The “fast charge” feature is now standard on the Nissan Leaf. It allows you to use a 480V fast-charging station which can charge the battery to 80% capacity in 30 minutes.
You can’t get a fast-charging station for your home though, because it needs something like 125 amps at 500 volts.
I wouldn’t buy a Volt because I have nowhere to plug it in and it just doesn’t make sense for us anyway. We are urban dwellers who don’t commute by car; I’m 43 and just bought my 3rd car ever a few months ago. (The first was a used beater for grad school, and the second was bought new and driven for 14 years, and I finally sold it to a friend’s relative when I found out it needed repairs that were about half its book value, plus Tom Scud’s knees barely fit under the wheel - legroom wasn’t an issue for my 5’1" self when I bought it.) We just drive them until they die.
We ended up with a Nissan Juke because after being hit head-on by an SUV, we wanted something a bit higher off the ground than the old Sentra, but with hauling space with the rear seats folded down. (That, and our parking spot is in teh alley, and with all the SUVs and trucks and vans in this neighborhood, we’ve had more than a few near misses pulling out of the alley because of poor visibility.) We average about 5k miles/year, so the math didn’t make sense, but if we drove even 10k or 12k miles a year, we totally would have bought a Prius. We wanted a bit more space than the old '97 Sentra, good gas mileage, and a hatchback with rear seats that folded flat, and those were about the only things we cared about. If the Prius C had been out yet when we bought the Juke, we very well might have gone with that instead.
For the life of me I can’t understand why, with all the 2-car suburban households who actually buy new cars, at least one of the 2 isn’t a hybrid, if not an electric.
there’s also an upper bound on how rapidly you can charge lithium-ion cells (well, this is true for any rechargable cell.) Trying to force it in too fast is bad for them, they’ll overheat, swell, and possibly ignite.
Two-car suburban household replying here. The reason why is economics.
My wife owns a Honda Accord which is our main car and her “going to work” car. It’s a dull-normal four-passenger sedan which is comfortable on long trips and works fine as a main car.
When it came time for us to purchase a second car for me we bought a new Honda Fit. As I recall, the Fit cost $17,000 (with no government rebate). I get 30MPG with it (which is a bit less than the stated MPG by about ten percent, but that’s about normal). It easily does 75MPH on the highway when I’m the only one in it, and when I fold down the rear seats it’s never failed to carry whatever I need to haul.
On the negative side, it can hardly get out of its own way when filled with passengers, and on long trips (say, the six hours it takes us to cross Pennsylvania) the harsh ride starts to get not-fun. But neither event happens very often with a second car.
A pure electric car wouldn’t make it to some of the golf courses I play and back, so they’re out. A hybrid would get me there and back, but why would I spend $40,000 on a second car when a car like the Fit (and it has plenty of worthy competitors) costs less than half that?
Why do you think a hybrid would cost you $40k? They seem to start around $19k, and it shouldn’t take too much driving to make up the not-huge price difference in gas savings.
Obviously only you know what your car-buying criteria are, but even if a hybrid in the low $20s isn’t the right choice for you, I am failing to understand why there aren’t more people for whom it’s a good choice. Heck, I am now wishing we’d been able to wait a few months to replace the Sentra - we totally would have gone for the Prius C, because even with as little driving as we do, the math would have worked out.
Yes, we’ve had the conversation before and I explained in great detail why it’s the same technology as the Prius plus additional batteries.
To say that the technology is new is like saying Ford’s 4 cylinder direct injected dual cam engine is new technology compared to Chevy or any other car maker with a similar engine. GM has invented nothing new.
I like the idea of a electric car, but the technology just isn’t there yet. For the United States in the near term the best solution is cars powered by compressed natural gas. This would reduce oil imports and our carbon emissions. For people who already have Natural Gas in their homes they would be able to fuel at home.
If we build enough nuclear reactors to generate electricity, then ammonia is another energy source. We can use the reactors to generate ammonia and use ammonia to power out vehicles.
