Sorry not responding you in time. I think that in order to secure electric car development USA shall impose fuel tax or, at lease introduce some umbrella tax formula. The reason is that oil companies can easy kill electric cars with one year oil price reduction like it happened with ethanol cars in Brazil. If USA is committed to oil import reduction it shall take adequate measures.

On other hand one should understand that there is obvious electric car technology lockout because of very well established conventional car technology. Governments should support new developments for numerous of reasons.

“Here’s an intuitive explanation as to why the teardrop (airfoil) generally has the lowest drag — its smooth, rounded front edges quickly divert impinging air enough that air FOLLOWING the front surfaces is NOT IN CONTACT with most of the teardrop’s remaining surfaces. This reduces or eliminates FRICTION over most of its surface area, which reduces the teardrop’s overall drag compared to that of other shapes.”

Actually the teardrop shape has the lowest drag coefficient because the air flowing over the trailing edges REMAINS IN CONTACT with the remaining surface. It’s the separation of air current at surface corners and projections that causes change from laminar air flow to turbulent eddy flow and increases resistance considerably.

George I @ #45

With the current generation diesel particulate filters in place I would suspect “nanoparticles” to be along the same order of magnitude or less than gasoline CO emissions.

Having said that, I read somewhere awhile back that a study comparing biodiesel with petroleum based diesel found that inhalation of the petrodiesel particulates caused necrosis of cellular structure, whereas no such effect was observed for biodiesel. I’m now constantly cognizant of this every time I happen to walk along the city bus route going to and from work.

No, but they are worried about aero stability. They have had an alarming history of “blowing over” like a very fast powerboat. So, they are willing to trade drag for downforce as well. The downforce also keeps the tires pressed to the strip as they fight for traction Fuel economy is not an issue for them! Plus the rules have a lot to say about the configuration of the cars.

It is a delicate balancing act. F1 cars, for example, use much different aero packages at tracks with long straights – Spa or Monza for example, than they do at tight twisty track – Monte Carlo or Hungaroring. They sacrifice downforce for top speed on the longer straights, and top speed for downforce in the twisty corners.

Some say that a modern F1 car in high downforce configuration could be driven upside down across a ceiling at 140 mph or so. This will not be a consideration for the Volt!

Streamliners running for all out top speed at Bonneville assume much more of the shape described by nasaman, as drag trumps all of the other tradeoffs there.

The Volt will clearly involve difficult tradeoffs between drag and styling. There is also a tradeoff between drag and ride height, for example. Lower ride height = less drag. Alas, getting in and out of driveways and other such mundane considerations interfere. Unless you want to run hydraulics like an East LA lowrider! Or an early Citroen. Not a bad idea in the abstract, but very complicated and expensive. Maybe it could be an option, lol.

Thanks a lot for these spy pictures of the new Astra.

As you said so well I also “suspect the 2011 Opel “Volt Equivalent” may look (a little) like the 2009 Opel Astra”. Parentheses are mine.