For those too young to remember, the Edsel was a misguided product of Henry Ford’s Company, launched in 1958 and dead by 1960. It was named after Edsel Ford, the only son of Henry Ford. At the time Ford was run by Henry Ford II, the son of Edsel Ford (Edsel died before his father). [Remember the Three Generation Rule?]
The quick description of the Volt is it is an electric car powered by 435 pounds of Lithium Ion batteries – similar to your cell phone or laptop. The electric motors drive the wheels, and recapture energy during braking. [Regenerative braking]
The car is intended to be used only as a commuter car – being plugged in overnight in your garage to recharge. The car also has a gasoline engine connected to an on board generator which is used to recharge the battery as needed – the gasoline motor is on a separate 12 volt battery system with its own traditional lead acid battery.
While GM was trying to get a government bailout, it floated the number that the Volt would get 230 MPG – a an absurd claim based on using the cost of electric energy and figuring out what that would be equal to in gasoline if the car ran only on electrictity. That claim was based on some shakey assumptions:
Big Problem #1 – $40,000
That’s $15,000 more than a similar gasoline powered car. Let’s ignore the interest cost and assume the cars last 10 years. That’s an extra $1,500 per year of cost. Unless you drive the car on its gasoline engine, you’re going to drive at most 200 miles a week (unless you also have a charging station at work). That’s another $.15 an “electric gallon” assuming really optimistic numbers. If the car lasts 7 years and you drive it 100 miles a week, it is closer to $.40 per “electric gallon”. 230 mph is probably down around 100 now – fractions work that way.
So maybe you’re a thoughful person and think “But a lot of people don’t have attached garages with high amperage electric lines…. So add to that the cost of building a garage and the effect on your home heating bill to at least partially heat the garage, which brings is to
Problem #2: Cold weather
People in Michigan know about Winter, so this isn’t unexpected – but Michigan is not Wisconsin or North Dakota. Lithium batteries like nice pleasant weather. When a lithium ion battery gets below about freezing, it gets unstable. It can’t take a charge, and it can’t hold a charge. The measurements of how much charge the battery is holding is unreliable.
How does the Volt deal with a cold battery? Well the best answer is you keep your car in a heated garage overnight so the battery at least starts the day with a full charge. You can’t charge the battery if the garage is cold or the car is outside. Oops!
Okay, say you don’t have a garage – or even worse – during the day your car is parked at work outside and it’s -10F all day. So how does your Volt deal with this?
The answer is – your Volt will automatically start up the gasoline engine and use its heat in the cooling system to warm the lithium ion batteries – bringing them back up to a temperature where they might take a charge. Your car will have to sit there with the gasoline engine running for at least 3 minutes before you can use the car safely. Since cold batteries cannot accept energy, that means the regenerative brakes can’t be used – and the car will have to rely on only its friction brakes. If you use the car before the batteries are warm, you lose the energy that regenerative braking will recapture.
Don’t even ask how you are going to melt the ice on your windshield. But “cold” is easy – which leads into
Problem #3 – Excessive Heat
While Cold makes Lithium Ion batteries unstable, getting your Lithium Ion batteries too hot will ruin them – permanently. Block the air flow on your laptop and you’ll find out just how fast.
GM’s first line of defense is the batteries are not inside the passenger compartment – and they’re “well insulated”. That’s helpful, but insulation only slows the rate of heat gain/loss. If your car is out in a parking lot in Texas in the sun all day in July, every part of the car is going to get very hot eventually.
So the lithium ion batteries have a cooling system that circulates coolant through the car’s air conditioning system. So maybe you’re thinking “Won’t running the air conditioning to keep the batteries in specs in really hot weather lower the range of the car as an electric only?” or “does that mean a parked car is going to turn on the engine by itself if the battery pack is getting too hot? Does air conditioning work if the car is standing still?”
GM is already backing off the 40 mile electric-only range and saying that 25 miles is probably more realistic under real world conditions. Running the car as a gasoline only car gets around 40 MPG – it does get some benefit from the regenerative braking, but also has 435 pounds of batteries it is lugging around.
Ready to sign up?
Problem #4 – Can you recharge the Volt if they are shutting down your coal fired plants?
All these electric cars need to be charged at night, so that means an additional load on our Midwestern coal-fired plants. Thankfully it will be at night, and not during the peak time in the summer during the day.
I bought a Prius. Iknow, Rush says I bought it because I’m really a Liberal, but when Barry Osama was looking into the camera and saying that electric rates were going to skyrocket, I believed him. On the freeway I get about 44 mpg, and around town I actually get about 51 mpg (the claim Toyota says the car can do). Best mpg I’ve done – a tank of gas used on vacation in Myrtle Beach that I got 57 mpg.
Does anyone think these newly free people in these newly free countries will know enough about the oil industry to usher in lower prices, and even if they do know something about the market, will they be happy enough with the US to supply us? Or will they use it as a weapon?
And remember – we still ain’t drillin’ Jack.
Hey, Obama approved resuming drilling at one deep water well – in about 5 years, we’ll be swimming in oil!
I was reading comments last night on a Volt fan web site… One tangent they went off on was the coal one. Close to 50% of the electric generation in California is based on natural gas. Remember the gas pipeline exploding south of San Francisco? Fortunately burning natural gas doesn’t give off CO2 [sarcasm alert]. Al least there it is centralized and can be sequestrated. Central control = good, individual choice = bad.
On a mostly unrelated note, there is an up and coming new business – electricity arbitrage – it works like this. You build a huge “farm” full of lithium ion batteries. When demand is low and wholesale rates are cheap (base load capacity + wind + solar > demand) – you charge up the batteries. When peak demand hits, you sell the energy back at top dollar.
It’s generally a reasonable idea – the long term problem is that the more storage you put online, the less excess there will be to buy, and the more supply there will be during peak demand, so the profits will go away – but that’s the ultimate benefit of abitrage.
There ya go! What a great idea – putting a gas line in a heavily Earthquake-prone zone! So, we build skyscrappers so they can move and flex, but we put the explosive gas in a rigid pipe surrounded by earth so it can’t move or flex.
No problems here, huh folks?
You guys just aren’t true believers. The pink energy genie shall come and we shall all rejoice.
You guys need to have more faith in Comrade Barack a.k.a. Imam Barack our apologist-in-chief formerly known as Barry Soetoro.