Consumer Reports: GM's Volt 'doesn't really make a lot of sense'

Roger Blake > wrote:
>
>Those of us who are old enough to have lived through the first iteration
>of this envirowacko rubbish 40 years ago are going to be an extremely tough
>sell this time around. (Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...) I
>can look through magazines from the 1970s and it's all the same crap;
>windmills, solar panels, alternative fuels, electric cars, etc., etc.
>Sorry, I'm not falling for it this time.

I think it was a good idea back in the seventies and much of it is a good
idea today. The stuff we saw in the seventies brought us the more efficient
engines of today.

And yes, the emission controls systems when they first arrived in the
seventies were horrible and sometimes did more harm than good, but they
got better because they had to. I think you'll see the same thing happen
with electric vehicles.

But I also think that the environmental impact of auto manufacturing is in
many cases even more significant than the environmental impact of operating
them. Build a car that lasts twice as long, you halve the effective
impact of production. Unfortunately you also halve your sales....
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

Scott Dorsey wrote:

>
> And yes, the emission controls systems when they first arrived in the
> seventies were horrible and sometimes did more harm than good, but they
> got better because they had to. I think you'll see the same thing happen
> with electric vehicles.
>

The first emission standards were designed to be horrible and
ineffective. The regulations were designed during the Nixon
administration by the oil cos and automakers. The intent of the
regulations from the automakers point of view was to create obstacles
for foreign competition. They did succeed in killing off the VW bug but
for the most part the effort only slowed the competition a bit.
The real problem with new regulations was there are places like LA
where important people live that really couldn't breath unless something
effective was done about car exhaust. The new regulations meant that the
new Cadillac was getting 6 mpg instead of the 13 mpg that the previous
models did. And LA has more than its share of Cadillacs.

It was pretty clear that to make things better the regulations were
going to have to actually work and could not be allowed to be just
another football the politicians and big corporation kicked around,
because the people who make movies were getting ****ed off and that
wasn't going to be pretty.





> But I also think that the environmental impact of auto manufacturing is in
> many cases even more significant than the environmental impact of operating
> them. Build a car that lasts twice as long, you halve the effective
> impact of production. Unfortunately you also halve your sales....
> --scott
>
> --
> "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

"ben91932" > wrote in message
...
> Your points are all valid IMHO Vic.
> I commute 14 mile to work, which would cost me $1.50ish in electricity
> a day and would only need gas every couple of months.
> I have a Highlander to use for everything other than my commute.
> The Volt makes perfect sense for me, and I am anxious for the price to
> come down a bit so I can afford one.
> HTH,
> Ben

If you payed $40K for that car, and amortized it on a straight line for
10 years, it would cost you nearly $11 per day. If you paid the actual
$60+ thousand that the car is reputed to cost GM and the govt, it would
be closer to $15 per day even if you just let it sit idle. Energy costs
would
be additional.

That seems a little expensive for a 14 mile per day commute.

"ben91932" > wrote in message
...
>
>> Since when was the Volt General Motors flagship vehicle?
> It may not be their flagship, but they are certainly banking on it as
> the future of the company.
> That car-of-the-year award didnt hurt them any...
> Ben

I really doubt that many people even considered the COTY award as
being significant. And I think the Volt is a smoke and mirrors exercise
to improve GM's public aura.

With the Prius and others already in existence that can do more and
better, I find it rather unimpressive.

On Wed, 2 Mar 2011 07:36:15 -0800 (PST), ben91932
> wrote:

>Your points are all valid IMHO Vic.
>I commute 14 mile to work, which would cost me $1.50ish in electricity
>a day and would only need gas every couple of months.
>I have a Highlander to use for everything other than my commute.
>The Volt makes perfect sense for me, and I am anxious for the price to
>come down a bit so I can afford one.
>HTH,
>Ben
>>

