Volt Fraud At Government Motors

IBD Editorials ^ | October 19, 2010 | Investors Business Daily staff

[Kaslin]

Green Technology: Government Motors' all-electric car isn't all-electric and doesn't get near the touted hundreds of miles per gallon. Like "shovel-ready" jobs, maybe there's no such thing as "plug-ready" cars either.

The Chevy Volt, hailed by the Obama administration as the electric savior of the auto industry and the planet, makes its debut in showrooms next month, but it's already being rolled out for test drives by journalists. It appears we're all being taken for a ride.

When President Obama visited a GM plant in Hamtramck near Detroit a few months ago to drive a Chevy Volt 10 feet off an assembly line, we called the car an "electric Edsel." Now that it's about to hit the road, nothing revealed has changed our mind.

Advertised as an all-electric car that could drive 50 miles on its lithium battery, GM addressed concerns about where you plug the thing in en route to grandma's house by adding a small gasoline engine to help maintain the charge on the battery as it starts to run down. It was still an electric car, we were told, and not a hybrid on steroids.

That's not quite true. The gasoline engine has been found to be more than a range-extender for the battery. Volt engineers are now admitting that when the vehicle's lithium-ion battery pack runs down and at speeds near or above 70 mph, the Volt's gasoline engine will directly drive the front wheels along with the electric motors. That

[Grizzled Bear]

1. How would the volt manage a norther tier winter?

2. Will it pull my 5th Wheel trailer?

3. How does the price, including replacement cost of batteries, compare to similar fully gasoline engine automobiles in its class (not including the governments generous taxpayer subsidy)?

[truthguy]

41K?!! There are a lot of fully loaded luxury cars available for that kind of money. How many people are going to shell out for this silly battery on wheels?

Lots of people will shell out this type of money. And the buyers of a luxury Lexus or BMW are not the same people who will buy the Volt. It's going to be next to impossible to get a Volt for the next two years as the units scheduled for production will easily sell out.

And one more question. Do any of you Volt detractors think the Wright Brothers could have started out with a 747? Do any of you remember what cell phones were like even 15 years ago? Already GM is working on the second generation which will have better specs and will be cheaper. Why so much negativity with the initial release? You have to start somewhere and this is a pretty damn good start.

See Car and Driver

Car & Driver Review

[truthguy]

Yes, you are absolutely correct and I think they did the right thing. Why sacrifice 15% efficiency? The Volt is a winner and it's killing many on this site that the damn thing works as advertised. I know many don't like GM because of the bailout and I wish GM had a standard Chapter 11 bailout. But what's done is done and I wish GM, Ford, and Chrysler all the luck in the world. We need to keep manufacturing alive and well in the US. Not everyone can work for Google or Apple. We still need base manufacturing and the Automobile Industry is a big part of this.

[TStro]

Wait till you get your electric bill. The 240v charging station is an extra $2500. Ever run a 240v welder? My wife freaks when she gets the electric bill if I use it much.

[truthguy]

1. How would the volt manage a norther tier winter?
2. Will it pull my 5th Wheel trailer?
3. How does the price, including replacement cost of batteries, compare to similar fully gasoline engine automobiles in its class (not including the governments generous taxpayer subsidy)?

Let's take question 2 first. It's the easiest. No it's not designed to pull trailers. Not every vehicle is right for every person. But stay tuned on this. Remember Diesel Electrics pull heavy loads so there are future possibilities here.

The Battery is guaranteed for 100K miles or 8 years. By that time batteries will be cheaper, possibly much cheaper. And the 100K is the minimum.

Question 3 is is most interesting. This is where the Volt has a huge advantage over the Nissan Leaf (an all electric). The Gasoline engine will come on to produce heat on very cold (or hot days-ac) days. You can also program the Volt to heat up before leaving for work on a cold day. Plug in the Volt to charge overnight. Let's say you leave for work at 7:00AM. The electric heater can come on at say 6:30AM and heat up the car from the electric outlet. When you get into the vehicle at 7 the car is already warmed up.

