Overpriced Prius? Care to tell me the similarities between this and the Prius?

I'll be waiting.

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They both have heavy and inefficient battery packs.

Honestly GM, come back when the technology gets better instead of wasting our tax dollars with these incremental steps in technology. I rather wait another 10 years but have a battery that's lighter and can run say... a trip from say Santa Barbara down to San Diego without intervention by a gas motor.

Keep these pet projects in skunkworks until they're matured and in the meantime devote more money into car structural weight savings.

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I don't understand your logic. A lot of technology advances incrementally, how does that make it a waste?

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This is a stupid article....the price stated is likely specific to a single battery, not the actual cost of the battery per vehicle once in production. There's no way any automaker spends $15k on a battery with a car worth ~$30k

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This is entirely unlike a Diesel. It gets far better fuel economy in the city than a Diesel, and it also has a significant zero-emissions range, unlike a Diesel.

This has a niche, for those who want to drive to work and back on no gas. Is it a big niche? I suspect not. But either way, it isn't competing in the same market as a Jetta TDI.

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Well, until they start building charging plugs into parking lots there's also the fact that a lot of people can't take advantage of the plug-in aspect of the car at all.

For example I have nowhere to charge such a car, since I park in an apartment building's open-air parking lot where there are no power lines to be found.

So their target audience is largely limited to people who can charge it at home, have $40,000 to spend on a new car, and want a super-green car from GM. We'll see how large that audience is soon enough I guess.

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Some of us don't want a diesel car.

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i read somewhere recently about the Chinese auto maker Cherry introducing an electric car with a 70 mile range

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The difference between the Prius and Volt is obvious: The Prius is an non-plug in ICE car with a small electric motor accelerator boost. The Volt is short range plug in electric drive car with a ICE distance booster. They are entirely designed for different duty cycles. Of the two the Volt is far more advanced than the Toyota

I like the idea of a plug in BEV that has a 100 mile range that can use fast charge stations or battery change-out robots should one want to travel beyond the car's range. The future is long-distance BEVs fast-charged on a non-fossil fuel smart grid.

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I agree .. so poorly done it is essentially light-weigh propaganda.

I think this is the same stuff the domestics used to say when they went on and on about electric vehicle technology not being viable in this market place. Now that Toyota ignored the press and put out a bunch of hybrid vehicles -- yes they use technology substantially handicapped by the batteries -- and good golly the have sold like hotcakes. Now every manufacturer outside of Toyota is scrambling to get their hybrids out before further market shares are lost.

I used to say they have to wait for the battery technology to catch up -- but I have to admit I had it wrong.

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The problem with your solution is that oil is a non-renewable resource. Putting money into new innovation ensures that there are workable solutions for the future. Oil is going to run out. Nuclear power will last for much longer and won't pollute the air.

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Yo Bill: Ever heard of peak oil? The whole idea is to find an alternative to "Burn oil in vehicles" because the oil isn't going to be there forever and things are going to be problematic as the supply dwindles. More exploration, at best, can delay the problem, but it certainly cannot solve it. Did you think the industry is investing all this money in alternative fuel sources because it is bored?

The attraction to electric vehicles is that it tkes the problem of deriving energy from non-fossil fuels out of the car. Whether it is wind, solar, nuclear, or from magic crystals, electricity is the commen endpoint and electric vehicles can take it from there. Obviously, we are not there yet, in terms of technology or infrastructure, but that is the inevitable end-point. I applaud the efforts of all the manufacturers to advance the technology. Just because it is not practical now doesn't mean it never will be. Consider the lack of efficiency of the otto-cycle engines of a hundred years ago. That is where we are now.

Most readers here understand this.

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BIlly, that's the dumbest $hit I've ever read, you fool think we should keep burning oil away as if there were no oil wars, no trade deficit, no environmental damage?

It's redneck skum like you that drag this country down. F U

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Most of the electricity produced in the US is from non renewable sources anyway so we really aren't being THAT green with hybrids and plug ins.

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The Myth Of Peak Oil

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones | October 12 2005

Peak oil is a scam designed to create artificial scarcity and jack up prices while giving the state an excuse to invade our lives and order us to sacrifice our hard-earned living standards.

Now that the social architects have de-industrialized the United States, they are going to blame our economic disintegration on lack of energy supplies.

Now that the world economy has become so centralized, they are going to continue to consolidate and blame it on the West's "evil" overconsumption of "fossil" fuels, while at the same time blocking the development and integration of renewable clean technologies.

In other words, Peak oil is a scam to create artificial scarcity and drive prices up.

Peak oil is a theory advanced by the elite, by the oil industry, by the very people that you would think peak oil would harm, unless it was a cover for another agenda. Which from the evidence of artificial scarcity being deliberately created, the reasons for doing so and who benefits, it’s clear that peak oil is a myth and it should be exposed for what it is. Another excuse for the Globalists to seize more control over our lives and sacrifice more American sovereignty in the meantime.

The lies of artificial scarcity:

The crux of the issue is that if oil was plentiful in areas in which we are being told by the government and the oil companies that it is not, then we have clear evidence that artificial scarcity is being simulated in order to drive forward a myriad of other agendas. And we have concrete examples of where this has happened...

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Here's an idea: Let the marketplace and producers decide what ought to power a vehicle.

