Paul,
There's voodoo economics and now I'm a believer in voodoo mpg.

Chevy says the Volt gets 230 mpg city.
Let's see:  it will go 40 miles on pure electric.
It has a 10 gal. fuel tank.
The overall range is more than 300 miles.
Let's give it the benefit of the doubt here and say it will go 300 on its
gasoline, which is 30 mpg.
So add the 300 gas miles and the 40 electric miles and you get a total of
340 miles  If you divide 340 by the 10 gal of gas do you get 34 mpg or 230?
jd


The real question is how many miles per bucket full of coal?
No pollution in my back yard.

The other thing about it is once the batteries are dead after traveling 40
miles you then have a 100 HP piston engine in a 3500 pounds car. Talk about
a slug. That should kill sales in a milli microsecond when that becomes
common knowledge.

I can't believe how stupid the Government thinks I am.
Maybe it it just who THEY hang out with :)

Paul Lamar


I have to carefully comment about this dangerous path being taken by GM.
I'll admit that one could consider me biased, as I work for Ford.
That being said, there is a lack of appreciation of past mistakes being
repeated. Fritz has made a fantastic pronouncement of performance that will
never be approached by the customer, nor has he been candid with the
equivalent carbon footprint of the energy cost/requirements of a plug-in
hybrid, nor has he touched on a cost comparison of energy price/efficiency.
Hiding these critical metrics from the consumer will lead to yet another
breach of trust between the consumer and GM.
I would hope that A.M's experience in Boeing will keep him from allowing our
marketing to slip down that slope of exaggerated claims.
This will come back to haunt GM.
C. SMith


As did the first GM electric car.

They need to get with it and improve the efficiency of the internal
combustion and quit throwing away half the fuel energy in the exhaust.

An external combustion coal powered power plant is 1730's technology
except for the steam turbine which is 1930's technology. My guess is
it is 40% efficient at best. A turbo compound Mazda Wankel could be as
much as 44% efficient without all the long distance  electric power
transmission losses.

Not to mention the losses when charging the batteries and converting
stored electric energy to mechanical energy to move the car.
On top of that you are hauling around 400 pounds of dead battery weight.

Paul Lamar