[SamAdams76]

If you want to buy an American car, buy a Nissan that is made in Tennessee or Mississippi by non-union workers. If you buy a car made in Detroit, you might as well just write a big check to Obama or Hillary Clinton because you are DIRECTLY supporting socialism and marxism.

One cannot understate the pure evil of labor unions. They extort money from the workers (in the form of dues) and apply it towards supporting marxist and socialist political candidates who are committed to destroying America and all it stands for. On top of that, the unions tell their workers who to vote for and intimidate them into holding signs and otherwise volunteering for the campaigns of Democrats.

Unions reward sloth and destroy anybody who wishes to work hard and do a good job. They promote socialism by paying everybody exactly the same wages for the same job. If somebody calls out sick twenty times a year and drinks and smokes weed on the job, they get paid exactly the same as the poor sap who comes in every day, works hard and goes the extra mile.

In fact, unions HATE people who work hard and they seek to root them out of the workplace. They even have an expression to discourage others from working hard: "Don't kill the job." Because they know that if people do a full days work, the companies they are leeching off of might realize that they don't need to have quite so many workers on the payroll. So basically it takes seven men to dig a hole, one to hold the shovel and the other six to lean on their shovels and watch.

This is no exaggeration either. The labor unions, where they are permitted to exist, suck the blood out of our industries and like the parasites they are, they eventually destroy the host.

[truthguy]

Wait till you get your electric bill. The 240v charging station is an extra $2500. Ever run a 240v welder? My wife freaks when she gets the electric bill if I use it much.

Charger costs $495. See link. It may cost more if you are electrically challenged and need to hire an electrician to install. See Article:
Charger

At $3.00/gal and using $0.11/kWh, the volt costs about 1/6 as much as gasoline to drive in the Charge Depletion mode. Adjust numbers as necessary.

[Grizzled Bear]

The Battery is guaranteed for 100K miles or 8 years. By that time batteries will be cheaper, possibly much cheaper. And the 100K is the minimum.

Upon what do you base the claim that batteries will be cheaper? If they are cheaper, can I pay for them with magical skittles pooped out by my friend the unicorn?

Look, there's a place and a market for the volt. However, I resent my tax dollars going towards a bail out for the company or towards off-setting the price for the buyers.

There's a reason we haven't seen a new model Studabaker this year. You let businesses die; others will fill the void. That's where real innovation arrives.

[Grizzled Bear]

Lots of people will shell out this type of money. And the buyers of a luxury Lexus or BMW are not the same people who will buy the Volt. It's going to be next to impossible to get a Volt for the next two years as the units scheduled for production will easily sell out.

Let them pay for them without my tax dollars.

Do any of you Volt detractors think the Wright Brothers could have started out with a 747?

How much did the Wright Brothers receive from Uncle Sugar before Kitty-hawk? Later, after they proved a success, the government purchased their planes and services. The early aircraft was tested for military uses, especially reconnaissance.

The government handouts do not fit this criteria.

[truthguy]

If you want to buy an American car, buy a Nissan that is made in Tennessee or Mississippi by non-union workers.

Correction. Nissans are assembled in Tennessee and Mississippi (or wherever). There's a big difference between manufacturing and low-tech final assembly which is what most people do in the transplants. And if GM and Ford were ever to go down you can bet your last dollar that the transplants would instantly leave the US. They really don't want to be here and they are only here because they were forced to manufacture here by trade conditions imposed upon them during the Reagan administration. If the US had no leverage on the transplants in the form of US Manufacturing, they would leave in a millisecond.

By the way, I cannot stand the UAW either but we still need manufacturing here and the US and we will have to deal with the UAW for the time being. In the not to distant future, they WILL go away. But we must not cut off our nose to spite our face.

[truthguy]

Look, there's a place and a market for the volt. However, I resent my tax dollars going towards a bail out for the company or towards off-setting the price for the buyers.

I don't like it either but remember that the Volt was started before the bailout. It was also started before Obama was elected. It was started before he was elected Senator from Illinois.

