Autoblog

Tony Belding @ May 7th 2007 8:56AM

The reason it will go only 40 miles on battery power is because it's also lugging around a whole gasoline engine, generator, fuel tank, exhaust system, and so forth. If you ripped all that out and replaced it with more batteries and tweaked the aerodynamics, it could have a 200 mile highway range on batteries.

However. . . It would then become more expensive (try pricing half a ton of laptop batteries!), and you wouldn't have an option to take long road trips without recharging, and you'd basically have a Tesla Whitestar -- which should also be on the market by then. It'll be interesting to see which approach proves more successful.

I have really mixed feelings about the Volt. I strongly dislike the styling, which seems both ugly and non-aerodynamic. It annoys me that GM insist on calling it an "electric car" even though it's a PHEV, and they certainly should know the difference. It annoys me that GM chose a design which flogs the batteries very hard instead of making an EV that could work with today's battery technology, as Tesla are doing. It annoys me that you'll have to lug around -- and maintain -- an internal combustion engine, even though you probably won't even be using it the great majority of the time.

To be fair, a 200-mile BEV would be lugging around a lot of expensive batteries that it wouldn't even be using the great majority of the time, so I wonder which is really better?

The Volt is not an elegant solution. However. . . Even if it isn't the car I would have designed, I give GM credit for going where many of there competitors don't have the vision to go. You don't see Ford, DaimlerChrysler, VW or even Honda doing this. (Toyota have said they are going to make a PHEV, they announced it before the Volt, but nothing else is known about it.)