GM's 200 MPG+
Fantasy
Adrian Veidt, Senior Editor
Casey's
Extraordinary Technology
Sep 3, 2009
A few weeks ago, Government
Motors dropped a public relations bomb when new chief Fritz Henderson
announced that the forthcoming Chevy Volt would get an astonishing
230 miles per gallon (that's 98 kilometers per liter, for our
metric-system friends).
For those of you not yet familiar,
the Volt is a plug-in hybrid car. The car runs primarily on electric
power, with batteries charged overnight by simply plugging the
car into an electrical outlet like a cell phone. Its gasoline
engine is used only to charge the battery and supplement the
power when the batteries run low.
Due in late 2010 at the earliest,
GM is pinning the company's hopes in large part on the new technology
and the associated PR bump of having the most fuel-efficient
car offered by a mainstream company.
So, how about that 230 mpg
claim?
We'll stop short of calling
it a fabrication and instead chalk it up to a classic apples-to-oranges
comparison. After all, the Volt will be powered more by coal
than by oil. You see, the mileage claim is based in part on the
idea that the average driver puts less than 40 miles per day
on their car, and that because the Volt is plugged in overnight,
it has enough juice to make it back and forth to work having
barely sipped a drop of gasoline. But hop on the highway for
a 230-mile ride to visit a client or take a vacation, and you're
likely to use quite a bit more gas than your window sticker would
have you think. Probably by an order of magnitude.
United States EPA mileage guidelines
are based on a bunch of hypothetical "typical" driving
patterns. And the makers of conventional and plug-in hybrid cars
are lobbying hard to change those patterns to reflect well on
the broad range of possible outcomes these funky two-mode drive
trains could have, with their on-again-off-again relationship
with the gas tank. And the GM announcement of 230 mpg is based
on some unpublished, unverified agreement the carmaker claims
to have reached with its government sibling, the EPA, on how
to judge the car's performance in the "City."
However, if GM's claims prove
true that operating the car off the electric grid costs about
one-third of what it costs on gasoline at today's prices, it
won't matter what formula the EPA uses. There are sure to be
many more PR moments between now and when Volts are a common
sight on the road, including years of arguments about the environmental
impact of moving the burden of powering a car from oil to a predominantly
coal-powered electrical grid. But more electric cars are coming,
one way or another, and the impact will be major on the economy
and the environment.
GM is by no means the only
car company working on a mostly electric or all-electric vehicle.
In our inaugural issue of Casey's
Extraordinary Technology, we covered the Fisker Karma,
a high-end sports car plug-in that is part of a class of flashy
racers based on similar technologies, including the Ronn Scorpion
and Tesla Roadster.
On the more affordable front,
virtually every major car company from Nissan to Ford has announced
plans to add or expand their electric line-up. And many of them
will have the jump on GM in timing, so it remains to be seen
how much the Volt will actually help GM in the long run. But
for now, it makes for some good headlines - even if they don't
make a lot of sense on closer examination.
And the race is only beginning.
Car companies are in a scramble to buy and build the components
that will power tomorrow's cars. They are building so furiously
that the cars are often announced before all the parts have even
been invented.
Tesla Motors notoriously sold
out their entire first year's volume of cars well before developing
a transmission able to withstand the incredible torque these
electric motors can put out, and delayed the initial shipments
by months as a result. And according to recent statements from
GM, some parts of the Volt are not yet fully baked, and there
is a risk they won't all be complete by the currently scheduled
launch date.
Despite GM's struggles to bring
the Volt to market, there's no doubt that technology is changing
the automotive industry forever and that mpg will soon be a wholly
inadequate metric on which to judge the efficiency of a car.
You can expect GM's inflated claims to be reduced when the Volt
finally hits showroom floors in a few years. But you can also
expect shockwaves to run through the industry and the economy
as virtually every component of the car, shy of the seats, is
rethought over the next decade. Fortunes will be made and lost
in a way that has not been seen in the automotive industry in
half a century or more.
The inaugural edition of Casey's
Extraordinary Technology debuted in July. One early subscriber
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over two weeks? Nice start to this newsletter, and kudos to the
author."
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