It sounded too good to be true. A real electric car was going to get a real chance to crack the market here in the SUV-saturated North America. Chevrolet’s latest car, the car that many reporters, at the time of release, said would make or break General Motors, was revealed amidst great fanfare, and even greater mileage. 230 MPG was the number that all the reps were spouting, gas only being used sparingly as a trip extender to get rid of that “short trip” stigma that have plagued electric car concepts in the past. In fact, one of the points that lead GM to receive bail out money was that they were producing an engine where “only the electric drive train would power the car.”
Surprise, surprise, this is not the case.
Now before I get into a snit about the lie (and that really is the heart of the problem) I’d first like to say that from the early reviews, the Volt is a fairly interesting piece of engineering. Sure it’s not all electric, but it does have a 40-mile range (more around 35 miles as observed from engineering) where it only uses electricity. After that it’s a ten-hour charge before your battery is back to good again. It does get very high mileage even after the battery is done, around 36 MPG on the highway and 31 MPG on the city streets. But, mind you, this is a 4 door hatchback. Smaller than the Prius, ten thousand dollars more expensive than the (all-electric) Nissan Leaf, the Chevy Volt really doesn’t have a market now that it’s revealed its true colours.
So what is it? It’s not an auto with an all-electric engine; once that battery drains, or when it goes above 70 miles (113 km) per hour it switches to its gasoline engine. It’s really more of a plug-in hybrid, a small step compared to the huge leap promised by GM. The only thing new that it offers to the table is the combination of charging and a hybrid engine, something both Toyota and Nissan are doing much better in their cars.
One has to remember (and if anyone watched the superb documentary “Who killed the Electric Car”) that GM has been on the cutting edge of technology before. The same cycle happened with the EV-1, when it never lived up to its initial claims, and ended up being a shade of what it was predicted to be. Given that the Volt will be marketed more extensively than the EV-1 ever was, one has to wonder if it has enough juice to pull GM out of its current slump. Right now, it looks like a few innovations wrapped up in a package that has no target sender. It might not fail, but without major changes, it is unlikely The Volt has much of a future.
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