Before I retired my round-trip commute for 35 of 40 years working was
less or equal than the Volt electric range.
Had 2 1/2 years of a 75 mile round trip commute and 2 1/2 years of a
40 mile round trip commute.
But there were also about 7 years of that when I lived in apartments
where I couldn't plug in.
Last 13 years the commute for both me and my wife has been about 12
miles round trip.
I've read the "average" driver in the U.S. drives 32 miles a day.
There's a real big market for the Volt with folks who have 2 cars and
buy new - if the price comes down where it's comparable to an IC and
the current gas price trends continue.
I'll never have a Volt because I don't buy new cars or expensive cars.
All but one of my cars have cost $2500 or less.
But if it was in my nature to spend bucks on cars, I'd love to have a
Volt and see how long I could avoid the gas station with it.
Of course it's still not proven.
CR was absolutely no help in that regard.
The Volt and other electric cars kind of remind me of the history of
successful technology like radios, TV's, color TV's, PC's, cell phones
and cars themselves.
Always people with the money to buy them and make the technology
"happen" enough where the average Joe can afford one.
Except for the early PC I've been a "late adopter."
This is another innovation I'll sit out. Since I'm a bit long in the
tooth doubt I'll ever have an electric.
But since I'm always interested in cars, I find the Volt to be a
pretty exciting development.
Don't recall anything close to it with the potential of being a real
automotive game-changer.

--Vic

On 3/2/2011 3:13 AM, Roger Blake wrote:
> On 2011-03-01, > wrote:
>> In the scheme of things, our personal opinions don't matter much do they?
>
> They do at least in terms of the directions our own lives take. I can
> assure you that I will never own an electric or hybrid car. What the
> rest of you do is your own business, of course.
>

Is there any reason that you think that the electric car is a bad idea?

On 3/2/2011 3:13 AM, Roger Blake wrote:
> On 2011-03-01, > wrote:
>> 20 years ago I wouldn't have believed that our future was going to be
>> almost totally digital.
>
> Speak for yourself.
>

I thought it would have been obvious that I was.

On 3/2/2011 3:16 AM, Roger Blake wrote:
> On 2011-03-02, > wrote:
>> My guess is that 20 years from now, we won't be doing fill-ups at gas
>> stations and changing motor oil. I could be wrong but I hope not, for
>> our sake.
>
> I can assure you that I will be still doing fillups at gas stations
> and changing motor oil in 20 years. The installed base is far too large
> to simply go away in that period of time. (You of course may elect
> to purchase some stoopid electic pregnant roller skate to run around
> if you desire. Just don't try to force me into one.)
>

For a guy that claims to be such a forward thinker, you seem to be stuck
on this technology based on the steam engine.

There were guys like you that thought the automobile would never catch
on but my guess is that the 20 years from the introduction of the Model
T to the 1930s pretty much changed the entire nation. Of course, back
then, the naysayers had a more legs to their argument - there were few
roads and hardly any place to get gas.

On 3/2/2011 4:52 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> > wrote:
>> Well I guess it's too late to find out now. The price of computer RAM
>> was about $45 a MB so you'd probably have a hard time imagining regular
>> folks owing a computer with $200,000 worth of ram and drives which would
>> cost about $10,000,000 at the time.
>
> Yup. However, at the time, the exponential growth in computer power had
> been pretty well established.
>
>> The only reason we're a digital world is that cheap RAM, data storage,
>> and a method of moving info around at high speed exists. Without that,
>> we'd probably still be using film, listening to CDs, going to Tower
>> Records, and using computers with small sized OSes with limited memory.
>
> The cheap ram and long-term storage was predicted. The cheap CPU was
> predicted. They all fell along the same growth curve that had been going
> on for some time.
>
> But a lot of the actual applications weren't so easy to predict, and that
> is what makes the future fun.
>
>> My guess is that 20 years from now, we won't be doing fill-ups at gas
>> stations and changing motor oil. I could be wrong but I hope not, for
>> our sake.
>
> I expect to be, and I expect to be driving the same 1974 car that I am
> driving today. It should be up around a million miles on the odometer by
> then. But then, I'll probably still be using film and listening to CDs
> as well, so I am clearly an outlier.
> --scott
>

Us folks interested in such things were aware of the drop in RAM and
storage space prices as well as the growth of processing power. Still,
I'm stunned at all that has happened. I never really thought about what
kind of impact all this would have on society. Who does?

On Wed, 2 Mar 2011 07:39:56 -0800 (PST), ben91932
> wrote:

>
>> Since when was the Volt General Motors flagship vehicle?
> It may not be their flagship, but they are certainly banking on it as
>the future of the company.
>That car-of-the-year award didnt hurt them any...
>Ben