One small correction: in one of your comments, you imply that the Volt’s gasoline engine can’t keep the batteries charged enough to run indefinitely when you say, “Sooner or later, depending on how you drive, the gasoline motor won’t be able to keep up with the electric motor demands, and you’ll run out of juice.” According to Frank Weber at GM (the Volt’s head engineer and exec), the Volt will run as long as you keep refilling its gas tank. The gas engine is strong enough to power the car and keep the battery at 30% or so. You couldn’t accelerate with a full 160 hp continuously forever, but in practice, it’s virtually impossible to use all of a car’s horsepower–or anything close to it–unless you’re at a test track. If you floor it, the battery will dip slightly below 30% to give enough juice to deliver bursts of reasonable acceleration, according to Weber. Even in the theoretical world, if you were trying to, say, drive at top speed up a steep hill for many minutes continuously, and you needed all 160 hp, the worst thing that would happen is that you’d get less power temporarily and it would be as slow as a Prius.

On another note, I ate at Grange for the first time last night and was impressed by the food. The farm-to-table concept carried through in the salmon; it had a pared down, fresh personality. The artwork on the walls doesn’t work with the restaurant’s theme, though. It looks mass produced and not particularly elegant.

As far as the cost to produce gasoline versus electricity, the numbers in the calculations above are the end of the line cost to the consumer. But you are right, there is a huge infrastructure cost in getting the electricity to us. There also is a huge cost in getting a gallon of gasoline to the pump, and sometimes those costs aren’t reflected in the price, but rather in the cost to our foreign policy, our national debt and the stability of our future.

I hope that people start making their own charging stations at home with solar panels. Not cheap, but a 220W panel is under $1000 so a couple of them during suny days could give you some number of miles each day.

As far as the zero effect goes, I don’t know the numbers to figure out how you pit a gallon of gas against the energy needed to create the electricity, ship it and then charge a battery. And of course, how you create that electricity is important as well.

–STeve Andre’
andres@msu.edu

One thing you didn’t take into account however, is the
efficiency rate of charging the batteries. It is not 100%,
so the claims about how far you get with NN kWH from the
wall socket is going to be skewed. How much I can’t say,
but if you’ve ever felt a battery getting warm when its
time to feed it, that heat is wasted energy. Different
battery technologies exhibit different characteristics,
so maybe this isn’t a huge problem, but there is some loss
during the charge.

We’ll see how well these do overall. My other concern is
how much extra pollution we’re going to create if 5,000,000+
cars are suckling on the nations power grid each night. In
terms of carbon, how much goes a gallon of gas create, vs.
how much that electric equivalent of a gallon creates?
(I know this doesn’t take into account the fact that we’d
be more free from oil, but carbon is carbon).

–STeve Andre’
andres@msu.edu

1. “Volt gets 230 mpg”
2. “Volt goes 300 miles on a tank of gas”

If both these claims were strictly true, that would imply a tiny 1.3 gallon tank. I think my (non-riding) lawnmower holds more than that!

Yes, but buying a Mercedes doesn’t get you a $7500 tax break, which puts the net price of a Volt at $32,500.

See: link