Z")
> [@xtisme](#): > > Ok…what regulations in the past do you see as being key to why oil and fossil fuels based products have dominated the personal transport industry? It was oil’s lack of regulation which helped it. Electricity was heavily regulated with the predictable effect that it would never generate massive profits the way the market can, even commodity markets like oil. > [@](#): > > What COULD they have done in the past to make electrical vehicles competitive with hydrocarbon based vehicles? That’s not the point. The point is that **electricity and oil were never on equal footing in the market so you cannot claim that oil “won” via market forces**. What would happen if oil companies were as regulated as electricity, I don’t know. I suspect electricity would have won out, oil at best being used for remote work and as input for electricity generation. But I really don’t know. > [@](#): > > The technology available, the real world costs and the performance envelop differences between electrical and hydrocarbon pretty much make this conclusion the reality we are at today. I disagree. It may be that the internal combustion engine would still win out in the end but I think it is very hard to say overall. We’re talking about a counterfactual running over fifty years. I have absolutely no power to describe such a scenario, but it’s not really a big deal. I am only disputing that oil won the market. It didn’t, because of the history of electricity regulation. > [@](#): > > Even TODAY the technology just isn’t there even if we take cost out of the equation and say that hydrocarbon based tech really costs the same due to emissions and environmental damage. Obviously, if people abandoned the electric car first, and research was made for internal combustion, and then the electricity market was stagnated by regulation and could never fund this kind of research itself to commoditize its compliments, then clearly TODAY the technology wouldn’t be there. Is this not obvious to you? What would happen if history were different, I don’t know. Maybe things would be substantially similar. But that seems just as difficult to support. ---
**Author:** ![billfish678](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7bcc69/32.png) [@billfish678](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/billfish678)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2012, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/37 "2012-03-22T23:18:39Z")
[QUOTE=erislover;14892737The point is that **electricity and oil were never on equal footing in the market so you cannot claim that oil “won” via market forces**. What would happen if oil companies were as regulated as electricity, I don’t know. I suspect electricity would have won out, oil at best being used for remote work and as input for electricity generation. But I really don’t know. [/QUOTE] Its always been the power storage ability of batteries. They have been for decades absolutely horrible. Now they are just terribly bad. The fact they haven’t been cheap either was just another blow. Throw in convience factors and they have mostly been dogs except under a limited set of circumstances. Electricity could have been totally unregulated and I doubt that would have done squat for battery technology. Liquid fuels are just damn hard to beat when it comes to energy density. And the driver thats finally started pumping large sums of money into "a better battery"is not that electricity is cheap, its that fuel started getting expensive (and other needs like laptops and cell phones and such). How much cheaper do you think deregulated electricity would have been? I’d submit it could have been free and things wouldnt have been much different battery technology wise from our actual technological history. Honestly, you fixation on the regulation of the electrical industry as some bugaboo makes me think you don’t really understand the physics and engineering of the whole electric car thing. ---
**Author:** ![asterion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/4da419/32.png) [@asterion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asterion)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2012, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/38 "2012-03-23T00:20:14Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > So you’ll wait for electric cars to become more… current? [Obligatory button](http://yeahbutton.com/) I’d love a Volt, but I don’t have a way to charge it at home and I don’t have 40k to spend on any car. Get that down to 20k and me out of this apartment and I’m there. ---
**Author:** ![Chimera](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Chimera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chimera)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2012, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/39 "2012-03-23T00:35:31Z")
> [@AtomicDog](#): > > This. > > It’s a $40,000 car. Compare it against $40,000 cars. If I compare it to a $110,000 Mercedes, it looks even better! 😉 ---
**Author:** ![erislover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/71e660/32.png) [@erislover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/erislover)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2012, 11:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515/40 "2012-03-23T11:22:46Z")
> [@billfish678](#): > > How much cheaper do you think deregulated electricity would have been? I’m a runner, and you’re an average guy. We’re in a race. I tie your legs together and then we race. When I win, do you think it is fair to say I won because I was the better runner? > [@](#): > > Honestly, you fixation on the regulation of the electrical industry as some bugaboo makes me think you don’t really understand the physics and engineering of the whole electric car thing. You have failed to understand. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chevy-volt-what-were-they-thinking/616515.md?page=3)