AutoblogGreen

You knuckleheads that are bashing GM for their rocky attempt at producing a reasonably priced, mass produced all-electric car oughtta get one thing straight: NOBODY else has done it yet. If it was just a case of stupid American engineers then you'd be driving one from Toyota by now. But you aren't because even overhyped, overrated Toyota can't pull it off.

Tesla's vaporcar has yet to be seen in the real world and if it ever appears, it will be limited to specific cities where they can support it. Oh yeah, it's just around the corner... any minute now... just let me perfect my 'temporary' transmission. Which one of you was talking about 'reliable transportation' again?

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GM's P.R. strategy for the Volt puzzles me. They make a huge splash, raise incredible expectations, and now comes endless equivocation and adjustment of those expectations. Is this their attempt to keep the Volt in the news?

If the Volt come off as planned (from what we know of their plans, as of today), GM could win big. In meantime, they're talking up something that isn't available to sell, and not saying when it might go on sale either. Don't they realize that they're taking a P.R. hit each time? They might learn the value of a little discipline.

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texmln,

They had a working friggin' model over ten years ago!! Did you miss Who Killed the Electric Car? Please, there has been a giant conspiracy by the oil companies, the car companies, and the gubbermint to keep EVs off the road.

Fat and stupid is no way to go through life son.

Dean Wormer

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They had a working model that they could not make profitably, and that no one wanted, except for 20 celebrities in hollywood. toyota found out the same thing and they used an existing car (RAV4). The fact is 10 years ago not enough people wanted an electric car unless they were on a golf course. By the way GM is not the only car company in the world. If it is so easy to do where are the electric cars from renault, PSA, honda, Toyota, Ford,VW, Chrysler? The Tesla looks promising but a 2 seat 100K roadster is not for everyone.

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A lead-acid battery pack isn't going to last 200k miles.

Even if you build it out of Firefly batteries.

Yes, lithium-based batteries are very expensive.

But they are the future - maybe if we go back to the idea of leasing the battery pack?

>They could build a great EV that lasts 200k miles for $15k

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Throwback,
It wasn't profitable because they had no intention of selling it in volume. The EV1 was built as a Kit Car, no modern assembly line was built. That's one of the points in "Who Killed the Electric Car".

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Why invest in very expensive technology when only California was mandating it? There was no demand for an electric car 10 years ago period. The movie implies that there was huge demand for the car and GM purposely lost money so they could kill the program. that is simply nonsense. Even Toyota admits the numbers did not add up so they also dropped their EV program. The movie was simply a hatchet job on GM, as if GM was the only car company in the wold that could make a EV. Toyota decided to go with Hybrids because they felt it was a better solution, guess what, they where right. Although there is a vocal minority of people who want EVs, that does not mean every car buyer in the US will take to plugging in their cars.

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I think that battery technology is too complicated
for use in a car. They always end up saying battery is not ready yet. Lead-acid is too heavy,
nickel-hydrid is still too heavy and li-ion is too
heavy and costly and suffer in cold and heat. Batteries have tons of limitations, weight, slow
charging time, memory effect, heat and cold, difficult to monitor, so on..

We go in the space but we do not have a good battery yet.

They have the answer it's a hydrogen fuelcell but
they cannot decide to change the fueling infrastructure so we are struck agonising with fossil fuel. All that is the fault of GM and exxonmobil.

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The hydrogen-fuel-cell is pure nonesense. Not really emission-free, hard to regulate, problems with H²-storage. It is one of the worst concepts you could think of. Greatest problem about hydrogen is still the giant energy problems with production and logistics. And fuel-cells are still not real market-ready: Hondas Fuel Cells have problems with over-heating, VW fuel cells have problems when it is cold and BMW and MB had great safety issues about the hydrogen tanks.


EVs nowadays have a chance to be market-ready because of new technologies which came from investments of mobile phone producers and not of car producers. Lithium-based batteries are quite a good solution. They are much lighter than Nickel-based batteries and modern concepts have very good charecteristics. Evonik (a german company) has Lithium-based batteries with ceramic separator which have no temperature problems, no memory effect and extremly high capacity (but long loading times because they still use very classical anode materials). So it looks quite reasonable that PHEV will be uesable for the mass-markets in about 3 years. VW and Audi had EVs and PHEVs in the 90s but they were just to expensive and had real problems with the NiMH-batteries they at that time. Building a decent EV is very complicated. Only newer technology like the lithium-based batteries or new loading electronics make it possible.

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I wonder if it was possible to combine an Altairnano-anode for fast loading time and an Evonik Separion Separator for battery safety and life extension.

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All new technology products are expensive at first. VCRs cost $1500, then $1000, $500, $300, now about $50. Big screen TVs were $10,000, then $5000, now under $1000.

GM produced a first generation EV, the EV1, back in the late 90's. It was way to expensive, just those $10,000 big screen TVs.

If they had stuck with it, they would be on the third generation EV by now, and it would start to become affordable. They didn't, and now they are starting over with a new, but still first generation product. (Ok, maybe it's gen 1.5, doesn't matter). The Volt is way too expensive, just like those $10,000 big screen TVs.

Does that mean we should just avoid all new technology?

Remember, at one time, not that long ago, books were way too expensive for the average person.

The "Anything new is bad because it's too expensive" attitude would have us still living in caves, hunting animals with rocks. (Those new spears? No, those are way too expensive, I'll stick with my rocks, thanks,)

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