Chevy Volt Test Drive: How GM’s Electric Car Works [+pictures]
Editor’s Note: This is a 4-part series covering my trip to Michigan to test-drive the Chevy Volt. See also: 1. LiveBlogging from the opening of GM’s New Battery Lab and 3. Tour of GM’s New Battery Lab, 4. Video: Driving GM’s Electric Car. Disclaimer: GM flew me out for this event.
June 8, 2009- It was pouring rain when I arrived at GM’s Testing facility in Warren, Michigan. A crowd had already gathered inside the Alternative Energy Center which, among other things, is home to GM’s first electric car—the original model EV1 (#1).
The ghost of the EV1—a car designed and built 13 years ago—still haunts GM, though it’s both a symbol of lost opportunity and tangible proof that the company could pull off the same kind of engineering feat again. The billion-dollar Volt project is a major component of the company’s reinvention strategy, and it’s clear they aren’t pulling any punches this time.
- » See also: Is the Renault-Nissan Alliance Going in Two Different Electric Car Directions?
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In one corner of the conference room, the innards of new electric car—the Chevrolet Volt—were on display, and many of us took the opportunity to gawk at the awkwardly large 1.4L, 3-cylinder gas engine bolted firmly next to the Volt’s electric motor.
-Gas generator on left, electric motor and charger on right.
How the Chevrolet Volt Works: It’s a real Electric Car
If you aren’t yet familiar with how the Chevy Volt works, let me explain: the most important thing to understand is that it’s a fully electric car—not a hybrid—since the only thing moving the wheels is the electricity provided by a battery pack. The gas engine you see on the left (above) is actually a generator, and only produces enough electricity to maintain a steady charge level when the batteries drop to 30% of their capacity. Without this “range extender”, the Volt would simply be an electric car that stops working after 40 miles.
According to GM, it would cost only $0.80 to drive 40 miles in a fully-charged vehicle. Once the batteries are depleted and the generator kicks in, the car has an additional 260-miles of driving range. Fuel is supplied by an on-board 6-gallon (or so) pressurized gasoline tank, which will also accept up to E85 (85% ethanol / gasoline blends).
I was told the Volt will get roughly 40mpg while running on the generator. (Interesting fact: like a standard household generator, the engine will have to start up once in a while if the driver keeps the car in EV mode by consistently driving less than 40 miles between charges. The fuel tank is pressurized to maintain fuel quality for longer periods of time than your standard car).
-The battery pack is T-shaped, and runs the length of the car underneath the center of the car and then Ts underneath the rear seats.
-Close-up of battery cells in the Chevy Volt battery pack.
Only 50% of the Volt’s battery capacity is actually used (8 of 16 kw), which preserves the longevity of the pack, guaranteeing a 10 year lifespan and consistent range (more than one GM rep. made offhand comments questioning the range capabilities quoted by other electric car manufacturers).
The Volt’s T-shaped battery packs are composed of 200 individual 3.6V lithium-ion cells, each of which is a thin sheet about the size of half a piece of paper and about as thick as a CD case. Total weight for the whole pack is about 400 lbs which, when taking into account structural modifications, adds 700 lbs. to the total vehicle weight.
Excellent last sentence, and facts seldom voiced by
the EV-ignorant media. Agassi’s Better Place is betting on continued crappy battery technology. He’s dead wrong - MIT proved it a month ago and commercially available fast recharging, ultra high output li ion batteries will race the Volt to the marketplace. The Volt may upgrade batteries before 100 Volts are produced. Also, Better Place has no ability to electrically power either trucks or large vehicles, making it not even remotely possible to avoid all oil. The Volt can easily avoid 95% of oil. That’s way more than enough. And it will work in trucks as well.
@kent: Great comments. The big picture is really important for intelligently evaluating these approaches. Road transport accounts for 60% of US petroleum usage, with a breakdown of 42.5% for light-duty vehicles, 13.5% for buses and trucking, and 3.7% for home/business/powerplants/factories (all 2007 numbers from David Sandalow’s Plug-in Electric Vehicles).
Solving petroleum dependence for passenger and light duty vehicles solves approximately 40-50% (future) of the problem, assuming you get all of them.
Plug in hybrids will be a huge part of the future auto fleet, but they are still plug in hybrids, not “electric cars”. Calling them that just melds together the options for how you power a vehicle in a confusing way. Was this what GM asked you to call it?
