Bromleyisms

Just in, GM has announced that the “Volt” will retail for $41,000:

Chevy Volt will cost $41,000 before tax credits

How awesome is that: rather than having to rebuild your garage to fit another Prius (two Prii?), you can double your conscience with a single Volt!   Oh, wait: the federal government offers buyers $7500 in tax credits for electrics, so you’ll have to settle for 1- 2/3ds Prii, or, worse, if you’re in California, which offers another $5000 tax rebate, you’ll only get a Prius and a half for your money.  Either way, even if you have to share your conscienc with the government it’ll make you feel good. (Do stock up on “energy saving” lightbulbs, cause you’re gonna need some carbon credits to keep that conscience fully charged.) 

I’m not so sure, though, about any lifestyle enhancements from this car, especially per dollar spent on it.  Sure, new technology needs momentum, competition, and volume for prices to fall, and, sure, after years Toyota has finally recovered its investment in the Prius, but 40K for an economy car?  Truly, this is inane. 

The electric car is inherently limited, and it’s limited in a way that gasoline cars never were.  In the early days of the automobile, the only serious complaints about the internal combustion engine regarded complexity, not performance. Even if gasoline cars have become more complex, their ease of use and performance have improved exponentially.  Gasoline delivers.  With electrics, it’s the worst of both worlds: complexities surround design, build, performance, and, worst of all, use.  And with hybrids – it’s the worst of both gasoline and electric.  And with the Volt — designated a “plug-in hybrid”, it’s the worst of all three worlds, gasoline, electric, and both. (Note: the gas motor in the Volt  is used only as a generator, and alothough it is not sophisticated it still requires all the maintance of any gas motor.)

GM has managed to thread the eye of a needle with this “plug-in hybrid,” which the SAE has designated as “Extended-Range Electric Vehicle.”   The supposed purpose here is to differentiate between dual propulsion systems (hybrid) and a single-propulsion electric motor with a gasoline generator.  Whatever.  What is at stake here is public policy and money, not truth in advertising.  By calling it an electric, the Volt qualifies for all the grants and subsidies and other federal rules and requirements.  The question here is if the gasoline motor qualifies it as hybrid or if it can maintain “electric,” as GM claims.  It won’t matter, as GM will get all the designations and benefits of the electric category. And there’s more:  new CAFE standards are going to hurt the domestic builders, so there’s this little problem of what, exactly, is the “miles per gallon” of an electric car?  Somehow, while claiming “electric,” GM is also maintaining that the Volt gets 240 mpg (electric?  no — that’s due to the “generator” that runs on gasoline).  Add 50,000 units to the GM “fleet average” and we’ll be seeing GM back to selling pickupts and SUVs for some real profit again soon enough.  It’s beyond a scam, and I honestly feel bad for the suckers who spend the forty thousand for this fake indulgence.

As a pure electric, GM claims the Volt can make 40 miles on a full charge, and that 8/10 Americans commute less than that a day.  I’ll grant them both, but let’s look at what 4o miles really means.  Let’s see: 10 miles to work each way, then come home and plug it in, but don’t forget, because you need a grocery run, and then the kids need to go to soccer practice and you think you might have enough time for some Tai Chi except that the dogs have eaten you clean of kibble and you’d rather buy that at the Petsmart 10 miles up the road rather than the local Giant but you’re stuck going back to the Giant because you forgot to plug in the car, but, hell, you may as well go to Petsmart because its next to the Costco and you need 18 dozen cans of Cambell Soup and a case of toilet paper — and you have to take the Volt becuase all that won’t fit into the SmartCar…  Before you know it, you’ve gone 60 miles and that tiny 1.4 littler gasoline motor is killing itself to run the engine and recharge the battery to get you back home.  And then you forget to plug it in for the night again…  By morning, you’re too tired for a clean conscience, so you drive the Suburban over to the Exxon and fill it up with 35 gallons of regular unleaded which will be good for a week or two.

Then there’s performance. You really want a rev-limiter?  Really? Hell,  I just put 600 miles on my F150 going up and down the Northeast corridor, and I wasn’t passed by a single Prius — not one.  And, yes, even in the truck, I had to pass many a Prius, including all too many that were hugging the left lane at a blazing 68 mph — sure pushing that little gasoline motor there, my little Prius friend!  Back home, I jumped into the XC70 for a trip to Philly and back, and on a tank of that magic fluid, gasoline, I did what I want where I want and how I want — and as fast as I wanted (the NJ police cooperated that day).  All it took was a 2-minute detour at one of the many hundreds available “re-charging” gas tank stations all along my route.

I’ll grant that the Volt and other hybrids fulfill the needs of basic auto use, but I’ll never ever ever admit of their superiority to a kick-ass gasoline or deisel motor that packs amazing amounts of energy in but a little, easily & cheaply refilled container under the chassis.  Hybrids are by design a compromise, and electrics are inherently limited.  Even the fastest of them (see the BMW high-end hybrid) cannot possible deliver the miles, the performance, the ease of use, and the manufacturing and design efficiencies per dollar of gasoline. Forget Tesla: anyone can make a high-performance electric — and no one can make one that’s fast and doesn’t drain the battery like an iPhone 4 on youtube when you need to stretch you legs. The engines can be strong and fast but not when applied to daily use.  Thinking the Tesla to the everyday is like wanting a Porsche in every garage.  Ever driven a Porsche?  Let’s just say that functional compromises abound when making a car that goes from 0-60 and back in under five seconds.  You can do that in the Tesla, but not for very long.  With but a short spell of serious driving the Porsche will still have half a tank while the Tesla is back in the garage for a full 30-hour recharge.

But I’d sure take that over this abysmmal compromise that is the Volt.  The damned thing weighs 3500 lbs ( here) — which is — you guessed it, an amazingly 199 lbs less than my Volvo XC70, two seconds slower on the 0-60 scale, and, with the limiter at 100mph, some 40 miles per hour slower.  And let’s not even talk trunk space.  Then there’s the Prius, now in 2011 with a slightly larger gasoline engine, that makes 0-60 in 9.8 seconds, which is almost, but not quite as bad as a ’74 Mavarick.  Again, neither of the electrics fare well when pushing those 0-60 numbers.  It’s gets so tough when you’re trying to save the world from gasoline.

Okay, I’ll give to the hybrid idea, but only a little.  Today’s hybrids have it backwards.  Rather than supplementing an inferior drive train (electric) with a small slice of a vastly superior one (gasoline), it ought to be the reverse: supplant the internal combustion with some electrical power — if you must. Sure, an electric motor might keep the A/C working at stop lights while the gasoline engine rests.  Or, for stop-start traffic, run it on the electric.  But at what cost?  A significant one, that is. I’ve already gone over and over the added costs of hybrids, and now Chevy wants us to add to it a wholly electric car that merely doubles down on all the disadvantages of the hybrid platform.  Indeed, gasoline is still king (here for a Washington Post article on gasoline that quotes me, and here for another interesting piece on the superiority of gasoline over electricity by Ralph Kinney Bennett).

There’s so much here, and, of course, it has nothing whatsover to do with a speech by GM’s CEO, Barrack Obama, the other day about the future of electric vehicles:

Obama to promote electric vehicles in MI (July 15, 2010)

Whose interest is really at stake here, anyway?  Your conscience, or your wallet?  The government is taking a monopoly on both. (Hold on tight!)