This nasty recession was started by government policies. GM was making the painful steps to be competitive before it got clobbered by this recession. If not for this recession, it would not have needed the bailout. Also many government policies have helped to make GM not as competitive as possible. And NEVER forget that every automaker in the world gets some government subsidy in some form. This is particularly true for the Japanese Manufacturers.

[thulldud]

How much did the Wright Brothers receive from Uncle Sugar before Kitty-hawk?

Uncle was throwing money at Samuel Langley while the Wrights were developing real flyable aircraft on a shoestring budget.

[Morpheus2009]

1. How would the volt manage a northern tier winter?

One man in Canada mentioned having a heated and insulated garage to run his electric car. But when you think about the energy to heat a garage, that might defeat the savings of supposedly running a volt. The volt also has a gas motor, which you would need to run a little to warm it up when it was cold. I am not sure but it does sound complicated.

2. Will it pull my 5th wheel trailer?

I doubt it. The car uses an immense amount of added wait on the battery alone. Which is why I mentioned capacitors in an earlier post. Capacitors don’t carry weight from a complex network of power cells and chemical solutions within like a battery does.

3. How does the price, including replacement cost of batteries, compare to similar fully gasoline engine automobiles in its class?

I would say that a regular gasoline automobile would be cheaper to you upfront. This isn’t including the possible payments you would need to make on whatever loans you took out to buy the car. Gasoline cars were the key to making automobiles perhaps the most personally owned vehicles ever. Not even horse-drawn carts were as commonly owned as Henry Ford made the automobile. The Volt Price is over $40,000.00 as a starting price, compare that to just about every other car you see advertised such as in the paper or your local dealer.

[Morpheus2009]

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/27/business/la-fi-autos-volt-20100727

This is the link to the price of the Volt.

[SamAdams76]

By the way, I cannot stand the UAW either but we still need manufacturing here and the US and we will have to deal with the UAW for the time being.

I do not agree. Saying that we have to get along with the labor unions is no different than saying we have to get along with RINO candidates like Mike Castle. Well against all the conventional wisdom, Christine O'Donnell defeated Mike Castle and she may yet win in two weeks against Coons. But even if she does not, we have the satisfaction of sticking to our principles and relegating Castle to the dustbin of history.

These unions that you claim we must get along with are spending over $100 million this election cycle to "Save the Democrat Majorities."

So to hell with "go along to get along". Unions are the enemy.

[Smokin' Joe]

and lithium is not even a rare earth element required for use in advanced electric motors and switching devices

Yep. You're on it. When it appears our access to rare earth elements is going to be limited, and in a pinch they might be needed for defense, it makes no sense to pursue sumps of strategic materials to remedy a 'global warming' problem that does not exist.

There are just too many levels of stupid involved for this sort of thing to be anything but an intentional misallocation of resources.

[truthguy]

I think you have not understood what I meant. I said for the time being. We are not going to get rid of the UAW tomorrow. But we cannot throw out the baby with the bathwater. The key phrase is “time being”. New hires at the US manufacturers’ are working for the same wages as non-union. This is an economic fact of life. It's either that or the US Manufacturers go out of business. Just like the public employee unions, they are faced with give backs. But we aren't going to get rid of these unions except over time with policies that will make the irrelevant.

[6SJ7]

Remember Diesel Electrics pull heavy loads so there are future possibilities here.

Now they just have to figure how to get one of these diesel locomotive prime movers inside the car.

[RipSawyer]

So, this overpriced pile of tin gets city mileage of about one fifth what was claimed, maybe. On the highway it fails to equal cars that were available in the seventies with very simple drive trains and at eighty miles per hour it won’t do any better and probably not as well as my 2004 Mercury Grand Marquis Limited Edition, a car that is very comfortable to drive and not cramped at all even for me and I am six four barefoot.

No thanks, government motors.

[RipSawyer]

Do any of you remember what cell phones were like even 15 years ago?
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I do, a small simple device that allowed you to make and receive calls without all the useless features that are touted now. I liked cell phones then, I don’t even have one now, I can’t use the ones I see now without having a pointed instrument to use in dialing and I need reading glasses to see the letters.