1. Suggest to GM to suggest to congress the concept of a minimum gas and diesel price, this would only protect and help GM with their electrical and hydrogen efforts.

2. Wire the volt to handle 220v, but make the separate transformer an add-on product. So if somebody wants the feature, they pay a few hundred dollars for something a mechanic can install in 20 minutes. That way the cost of the car is reduced, but the 220v feature can be obtained.

3. Program the car’s computer to delay the charging of the vehicle with the press of a button. When the car is switched to off, this option should pop up on the screen. This will allow the driver to take advantage of nighttime electricity rates.

4. Any built in GPS should be utilized to figure out where the car is, so patterns can be detected. Going to work assumes you will be there a while. Going home after work assumes you will be there for a while too. Going home at lunchtime assumes you’re not staying. Charging of the electricity and thee decision to turn on the generator can be influenced by the location. Privacy issues will exist, so set the “learning” feature to off by default.

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Wally Rippel says:
“My conclusion is that DC brushless drives will likely continue to dominate in the hybrid and coming plug-in hybrid markets, and that induction drives will likely maintain dominance for the high-performance pure electrics.”

So it may be that Tesla will use a DC brushless drive for their BlueStar.

Wally also says:
“Induction machines are more difficult to control. The control laws are more complex and difficult to understand. Achieving stability over the entire torque-speed range and over temperature is more difficult with induction than with DC brushless. This means added development costs, but likely little or no recurring costs.”

This tells me that GM would get the Volt out sooner with a DC brushless motor.

Can someone explain the issues with a DC motor?

I’m looking on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushless_DC_electric_motor
and they don’t seem to point out any huge downsides. In fact, they say:
“Although burshless DC motors are practically identical to permanent magnet AC motors, the controller implementation is what makes them DC. While AC motors feed sinusoidal current simultaneously to each of the legs (with an equal phase distribution), DC controllers only approximate this by feeding full positive and negative current to two of the legs at a time. The major advantage of this is that both the logic controllers and battery power sources operate on DC, such as in computers and electric cars.”

I suspact that if you had a true AC motor, that would require a more complex circuit to convert the DC battery voltage to variable rate AC to run the motor. This would seem to add cost and weight, but again I’m no expert.

Can someone explain the difference from a driver’s perspective?

What I find fasinating is all the talk about 220 versus 110 and virtually no talk about the fact that he said it was going to be a DC MOTOR!!!!

Also, since the Li/Ion battery pack is much higher than 12 volts, creating 12V DC with any kind of power behind it might be more expensive than 110V AC outlets. My understanding is that converting DC to DC at high power is more expensive than converting DC to AC.

But regardless of technical issues, if 110 volt AC convenience outlets came standard, that would be another reason to call it the Volt! It works with 110 volt electricity both ways – could be a great marketing gimmick.

If that 12V circuit can take power from the Volt’s primary lithium battery system, then you should be able to plug in a regular cheap 12V AC inverter and run it (depending on draw) for many hours. For example, ignoring heat losses, seems like 8KWh of capacity should be able to drive a 500W inverter at full load for 16 hours.