Quote:
Originally Posted by Happy Monkey
I guess I understand their explanation (arriving at the destination with an empty battery and charging there will likely be cheaper than charging using gas).
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The Chevy Volt was suppose to be 100% electric. But the design, when it was proposed, was subverted repeatedly by cost controllers. To save the design, it was patched together to a gas motor.
Read what Toyota did to implement a gas motor with a battery, energy from brakes, etc. That controller is complex - more complex than the design of a new motor. So business school graduates did what they understand. They understood obsolete technologies. So that was pushed into the Volt as a separated system.
Cost controls. Eliminate the complex interface and costs go down ... only on a spread sheet.
Chevy Volt is a
kludge created because business school graduates constantly 'fixed' the design. Then they made some silly excuse that people would rarely need the motor.
BTW, gasoline uses less energy than recharging from fossil fuels burned in some distant generation station. Also explains why electric heat is also so expensive. Currently is no alternative to fossil fuels - either burned efficiently in the car or burned far away and transported to the car with greater thermodynamic losses and further battery losses.
Well it could be worse. Someone could foolishly propose hydrogen as a fuel.
What makes a hybrid so superior? Same reason why 1940 locomotives used that technology So that a rail car can go 400 miles on one gallon of fuel. Electricity stored in a battery could never do that. Too many losses.
Hybrid was the innovation in 1990s. 2020 and GM business school graduates still cannot make one. Mary Barra must now first what the Donald Trump types did that long ago.
GM (like Kmart and Sears, GE, etc) are first indicators of a recession that has started. First to be hurt are companies who made profits rather than innovated ten years ago. What happened ten years ago determines an economy today. In the case of the Volt, what happened 17 years ago is why that piece of crap exists today - destroying jobs.