Cost to operate a Chevy Volt



Eric Bolling (Fox Business Channel's Follow the Money) test drove the

Chevy Volt at the invitation of General Motors.



For four days in a row, the fully charged battery lasted only 25 miles

Before the Volt switched to the reserve gasoline engine.

Eric calculated the car got 30 mpg including the 25 miles it ran on the

Battery. So, the range including the 9 gallon gas tank and the 16 kwh

Batery is approximately 270 miles. It will take you 4 1/2 hours to

Drive 270 miles at 60 mph. Then add 10 hours to charge the battery and

You have a total trip time of 14.5 hours. In a typical road trip your

Average speed (including charging time) would be 20 mph.



According to General Motors, the Volt battery hold 16 kwh of

Electricity. It takes a full 10 hours to charge a drained battery.



The cost for the electricity to charge the Volt is never mentioned so I

Looked up what I pay for electricity.



I pay approximately (it varies with amount used and the seasons) $1.16

Per kwh.



16 kwh x $1.16 per kwh = $18.56 to charge the battery.



$18.56 per charge divided by 25 miles = $0.74 per mile to operate the

Volt using the battery.



Compare this to a similar size car with a gasoline engine only that

Gets 32 mpg.



$3.19 per gallon divided by 32 mpg = $0.10 per mile.



The gasoline powered car cost about $15,000 while the Volt costs

$46,000.



So our government wants us to pay 3 times as much for a car that costs more that

7 time as much to run and takes 3 times as long to drive across country.



REALLY?

Volts are so expensive that I doubt that anyone who actually cares about saving fuel dollars will be buying them. If you can buy a $20,000 car and $20,000 of gas for your $40,000, which could be taken as the most economical??

Looking at my utility bill I used 238KWH last month and was charged $23.62 or ~10 cents per KWH. You might want to double check those numbers or call your utility!

Not my numbers. As I said it's from Eric Bolling.
But it doesn't even include battery disposal at the end of battery life.

from Forbes.com and a search on the highest power rates in the country:
Since the power rate figures are total BS, I have no reason to believe any of the rest of article either.

Plus one. Fox being fair and balanced yet again.

Electric cars could work in cities. Dunno.

What's truly stupid is that we even have to suffer hybrids and electric cars. Our dirty diesel up till a few years ago, and CARB, kept us from having proper high- mileage vehicles. Which is to say, Japanese turbo-diesels.

Like this:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Auris

~50 mpg with the diesel engine.

I drove a VW Jetta diesel in the early 90's that would do anything any of these would. The downside was that you'd take your life into your hands passing anyone.

My brother has been picking up VW TDI's for the sales fleet, they go OK and give 40+ mpg...no batteries, no subsidies, etc.

Well, lets use the NYC rates since that's the area where Bolling lives.
16 kwh @ $0.2127 = $3.40 per charge, divided by 25 miles = $0.14 per mile.
That's 40% more than a gasoline engine getting 32 mpg. That's no ringing endorsement for a car that nobody wants or can afford.

Remember, electric cars really run on coal.

Displaced emissions and outright lies are the bastion of those who support electric cars.

Look, look, it does zero to sixty in x seconds...it's almost like a real car. No one really takes into account that it takes the same amount of energy, no matter the source, to make a car enjoyable to drive.

Amen, brother.

Sorry. Not FOX numbers. Don't know who added them. Here is the report: http://video.foxnews.com/v/1430236461001/eric-bolling-test-drives-chevy-volt/

Agreed that the electric car runs on coal.

Kcih, yeah, my wife wanted a TDI Jetta some years ago. However they have a brutal rep for nickle and diming you to death. Drivetrain was supposedly good; everything else sucked. More recently the drivetrains are even suspect (tranny). I did some looking into it after the Land Crusher got totaled last year because we at least considered a TDI.

This is why I spec'd a Japanese turbo diesel. A Toyota, Honda, or perhaps AWD Subaru that gets great mileage?! Sign me up!

I dunno Jeff, they seem to be doing pretty well.

I'll have to admit that the new ones are a far cry from the simplicity of the mechanically injected ones of my youth, and the lack of power.

The base issue is more to do with the fact that we have very simple technology at hand to accomplish what is easily accomplished, but the powers that be demand we go about it in the least responsible manner...and the least attainable.

I was stuck inside a Chevy dealer a few weeks ago. The wheels had fallen off my S-10, and I was in getting a replacement. While they were cooking the numbers for me, I had the dubious pleasure of sitting with another salesman for a half hour who thought he could sell me a Volt.

Yikes! I feel sorry for that man. How they got his head wrapped around the Volt must have taken serious surgery. He was telling me how easy they are to use and how cheap to run and how I could do my 80 mile commute without ever touching the gasoline. I got out of there and I felt like I wanted to stick a hose up my nose and irrigate my brain.

BTW: I decided to keep the S-10 and put money down on a new Silverado. The 'Rado has a V8, but gets comparable mileage to the V6 S-10. It cost less than the S-10 did back in 2002. I think I got a good deal. The S-10 is going to be retired to the farm-- don't know yet if it will be the new farm truck or the new deer blind. We'll see.

Exactly. Changing one form of energy to another is never as efficient as direct use. I have my suspicions about all hybrid vehicles for that reason. Maybe it's somewhat efficient to run a small gas engine at a constant rpm and store that energy in a battery as opposed to an engine subject to the whims of the operator...... but I'd have to crunch the numbers myself to believe it. All because of a rule in energy conversion..... there is always some loss.

