cts | Volt a Day | Fuel On Board September 29, 2010

This is my first Internet news scoop. As far as I (and Google) know, this information is not yet on the Internet.

My hope is that I will only burn gas in my Volt once a month or so. We'll see how that goes once I start driving one. (Supposedly that will be October 24th or a little after.) That means that I will be carrying gas around with me for no reason. In fact, I posted about this earlier, having read a very interesting article about the fuel system.

But how much gas?

GM is a little cagey about that. I think because they have been talking about range numbers before they are allowed to talk about mileage numbers. I don't think they can talk MPG until the EPA has done their evil poking, but they want to talk about the car. So they say it can go 40 miles on battery and 260 additional miles when the gasoline-powered generator kicks in. Some things I have read say an additional 300 miles when you are in extended-range mode.

Everyone online seems to want to know what the MPG is in extended-range mode. That seems sort of silly, since it's not meant to drive that way very much, and I believe that most people will buy it because they hope to be in EV mode at least 80% of their annual driving. Personally, I'm hoping to be electric 95% of my miles.

The gas tank on the Volt is 9.3 gallons, just a little smaller than the 11.9 gallons I have on my Prius. I really don't think that's meaningful, or at least not meaningful for this first generation of cars. In order to get the Volt developed as quickly as possible GM chose a gasoline-powered engine which was already designed and tested. I would have made that same decision. In a future Volt-platform car I could imagine a clean-diesel engine, purpose-built for the platform, which allowed better MPG in extended-range mode.

One of the cars I drove at the Milford Proving grounds was an executive's own car. She had already been commuting in it for a couple weeks. On the display (I love to play with the displays) it said: "Lifetime mileage: 93.1mpg" I think that's what people are going to be seeing. And I hope to do a lot better than that.