This is not just a simple question who delivered a few battery packs for testing. This is a much bigger economic issue. We need jobs here, we need to invest in our innovation, we need our tax dollars going to American suppliers.

Yes, it’s implicity included in the calculation, which is final output (miles) for original input (kWh energy), for direct comparisons of net output/input efficiencies.

What I’m measuring is how much energy, measured in kWh, it takes to go a mile for different vehicles. What’s in between for drive train efficiency is already reflected in the calculation results – it’s original amount of fuel energy in, translated to kWh, for the final number of miles traveld out. That includes all the mess in the middle. I think that the reasonableness of my relative results (example – look at my results for the Prius) and the fact that no-one in this thread reported anything different using that metric says that I’m doing it right (I’m just following US EPA and DOE published official methods for efficiency metrics, which they bizzarely fail to report the results on on their own site for all vehicles). If you have different numbers to report in the metric of kWh / 100 miles, please do so.

The plain fact is that Lithium is much more expensive than NiMH or lead-acid from a life-cycle cost perspective; and A123 was one of the more expensive LCC items.

No one can explain why GM fails to use NiMH, which is the lowest cost and longest-lived battery, the only standard and proven EV battery that lasts longer than the life of the car.

Lutz just smiles and babbles when NiMH is mentioned; that was the superior battery that GM tried to suppress in 1996, and sold control of to Chevron in 2000. Then Chevron sued Toyota, and now it can only be used for hybrids that can’t plug-in. But it’s best for full EVs, like the EV1, HondaEV and Toyota RAV4-EV; make no mistake, NiMH is still running fine after 6 or 7 years in our all-electric Toyota RAV4-EV.

– Pete

That’s the same as the Classic Prius… which has climbed Pike’s Peak and Mount Washington just fine with a significantly smaller battery-pack.

A while back, there was a “Pike’s Peak” article here on gm-volt.com:
http://gm-volt.com/2008/09/02/the-pikes-peak-question-chevy-volt-and-the-infinite-hill/
This outlined what would happen with the Volt on mountain passes, and why having 30% of a 16kwh battery in reserve is a good thing for such situations. This formed the basis of my estimate of 6-7kwh battery size for a non-plug-in Volt. As always, we can only form estimates about other options from the information we get from GM.

There were also a couple of articles on gm-volt.com where GM floated the idea of a 20-mile Volt at reduced cost. Here’s one of them:
http://gm-volt.com/2008/06/16/possible-future-chevy-volt-options-version-one-will-have-40-miles-ev-range/
But then GM later seemed to back away from that by saying 40 miles was the right size. So apparently, GM looked at a lower range and found out it wouldn’t save that much money.

Also, don’t be surprised if the actual price of the Volt comes in lower than people think. At the time congress was debating the amount of the plug-in tax credit, GM said they would need 2 batteries over the lifetime of each Volt, and that would drive the price up to $40K. Then after they passed the $7500 tax credit, Lutz said battery testing now shows that only one battery is required. I’m betting GM will surprise everyone with a price well under $30K after tax credits.

But as always, predicting the future is imperfect. The information we have now can change at any time.

I certainly don’t want that. Like many others, I see the need to offer a choice of size.

Reducing battery capacity would make Volt much more affordable.

As for needing 6-7kwh of energy storage, that simply doesn’t make any sense. All along there’s been talk of how the Volt engine is so big it is almost overkill. Now you come along and claim it produces so little electricity that it must depend on a battery-pack with 4 times the capacity of the one in Prius.

The Volt engine should be able to sustain charge. True, it efficiency may drop to an undesirable level during times of extreme demand. But requiring so much excess is hard to believe.