I think the final truth will be that electric, as currently produced, is at greater cost and polution.

don't we have rolling blackouts in this country during peak use. what would. 20 million electric cars do to the grid.

How is it that my 19 years old Accord can get 35+ highway and 24+ city using gas and it is all we can do to match that nearly 20 years later?

I wondered the same thing. If you check the weight of your 19 year old Accord and interior space you'll probably see it weighs a lot less and has less room than the current year. Safety usually adds weight.

I agree with your statements but I think oil's cost also isn't truly shown at the pump. If you add in the indirect costs of our giant military, middle east wars, and payoffs to foreign dictators you'd see we pay a lot more than the current $3.50 a gallon. Oil's environmental costs haven't been small either if you remember the BP Gulf or Exxon Valdez oil spills. Our dependence on cheap plentiful energy is a real vulnerability.

I agree on the size\weight issue. But if there was technology to achieve this that far back it seems there would have been more improvement over the 20 years. it seems to me that the technology just stagnated.

The majority of people who drive volts are fine with 25 mikes to a charge,

They drive around the city.

for a long trip they will use one of their other cars.

Snake

You can thank California and all of the emission revisions from EPA for that. Brother had a mid '90s Escort wagon that got low 40's mpg, older Civics and Corollas known for that as well. MPG's are what was sacrificed to get to near-water vapor out of the tail pipe (and yes, they are much heavier, but safer in a crash).
Emissions are now so low you can suck on the tailpipe without killing yourself, something many try after a few minutes with the Volt salesman....

I saw the piece and it was quite obvious Eric Bolling is highly biased against the Volt because he believes the government had a hand in developing it. What he doesn't know is that the Volt was in development long before the government bailout.

Bolling never said he paid $1.16 Per kwh, but that a full charge cost him around $1.50. However, the actual New York city area rate is 0.191 per kwh as of October 2011, so a full charge costs about $3.06. Given Bolling's bias I wouldn't be surprised if he drove around with his foot on the brake to decrease the electric range so that he could embellish his on-air rant.



This is nonsense. The Volt runs on gas once the battery is discharged. Once it runs low on gas you pull into a gas station and fill it just as you would any other car. There's no need to charge the battery if you want to just burn gas. Thus, it takes no more time to drive somewhere in the Volt than it does in any other car, assuming you're obeying the speed limit.

If you want to read an honest review check out this one by Edmonds.

You'll see that the average commuter can do each day's driving using only electricity (assuming they don't drive with their foot on the brake). With an extended range electric car like the Volt you can drive without using gas most of the time, but if you want to go on a tip you can use gas just like an ordinary car.

I've been screaming exactly that for years now... but the liberal idiots like obama and such simply don't want to listen to common sense at all.

Nobody is mentioning the OZONE that a D.C. Brush Motor produces,....

....another "Inconvenient Truth".

GTC

You didn't think an electric car from Government Motors was honestly going to solve any problem for Americans. All the Technoly for electric cars either isn't in place or isn't being put into those cars. My guess would be the latter. The Auto industry is still owned by big gas.

Motor Trend is running a long term test on the volt. So far they have over 25k on it with no warranty issues.
They say in their article they are keeping meticulous records on it so far and this is the result.
The epa says the car gets 93 "empg" in electric.
MT is getting 103.4
The epa for gasoline driving is 37mpg.
MT is getting 38.7.
Looks like its living up to the specs so far. And no battery fires.

Yep, I had a 1983 Datsun 310 that got almost 40mpg, and it had a carb!

The difference is that gas and diesel come from oil, but electricity can come from coal and NG, stuff the U.S. has in abundance. For those worried about carbon, then electricity can come from nuclear, wind and solar.

I see in the April 2012 issue of Motor Trend on page 32 that SunPower is working with Nissan and Ford while SunLogic is working with GM to produce affordable home solar charging units that can provide enough power for 12,000 miles of driving a year in most locations. Honda is developing their own home solar charging units using a thin-film copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) technology that Honda says has real world performance close to that of the more expensive silicon technology. Amortizing the cost of a $10,000 solar charging unit over 5 years at 12,000 miles a year comes out to 17 cents per mile, but over the 25 year warranty the cost could be as low as 3 cents per mile.

With affordable home solar charging units, we could soon be at a tipping point where the total cost (purchase price + maintenance + fuel) of electric passenger vehicles will be less than similar gas vehicles.

Long gas lines due to an oil shortage from a war with Iran would really boost the sale of electric vehicles, and even without such a war, the long term price of oil is on an upward trajectory as the demand from China and India grows.

Even if Republicans take both houses of Congress and the Presidency in November, environmentalists will use liberal state governments and the courts to obstruct and delay expanded drilling and development. Even if that were not the case, then unless there's an export tax on oil and refined products, more U.S. supply will be swallowed up by China and India with minimal impact on domestic prices at the pump.

Thanks to the magic of high-power sold-state electronics both the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf use AC motors. Same is true for diesel electric locomotives built in the last 20 years.

I agree. A diesel engine is fundamentally simple (though they get complexity all around them these days). A hybrid or electric car is not.

CARB and the dirty diesel supply killed it. VW was the only maker willing to bring a car into the US market that couldn't be sold new in Cali, NY, or the other CARB followers.

It's truly a bummer the way it worked out IMHO.