cts | Volt a Day | Not a Real EV October 12, 2010

Oh dear. This is just all over the Internet today. The first two times I spotted it (Engadget and their sister site about cars) I wrote a comment. That follows this short entry.

There is some very complex engineering in the Volt. Enough for there to be a patent on the drivetrain. I am pretty sure that patents are a good sign of innovation (I hold one myself in the realm of community building on the Internet). The engineering behind propulsion has to follow the same natural laws that everything else does. And the demands on an American car are sort of astonishing. It has to sit in stop-and-go traffic and travel at speeds close to a hundred miles an hour. It has to be happy in temperatures forty degrees below zero and one hundred thirty above. Crazy extremes.

Highway speeds are one of the bugaboos for electric motors. You are spinning them up near the edge of their efficiency. Our EV1 was amazing up to 65mph and the last 10mph up to 75mph really sucked the batteries down. That wasn’t a problem, we simply adjusted our driving style, turned up the music, and were happy to spend another thirty seconds getting to our destination. It was such a wonderful car that it was fine to be riding for another minute or two. If it was a short drive (down to the airport and back) I would sometimes blast along anyway, figuring the batteries could use a little stretching now and then.

It turns out that the Volt will kick on the Internal Combustion Engine and allow it to contribute to the drivetrain above 70mph if the batteries are low enough. With a forty mile range I would think just a couple minutes at 75mph would get them low enough to require the ICE, but I will let you know what the real-world testing reveals.

There are engineers who could enlighten you about all of this. I know that if you restrict an ICE to a very narrow power range (high RPM), and don’t ask it to provide the passing power, they can become much more efficient. I have another entry with a link to a very technical article about the drivetrain. It doesn’t really matter to me.

What will matter is the real world testing, and I’ll report all of the gritty details here. Is it possible that the 10.6 mile drive to LAX on surface roads will stay all-electric while the 15.1 mile drive on the 405 would not? Yes. But let’s find out.

The Volt is a possible replacement for my Prius. The plug-in Prius that they are talking about would still burn gas during my weekly drives. My current Prius can’t get down the street to Starbucks without kicking on the ICE. I play hyper-miling games with it and with the factory firmware it is pretty hard to pretend it is an EV. I expect the Volt to be the other-way-around, and the game will be to figure out what kicks the ICE on instead.

A lot of the comments I read kept saying, “This is a deal breaker!” Oh, please. This is a cutting edge technology. My guess is that there will be quite a few buyers that will need to wait to see how their neighbors like the car. I think that’s okay. Those people had to wait to see what cell phones were like, too. And they weren’t so sure about this new “email” thing. They will see their brother-in-law or niece tool around in a Volt for a few months and then say, “Oh, I see, that’s certainly a fine way to get around...”

Phil Colley wrote a very clear piece about it. And he has a picture of the red car, which is the best looking of the bunch.

Is it an electric car? If it doesn’t burn any gas for my daily driving, it is an electric car.

I am very aware of the problem of wrongness on the Internet, best explained by XKCD, so I try not to get too involved in discussions in comments on articles. But I have been unable to not respond to a few posts that were simply misguided (as opposed to the flame-bait by trolls, which I have learned to skip over).

Comment for the web:

Who knew electric cars were going to create so much fervor?

I drove an EV1. Then a GenII EV1. GM took them both away and crushed them, so I turned to a Japanese manufacturer and bought a Toyota Rav4 Electric. That's got 66,000 miles on it so far.

GM invited me to drive the Volt in its pre-production form. I was impressed. It was a lot like the EV1 that I loved so much. Now they have invited me to be on the Consumer Advisory Board for the Volt. They'll give me a Volt for three months and I will tell them why it sucks. But only if it sucks. There is not NDA or agreement about what I can post online about the car. I believe the first week iFixIt is going to come over and take the entire car apart.

I try to blog about it every day on http://voltaday.com and I'll be Tweeting from the same (Voltaday). Because of my previous experience with the car company, I would count myself as an extreme skeptic. But, I will say that so far, having driven the car about twenty miles in two different locales and builds (pre-production and a production version), I have been extremely impressed.

The gas engine connecting to the wheels over 70mph is not a surprise to me. It makes a lot of sense (you can keep the RPMs steady on the ICE at that point), so that should work out well. We'll see. I hope to make it through a regular week without burning a gallon of gas.

I'm taking delivery of the car Oct 25th, so we'll see.