Also, fully electric vehicles are an option for more than just light duty. For delivery fleets and buses in particular, the pre-determined routes make the logistics of charging even easier. You can make a battery that’s large enough pretty easily - after all, the chassis themselves are bigger. The obstacle is really cost, and as you point out, costs are being driven down over time.
@kent - I think you are taking Better Place’s mission to “end oil” a bit too literally. They aren’t making any claims about electric planes either, are they? And by the way, when you are driving around in your Volt, wouldn’t you rather charge your battery pack by plugging it in at a charge spot while you’re at work for 10 hours, for less money than filling up your on-board generator, even at today’s fuel prices? And who would you rather pay for your miles, your local utility or the international oil cartel?
Again, I’m not against the Volt, I just don’t think the evolution of cars should stop there.
@Rob: That’s not really correct, but if you want to get into semantics:
“Plug-in hybrid” is any vehicle that plugs in and has batteries, which can be fully electric (series plug-in hybrid) or partially electric (parallel plug-in hybrid) as in the case of a converted Prius.
GM is adamant about calling it a “range extended electric vehicle” because (while it’s technically a plug-in hybrid EV) when you take out the generator it’s just an electric car. This was made evident by the fact that the generator was completely shut off during the test-drive. My choice of the term “electric car” is purely my own, and I’m using it because it’s easier for most people to understand.
You do bring up a good point though– initially, these terms are going to be extremely confusing for the uninformed.
I think that the discussions of the Volt, and elective vehicles more generally, are heavily skewed in the direction of fantasy land. My criticism of the volt is the exact opposite of what is mentioned in this article, namely that I think the Volt’s battery is too big and that they should rely more heavily (not less) on the electric generator. Very few people are going to tolerate that massive column in the middle of the passenger cabin, nor are they going to pay the big price premium for the volt over the Prius or Insight.
A better balanced design would have a 5 to 10 mile battery, not a 40 mile battery. The purpose of the battery should be for temporary storage that allows the gas generator to run at peak efficiency all the time. You could still plug it in to get a little extra savings on fuel, but the primary savings would come from the greater efficiency of using an electric motor and of running the gas engine at peak efficiency. I suspect that this is what the Japanese will eventually do, and that most of the people who are whining about GM not selling a “pure” electric car will end up buying the even less “pure” Japanese cars, all the while complaining about GM.
From a technical standpoint, the problem with the Tesla and Volt approach is that batteries have terrible energy density relative to hydrocarbons (this is probably why all life on earth evolved to store energy in hydrocarbons, not in batteries). The most sensible role for batteries in transportation is temporary storage of electricity. No foreseeable advance in battery technology is going to change this.
John, the idea is to get off foreign oil, not get trapped into using more. we have the technology now, and its being introduced.
Batteries are making great progress, though many advancements are not at a commercial stage yet. Competition and consumer demand will force even more rapid improvements.
If you personally want to buy a Japanese car which is reliant on gasoline, go right ahead. I’ll line up for my electric car.
At the end of the day, I’ll not only be removing dependence on foreign fuel, but reducing smog too.
They will NOT sell me one………still the same people that have “RIP OFF” american people for a long time…..SORRY..to little…..to late
Man why is all the new electric cards 50,000$ plus.
I can never effored one I guess due to low income. how are the low income suppose to effored something like this when gas is banned?
@John: Good points. I think I’ll have to reserve judgement about how the battery affects the interior of the car until I see the production version. The Chevy Cruze skin certainly wasn’t perfect.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with Prius plug-in conversions, but they’re about the equivalent of what you’re talking about now. The good ones get about 25 miles on electricity, though cheaper lead-acid conversions get more like 10 miles. These are available now.
I think the mentality shown by automakers here is that we need to “leapfrog” current technology, and there are some additional factors to consider above and beyond how the market would normally develop. There’s the idea of consumers’ willingness to pay extra for an “environmental feature”, such as this large battery pack in the Volt. There’s also the current economic climate, which through new and existing policies is really going to determine what’s possible and how fast it can be accomplished.
GM is not serious about the VOLT; if it were, it would use lead-acid or Nickel (NiMH) batteries, which are the proven EV batteries, and the VOLT would be in production now.