In the very near term, Ford already has a 3 cylinder engine that gets over 50mpg with a Focus that they are selling in Europe and plan to sell in the US next year.
Of course electric cars could move back to the front burner if they perfect the Lithium-Air battery. That would give a power density per pound comparable with gasoline.
I think you misread what was said. sevenwood specifically mentioned Hybrids as an alternative. The questioned asked was why spend $40 when $20 gets the job done.
Of course, the Volt looks a lot sexier but $20k buys another Prius so it’s a two-for.
But nobody was talking about spending twice as much for a functionally equivalent car. The hybrid equivalent of a Honda Fit doesn’t cost $40k, or even close. I just tried to come up with a hybrid that cost $40k on the Toyota website, and you’d have to be looking at the top trim Prius with all kinds of bells and whistles (almost all of them, in fact) to hit $40k. But the Prius is a much bigger car than the Fit, so it’s apples and oranges.
Consider that the Volt is really aimed at an older version of you. You’ll be buying one sooner than you think.
And have you seen the Summer Rain Metalic Prius?
Eh, I’m 43 with no kids and not planning to have any, and it’s pretty rare that I have more than 2 people in the car, and I’m not seeing a house in the burbs in my future for all sorts of reasons. Most of the jobs in my field are in the Loop, not in the burbs, and therefore a train commute from here, not a drive - you’d have to be a real glutton for punshment to drive to the Loop every day and spend hundreds of dollars a month on top of that to park.
I don’t think the Volt is aimed at me, or even me in 5 or 10 years, but it may very well be aimed at people in my demographic who have made different lifestyle choices.
I like the Juke and all, but the mileage certainly hasn’t been as advertised. I wasn’t willing to spend an extra $5k to get a functionally (for us) equivalent Prius, but the new ones are basically the same capital outlay that we made for the car we did buy.
New patents say otherwise, your point here is not supported where it counts, that is at the patent office and by more experienced judges of new car developments as it was already posted.
http://www.earthtechling.com/2011/04/gm-racks-up-cleantech-patents/
That’s interesting. I was referring to batteries that took a charge faster. micro drilled holes in the anode. something like that.
The volt uses an ice motor and 2 electric motors set against a planetary gear set (same as the Prius). GM set up the gearing combination supposedly to favor electric mode versus ice mode to gain a couple of miles off the batteries. They matched efficiencies to the electric motor vs the ice motor. Big deal. Tell me how this differs from a Prius with additional batteries. it’s virtually the same combination of motors coupled to a planetary gear set.
If you compare it to recent ice engine developments the Fiat eltro-mechanical hydraulic valving system is a much more innovative achievement.
There’s also an upper bound (of sorts) to how much energy you can transmit through an insulated copper wire handled by untrained humans. 500V and 125A is pushing the limit. I don’t think you can push the voltage up, you can maybe double or triple the amps before the wire gets too thick to reasonably handle.
Even then, a small charging area with a couple dozen spots would have to be built into an electrical substation to handle the load.
Well the reality that loans were only $6.7 billion and those were paid back, admittedly using escrow money to do so. But there are not loans outstanding; the rest of the bail out is in equity. More detail here.
And again, investors want more than record profits; they want to perceive that the company is positioning itself well for the future. The market is not so convinced. It’s been a very effective disinformation campaign.
Once again, not what others with more experience see. And you are actually now showing that it was just plain ignorance of the innovations to the propulsion system. A big deal in the real world regardless of your opinion.
splain it then Lucy. There is nothing new in the design. It is virtually the same layout as a Prius except they changed the order of the coupling on the planetary gear tranny. Your cite didn’t list any patents of worth. Car companies are knocking out patents every day on every little change they make.
So by that thinking the Honda Insight and the Toyota Prius were nothing new as there have been hybrid buses and train engines for over 40 years?
Meh, it should be easy then to complaint to the patent office to nullify them and request the experienced Europeans and Canadians to withdraw their judgment on what is new technology.
As I have seen, don’t hold your breath expecting changes just because of your opinion.