Comments on: Volt Nation VIDEO: Bob Lutz Addresses the Crowd

By: Bob Lutz Reveals Chevy Volt First Continental Battery Pack at New York Auto Show GREEN DEETS 015 VIDEO 2 minutes WATCH >> : Susty

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 22:19:12 +0000

[...] Hall event at the New York Auto Show on Wednesday. New Jersey neurologist Lyle Dennis publishes gm-volt.com in his spare time and has gotten the attention of General Motors, so much so, the company sent down [...]

By: PaulR

PaulR — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 15:25:03 +0000

#24 Nasaman

Regarding your 3 hours of Q/A you recorded…

Would love it if that could be added to Lyle’s podcast feed. I am a subscriber of that. Thank you.

By: Koz

Koz — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:25:46 +0000

Thank all of you for your responses to the planned discharge cycle. The consesus appears to be GM is still with 30-80%. omegaman66 touches on the issue that I was hoping to discuss with the engineers. Are they testing outside of the 30-80% cycle, which I assume they must be? Do they have plans to allow the driver to overide the cycle limits? Do they have an idea yet what effects certain deviations from the 80-30 cycle will produce? Obviously battery life is an issue and performance could be an issue on the max discharge limit.

By: Shawn Marshall

Shawn Marshall — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 13:33:44 +0000

Nominal voltage designation in the USA is 120/240 VAC. If you use 110/220 in conversation, you are giving away your age.

Sounds like the Volt is very near a certainty. Hope I don’t have to steal one to get one. GM please take some money.

Would love to see info on the locked down design. Work on’em Lyle.

By: Tagamet

Tagamet — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 05:56:35 +0000

Bob DID say "more like 50 AER initially" and 40 at the end of the battery’s life. SOC range = 30 to 80%. If I was reading Bob right I wouldn’t be at all surprised with 60 AER in Volt Ver 1.0 Just a subtle guess (but I got $2 that says I’m right. They will hold some positive info secret to release here and there to stoke flagging interest or offset bad news.

By: Rashiid Amul

Rashiid Amul — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:10:55 +0000

#31, omegaman66. I keep thinking I heard 70%. Not 80%. I also heard 50 miles with new battery and 40 with old end of life battery (say around 100,000 miles or so). BillR is right, 30% SOC before ICE turns on. This they confirmed.

But I hope you are right with the 70 miles. I travel 51 miles one way, and the 70 would cover it completely if I could charge up at work.

By: noel park

noel park — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:53:44 +0000

#32 omegaman66:

Speaking as the king of typos, your post looks pretty darn good to me. Don’t sweat it, it’s blogging. I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve clicked "submit" and then groaned to see the typo after it was too late! Keep on keepin’ on.

By: omegaman66

omegaman66 — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:29:23 +0000

Looks like we need an edit feature here… sorry for the poorly written post.

By: omegaman66

omegaman66 — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:27:57 +0000

Lets see… the 30% to 80% was decided on BEFORE the batteries were built. Everything about the Volt has been towards no chance of failure and no chance of a screw up/recall/disaster. This means that they probably were a little conservative with those numbers.

I wonder if they are only testing between those ranges? When more batteries arrive I am sure what they range can safely be expanded to will be investigated further. Maybe a simple software upgrade will extend that range to something on the order of 20%- 90% operating range which would mean the range would go from 50 miles initially to 70 miles!!!! Fingers crossed.

By: BillR

BillR — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:16:55 +0000

#24 Koz

They confirmed that the Volt is designed for a 40 mile AER using 8 kWh of electricity from the battery, and as #25 Mike756 states, at 30% SOC, the ICE comes on.

I believe they also confirmed the 16 kWh capacity of the battery as well.

In other words, I can confirm everything except for the 80% charge point.