After all, the EV1 with PSB 1260 lead batteries had a range of 110 miles on lead-acid batteries; and the Toyota RAV4-EV, after 7 years of driving, still has over 100 miles range on NiMH.
And the VOLT hoax is, after all, just a 40-mile-range EV with a gas range extender. It’s nothing new; Oldsmobile demonstrated one in 1969, using lead-acid.
The problem with EVs is NOT that they have long charge times (they charge slowly at night, when electric is cheap, a good thing), with range or with battery cost; the big problem is that we, as a society, have decided NOT to make pollution-free proven-successful Electric cars.
That’s the ONLY problem, and it’s due to the massive power of the oil industry and its ancillary and dependent industries, from smog-checking to Halliburton, and from new-car dealers to Pep Boys.
GM and Chevron (Standard Oil of California) cooperated to sequester the exclusive patent-licensing rights to the only proven EV battery, Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMH), which to this day powers the most successful EV ever made, the Toyota RAV4-EV.
In 1994, GM bought control of NiMH from Ovonics, the patent holder, and sequestered it, refusing to use it; in 1997, Toyota proved that NiMH worked by bringing out the RAV4-EV (the same NiMH batteries powered the HondaEV).
On Oct. 10, 2000, GM sold GM-Ovonics to Texaco; six days later, on Oct. 16, 2000, Texaco and Chevron announced that Texaco would merge into Chevron, taking control of NiMH with them.
The fact that an oil company owns control of the technology needed for Electric cars was allowed, under the oil-tainted Bush regime, to go unquestioned. Clearly, Chevron didn’t buy control of NiMH to make money from oil-free cars; Chevron already makes lots of money selling oil.
Chevron, which renamed GM-Ovonics COBASYS (”Chevron-Ovonics BAttery SYStems”), filed suit the next year against Toyota et al., alleging violations of its patent rights.
In Dec., 2002, a settlement agreement was reached; Toyota now only uses NiMH for applications, such as the Prius, where the car cannot plug-in, and thus has to run entirely on energy from oil.
Whether Lithium will work or not, as an alternative, is irrelevant to the fact that no NiMH car has since been made that runs on energy other than that supplied by the gasoline pump.
Toyota stopped making the RAV4-EV and the NiMH battery it uses, which are not available at ANY price. Toyota informed the public that the RAV4-EV program had been cancelled at the same time as this settlment agreement, although the timing of the latter was not admitted until later.
we COULD make a battery industry for Electric cars, let’s say if Toyota were not encumbrered by Chevron’s lawsuit agreement, and/or if some American company decided to fight Chevron in the court of public opinion.
Nickel-Metal Hydride batteries (NiMH), like lead-acid, recycle; ALL the materials you need to construct the battery are to be found in (used) recycled batteries.
Hence, there is NO need for additional supplies of mined metals, once the battery “urban storehouse” in the fleet of EVs is created.
Hence, also, the costing claims for EV batteries are wildly inaccurate, and, to be frank, just plain LIES.
A fair estimate of the cost of NiMH in mass-production would be less than $100/kWh, which is about what CARB intimated in 2000. The only cost for NiMH would, like lead, be for the reprocessing from used batteries to new batteries, using the same materials.
The cost of a battery pack for a NiMH EV with 180 miles of all-electric range (with or without a small engine-generator to extend the range) would be no more than $3,000. That’s more than Detroit wants to pay, but it’s well within the range of value that people would pay, if they were allowed to.
It would be a change; like any other massive changes, some would benefit, but Big Oil would be hurt.
Up until now, no public figure, not even any news media, has dared to break or even allude to the story that Chevron and GM cooperated to kill a competing, viable technology, that Chevron owns control of the battery needed for EVs and that GM once owned control of the battery needed for the wildly successful Prius.
If people could have the choice of driving on energy they make themselves they would love it.
To go 1000 miles per month in an EV only takes 250 kWh, about what two old refrigerators use; the money saved by not buying gas would pay for a rooftop solar system to make more than that electric energy. Of course, Big Oil sockpuppets would say “gee I don’t have a roof” but if you have a car, it’s got a space where you park it, and that’s enough for a solar system to power it.
But the price of a barrel of oil would fall to about the cost of extraction (no more than $10/bbl.) and a lot of money held in oil stocks would disappear. Also, a lot of dealers, refineries, gas stations, engine repair businesses, pollution study and control industries, etc., would founder; no need to study dirty air if the air is clean.