Fact: There is no operating true Lassez Faire capitalist economy in the world; there never has been. The closest the U.S. and Britain came to it was in the late 1800's/early 1900's. Since then, government edict has been the driving force behind the economy, what it produces, the wealth it creates, and how that wealth is distributed. Obama will surely expand this, much to our mutual detriment.

Car manufactures, themselves playing with $billions like you and I invest thousands, would not invest in a technology (oil burning cars) if they KNEW the world was "running out" of oil. If they did, the day the pumps ran dry would be a very bad day for them, and a very good day for companies like Tesla, or Fisker, or other automakers heavily vested in electric transportation.

But it won't happen that way. The auto industry, selling products which are heavily dependent on the ready availability of fossil fuels, will spend far more time than you and I, and devote far more resources to accurately (and apolitically) determine the true supply of oil. If they are wrong, and the government doesn't bail them out, then they are the ones that pay the consequences, for they will have speculated and invested incorrectly.

We must never forget that successful businesses, themselves in competition with each other as well as for marketplace capital, invest for an economic return, while politicians "invest" (via money they steal from taxpayers) for a political return.

The Volt is a marketplace gamble at best, and a political football at worst.

Read Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, James Madison, Adam Smith, John Locke.

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@ Jake:

The fact is that when you charge a car using electricity produced by a coal-burning power plant instead of using a gasoline car, you are emitting LESS carbon into the atmosphere. Also, you are spreading pollution around instead of centering it in the cities (smog). Finally, there is more coal in the ground to last us than there is oil.

And whoever is going on about oil lasting forever and peak oil being an artificial scam really must have their head up their ass.

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Head up their ass? Hardly. One day we'll scoff at the cartoon of the dinosaur on the gas station sign. "Fossil" fuels....Hah!

From 321energy.com:

If hydrocarbons are renewable- then is "Peak Oil" a fraud?
by Joel Bainerman

Are hydrocarbons "renewable"- and if so- what does such a conclusion mean for the future of the world's oil and natural gas supplies?

The question is critical due to the enormous amount of coverage the issue of "Peak Oil" is receiving from the mainstream press. If the supply of hydrocarbons is renewable- then the contrary to the conventional wisdom being touted throughout the mainstream press today- the world is NOT running out of oil.

Unbeknownst to Westerners, there have actually been for quite some time now two competing theories concerning the origins of petroleum. One theory claims that oil is an organic 'fossil fuel' deposited in finite quantities near the planet's surface. The other theory claims that oil is continuously generated by natural processes in the Earth's magma.

One of the world's leading advocates for the theory that hydrocarbons are renewable is Dr. Thomas Gold who contends that oil is not a limited resource, and that oil, natural gas and coal, are not so-called “fossil fuels.”

In his book, The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels, he explains that dinosaurs and plants and the fossils from those living beings are not the origin of oil and natural gas, but rather generated from a chemical substance in the crust of the Earth.

Dr. Gold: "Astronomers have been able to find that hydrocarbons, as oil, gas and coal are called, occur on many other planetary bodies. They are a common substance in the universe. You find it in the kind of gas clouds that made systems like our solar system. You find large quantities of hydrocarbons in them. Is it reasonable to think that our little Earth, one of the planets, contains oil and gas for reasons that are all its own and that these other bodies have it because it was built into them when they were born? That question makes a lot of sense. After all, they didn’t have dinosaurs and ferns on Jupiter to produce oil and gas?"

He continues: "Human skull fossils have been found in anthracite coal in Pennsylvania. The official theory of the development of coal will not accept that reality, since human beings were not around when anthracite coal was formed. Coal was formed millions of years ago. However, you cannot mistake the fact that these are human fossils."

"The coal we dig is hard, brittle stuff. It was once a liquid, because we find embedded in the middle of a six-foot seam of coal such things as a delicate wing of some animal or a leaf of a plant. They are undestroyed, absolutely preserved; with every cell in that fossil filled with exactly the same coal as all the coal on the outside. A hard, brittle coal is not going to get into each cell of a delicate leaf without destroying it. So obviously that stuff was a thin liquid at one time which gradually hardened."

Gold claims that the only thing we find now on the Earth that would do that is petroleum, which gradually becomes stiffer and harder. That is the only logical explanation for the origin of coal. So the fact that coal contains fossils does not prove that it is a fossil fuel; it proves exactly the opposite. Those fossils found in coal prove that coal is not made from those fossils. Where then does the carbon base come from that produces all of this?

Says Dr. Gold: "Petroleum and coal were made from materials in which heavy hydrocarbons were common components. We know that because the meteorites are the sort of debris left over from the formations of the planets and those contain carbon in unoxidized form as hydrocarbons as oil and coal-like particles. We find that in one large class of meteorites and we find that equally on many of the other planetary bodies in the solar system. So it’s pretty clear that when the Earth formed it contained a lot of carbon material built into it."

Dr. Gold's ideas would lead us to believe that there is so much natural gas in the earth that it is causing earthquakes in trying to escape from the Earth. If you’ll drill deep enough anywhere, you will find natural gas. It may not be in commercial quantities every time, but more than likely it will be.

Is the oil and gas industry reconsidering things in light of his work?

Absolutely not.

"In many other countries they are listening to me: in Russia on a very large scale, and in China also. It is just Western Europe and the United States that are so stuck in the mud that they can’t look at anything else."

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