From the New York Times, it's too expensive.Also from the NYT:
In July, G.M., Ford and Chrysler sold their vehicles at an average price of $30,400 — $1,350 more than a year ago and higher than an overall industry gain of $1,100, according to the auto research Web site Edmunds.com.From the LA Times:
For those who would rather buy the (Volt), a $7,500 federal tax credit designed to accelerate entry of electric vehicles into the marketplace will reduce the cost of a Volt to $33,500.Me? I think it's nuts to pay more than $20k for a car. On the other hand, if it delivers as promised it will be a game-changer. GM may not be the leader, but it will mark a big shift in the way we drive to work.
11 comments:
Funny, a friend of mine was just telling me yesterday that the combined discounts of fed, state(CA), and manufacturer will amount to 12 or 13k off msrp.
I've had nothing but trouble with American made autos for over 30 years and won't buy another.
This silly-but-nice vehicle will be of little use outside of some enclave that wants no gasoline motors, or ultra low noise. Gasoline engines plus a gas tank are hugely more efficient to move personal vehicles around than power plants, plus power lines, plus batterie, plus electric motors.
Anon, I disagree strongly. If the Volt (and competitors) work as promised, most of the time the driver won't need to pull into the gas station. I'd love to have a car I could plug in for commuting, but still gives me unlimited range for long trips by gasing up.
Just saying, IF it works as promised.
anonymous is completely wrong.
gasoline-fueled non-turbo engines are at best 25% efficient.
electric motor used in vehicle applications are 95% efficient.
lithium-based battery packs are 90%+ efficient (charge/discharge)
it's just that vehicle-sized lithium battery packs are brand new, and thus very expensive ($10,000+)
Lou and Bill,
You are leaving out the source of the energy used to charge these vehicles: Electrical current generated by some means, and transmitted across our next to broken grid. So you have to multiply out the efficiencies by those of typical generation methods, and by the transmission efficiency of the grid. Given you are burining coal to boil water to make steam to push a turbine to turn a generator, to drive the electrical grid, to charge a battery to later discharge through a motor, Bill's efficiency advantage to the all electric vehicle disappears almost entirely. For that sacrifice, you give up lots of money(yours and other people's via taxation), range, carrying capacity, and probably much else(TBD when these things actually hit the streets). Given the neccessarily short range of these things(energy density of batteries versus that of gasoline strikes again), they'll deploy in dense urban areas, i.e. not many in Houston, unless you plan to stay in your subburb and to have another vehicle around to go any distance.
Even counting grid losses, it is still more efficient to burn fuel at a power plant and transmit it to your home to recharge your vehicle than it is to burn fuel in a naturally-aspirated gasoline-fueled car engine.
Of course, you could also recharge an electric car from PV panels on your roof (high initial cost, but subsidized 50% in many states, and practically no variable cost once installed)
Operating costs for vehicles are much cheaper for electricity than fossil fuels (2 cents/mile vs 10 cents/mile), but again, the capital cost of the battery pack is the hurdle.
Commercial fleet vehicles are the logical first choice for pure electric vehicles (fuel costs are a much larger percentage of overall costs)
E.g. a postal delivery van usually has a fixed route of limited mileage, working only one shift (no need for fast-charge batteries)
The Volt of course also uses gasoline, but could easily use cleaner burning fuels like natural gas or propane.
Well when the kids are gone and I my financial situation allows me to have a car just for commuting and another for all else and I have a power source that will cost lesss than gas and refill just as quickly and traffic is predictable I will know that I'm in a dream. But it is perfect for the people who know that homes always go up in value and Obama is the chosen one.
Bill, for what it is worth, I won't laugh out loud when I witness these things tooling around: There could be a role for them for some limited set of circumstances. I will be bitter though, when and if I'm paying for someone else's green pretensions, via subsidies and the the original abomination itself, GM's very existence. If it is such a great idea, it won't need subsidies. What we know is, that it is mostly a bad idea. The electric vs gasoline debate was over, about a hundred years ago. No kidding. The batteries sucked then, and they still do today, compared to dense combustible liquid fuel. You say batteries just need to get cheaper/better. Ain't happening very fast is it? Chemistry is a bear, eh? All those elements in that table, physics and all that, continuing to be uncooperative. When someone cracks those issues with, oh, nanotech fuel cells or whatever, I'm all for it. They'll have to add fake engine noise though, or the things wil cause a lot of accidents.
"Even counting grid losses, it is still more efficient to burn fuel at a power plant... "
Bill, you left out thermodynamic efficiency of the electrical generating plants themselves. Multiply through by about 40%, then say 90% for the grid, then 90% for the charger(generously!), then another 90%(even more generously) for the restoration from chemical energy back to electrical then mechanical energy, and so on. Lots of multiplying times .9, when you start with .4, gets you quickly down to the overall thermodynamic efficiency levels you state for gasoline engines. For this meager to zero improvement you give up a lot in vehicle cost and capability. You also give up some liberty, in the form of yet another central government intervention.
The first lithium laptop batteries were a heck of a lot more expensive than their NiMH predecessors.
Large-format lithium vehicle batteries (as in the Volt and Leaf) are brand new.
The chemistry is different from mass-market laptop cells, and they have not yet hit any economies of scale.
Demand for the vehicles that use them will be the largest influence on future price.
It does appear both the Volt and the Leaf will sell out this year.
Nissan claims they will double the capacity of their Leaf battery pack in 5 years (time will tell...)
Significantly higher fuel taxes are clearly on the way.
They will generate huge amount of revenue for an increasingly voracious federal government, and assuage the carbon guilt of those currently in power.
I fully expect European-level fuel prices to phase in gradually over the next several years.
So you probably want something more efficient than a run of the mill gasoline engine in your next vehicle.
Don't forget the figure I gave for the gas engine was PEAK efficiency.
Close down the throttle (e.g. stop and go traffic) and the efficiency plunges, probably down to single digits.
Bill, if the price of the batteries were driven down to ZERO (through economies of scale, or competition, or more likely simple taxpayer funding of the whole affair), that in itself would not increase the =efficiency= of these vehicles, nor their range, nor their weight. The thermodynamic efficiency from end to end..powerplant to wheels...aint great, and much else is left to be desired, particularly range, cost, and such. The serious way to power cars here is to get more oil from nearby and under our own rocks. The high taxes and huge government spending increases are not written in stone. We can demand practical solutions.
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