Comments on: GM VP Jon Lauckner on Current Chevy Volt Production Status

By: jbfalaska

jbfalaska — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 02:33:57 +0000

I was spooked. When GM announced the engine plant was idled, I gave up waiting and driving my well over 150,000 mile plus Buicks. Purchased two Lincoln MKX vehicles.

Am I still in the market for a Volt? Of course. IF and when the car is ready to roll of a real assembly line.

CHEVY VOLT: American-made, American-FUELED. No more Middle East turmoil oil will prove a great day for this country and all Free nations.

By: Sasparilla

Sasparilla — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:58:14 +0000

Boy does this sound good. I hope it continues to fall into place.

On the EV1, they only did prototype tooling because they had already scaled back the idea of really producing the vehicle and the proto tooling is much cheaper if your not going to be producing serious numbers – at that point you could tell GM wasn’t serious about selling the EV1 (long before the 1st one rolled down the line).

Things sound different with the Volt, but I’ll feel alot better after production tooling has been purchased, created and put in place – then we’ll know management wants a production throttle that can really be opened. Its great to see this stuff though.

By: WTF?

WTF? — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:28:51 +0000

John Lauckner and Bob Lutz “co-conceived the volt..”? Where do you get this shit? I’ve seen Bob Lutz named as the “father of the Volt” too, yet another crock of shit. Stop putting your opinions and the shit you’re fed by GM out here as facts. You have no idea what the hell you’re talking about, and the shit you parrot on your site is so far from accurate it’s ridiculous. Your site is proof postive that you can’t believe one half of one percent of the garbage in print on the internet.

By: Shawn Marshall

Shawn Marshall — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 15:03:41 +0000

Correction : The changeover switch is break before make to avoid parallel out of phase which equals a fault condition and possibly 10,000 amps fault current. Sorry, but nobody saw the last post anyhow.

By: Shawn Marshall

Shawn Marshall — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 15:12:14 +0000

Most people have jobs in the US. They get up in the morning and go to work. This causes one of two daily electric load peaks – the morning one. Then everybody comes home in the evening and there is another daily load peak when folks turn on the news and start dinner and maybe crank the heat or AC. These two peaks do not coincide all that well with fixed solar arrays on your rooftop. You could install a tracking system if you really want to spend a lot more money than you’ve already spent for very expensive arrays. Or if you had a great battery system you could store all the available energy that your solar system can produce and use it when you need it. Most utilities pay peanuts for home generated power and it has to be converted to AC and synchronized and fault protected. No lineman wants to get killed by a home system backfeeding into distribution feeders, that’s why home generator installations are required to have a make-before- break changeover switch.
So these new batteries offer the promise of getting off the distribution feeder entirely. You just need enough solar capacity to satisfy your average load and you can kiss your electric bill goodbye.
Average load for an average home in the mid-Atlantic region might be
1000 kW-hrs usage per month/ 30 days in a month/ 24 hours in a day = 1.38 kW average usage. So if you have 8 hours of insolation at a non-optimum angle, you might get by with 4-6 kW of cells if you can store all the output; and your battery pack needs to be able to supply the average load for x number of days? if you don’t want to run your own ICE generator too much during cloudy times. This is another reason why the Volt is a great idea. It not only points to eventual freedom from non-economic cartels but also promises to free us from the previously necessary electric monopolies – and cleanly too for the greenies.
Also a kilowatt – hour has a little k and a big W – if you wanna use scientific units. I’m just saying.