You can assign any value you like to that. However, consumers will assign values based on seats, cargo capacity, operating cost, depreciation, expected maintenance.

And consumers decide what to do with their dead 100K mile cars on a very practical basis; should I put $5K into this vehicle or just buy something else for $5K? If you like, yes, that is an investment decision. You can also frame it as a cost decision, if you like. If the $5K repair is to a vehicle that is worth just $5K, this is a tossup; except that you will strongly suspect you’ll need that $5K part in another 100K miles. For a conventional car, your worst-case scenario is a $2.5K engine and they appear to last, with proper care, indefinitely. For a Volt, you up the worst-case stakes to $5K.

This is all comparable because financial commitments can be compared.

Of course, for me, this is moot. A Volt makes no sense. I either drive 6 to 12 miles per day or I drive over 240 miles per day, often well over and do so for several consecutive days, on trips (no charging is likely to be possible). At 6 to 12 miles, a Volt is completely uneconomic (I don’t drive enough to justify the cost of the vehicle). On the 240+ mile days, I drive so far beyond the Volt’s AER that it’s uneconomic again.

Most Volt analyses you see here are framed in terms of the perfect use cycle of 40 miles/day, 365 days/year. Who has that? Drive either more or less than exactly 40 miles/day, 365 days/year, and the Volt makes even less economic sense.

The value of a 10 year old Volt or any other unreleased model is impossible to predict. I’m not going to even try to discuss it. To me, the worthwhile discussion is about the technological value of an EREV or lack thereof. That is the context of which I was speaking. Reputation and resale values are fickle and depend on a lot more things than just realibility, eventhough GM has certainly shot themselves in the foot in this area.

Replacing a $2.5K transmission or a $2.5k ICE for comparable cars IS comparable, assuming everything else is equal but that says nothing about the relative value of replacing an ICE (or transmission) in an ICE only vehicle vs replacing a battery in an EREV. Based on your economics, you believe it to be a wiser financial decision to add $2.5k ICE than a $5k battery to an EREV40 if both vehicles had a $5k value. This is a finacial commitment to another 100k miles for each car (which, by the way, I believe it’s 100k from the battery from what has been said but would mean many more generator miles). This means 100k of gas or 100k more of electric. If gas is more than $2, then you will be far better off with the new battery in the EREV. I thought all economics considered future obligations. Sounds like your doing an investment analysis instead of a cost analysis.

While it would take $10 gas to make the Volt economical under some rare scenarios. If you are comparing apples to apples cars, the “economical” gas price is much lower for the average driver and lower still for the heavy users.

You might just as well complain about a comparison between replacement of a $2.5K transmission vs a $2.5K engine. Money is money. Either one will kill a $2.5K car. A $5K component requiring replacement in a $5K car will kill that car, too.

Of course, people who buy GM cars are probably used to 100K miles as being the useful life of a vehicle, so maybe I overestimate the severity of this problem. As a former Volvo owner (155K and 200K miles on original engines and transmissions) and having got religion and gone to Toyota (125K and 150K without ANY significant repairs whatever), I tend to think in terms of the projected life of a car running to several hundred thousand miles.

#138, koz: “The better question is which is the more prudent direction to hedge your bets?”

In Economics, we talk about liquidity preference. You don’t tie up $5K to get $5K. If you’d like to discuss hedging one’s bets, you’ll be reminded that the Volt is uneconomic until gas prices hit $10/gallon or so.

Oh, I think battery prices will fall (look at the Prius and Insight; their parts-counter battery prices have fallen significantly over the past couple years) but you can’t rely on any particular factor in your analysis. Nor do we have a firm statement from GM as to what the parts-counter or manufacturing cost of the battery is today, let alone in 5 years. All we know is that this is a component of unproven life, that GM is willing to talk about 100K miles and the cost of the component is large enough to sentence teh car to death of the component fails.

Any idiot that sees replacing the Volt’s battery is an apples to apples comparison to buying a new ICE will probably not be buying a Volt in the first place. If you hadn’t noticed 100K worth of gas costs a lot more than 100K mikes of electricity. What do you think the cost relationship will be in 2021? The better question is which is the more prudent direction to hedge your bets?

It’s not about an ICE vs a battery, it’s about the value of a car when a component worth $X requires replacement. If the car’s worth $5K and it needs a $2.5K engine, you might well choose to put the engine in it (if you have the cash). If the car’s worth $5K and it needs a $5K battery pack, you are much more likely to junk it. Because of the cost of the battery, the life of the Volt is tied to the life of the battery… If I’m assured of 100K miles of service and no more, the life of the car is also 100K miles. Good luck selling cars like that.

#44, CaptJackSparrow: “With that said, why does GM make that claim? If they are going to do that, they need to mention that it’s calculated by FULL batt cycles of 40 miles X 2500 Cycles Full DOD = 100000 miles.”

Where have they explicitly stated this? Answer: Nowhere. You’re guessing.

#91, Mitch, see above. I don’t have cars with battery packs; I have cars with components worth no more than $2.5K each. The Volt will be a car with a single component valued in excess of $5K. Ask if you have more questions.

Also, Mitch, if I knew you, you’d be the one person I knew with a Ford or GM that went past 100K miles without an impressively expensive repair. And most needed expensive repairs far sooner than that. GM and Ford are in the tank for a reason and it’s not because people spend a lot of time dreaming up stories about them for people to read on the net.

Absolutely. This subject keeps coming up over and over again. Even if nobody chooses to buy the car and lease the battery, this will allow people to “see” the car’s price separately from the battery. As we can see from many comments on this and it will be much worse with the general public, people have a difficult time associated the added value to the car that the battery brings. This value is dependent on the price of gas and each individual driving pattern, but so many times people assign it very little value as if gas is equivalent to electricity in cost. An even better way to get people to think accurately about the lifetime vehicle costs, would be to offer the Volt with a batteryless price and prices for 2 battery sizes (16kwh and 14kwh). This will give the consumer more readon to conider their driving pattern and that process will help reveal the battery’s value.

Incidentally, I would happily take the 14kwh option with a 5 year warranty for several grand less.

““GM’s Tony Posawatz promises “it’ll avoid the shudders common on some hybrids.” He adds that GM is considering how to run the RPMs in that engine. Should they be programmed to match the accelerator or not?”

This may be a decision between noise and gas mileage… If the engine RPM’s match the accelerator, then mpg would suffer somewhat. If instead the engine ran in one or two (sweet spot) speeds, that would provide the best mpg (though louder).

Perhaps that could be one of those customer options… Quiet mode or Economy mode??? However, If mpg ends up much less than 50, then be sure to go for tuning based on mpg to get it as close to 50 as possible. (perhaps, still providing a “quiet mode” option, though.”

I’m surprised they haven’t sorted this out by now. Perhaps an “engine guy” could provide better detail, but I believe GM may have to make at least a preference choice and build it into the hardware. In other words I’m not sure that can allow the user to choose between optimal quietness and optimal efficiency. There may need to be compromises in the engine and/or control components to optimize one or the other. I think they will pick a resonable compromise between the two. Soft ramp up to power generation level required. As the’ve said, there will 2-3 operating outputs. I expect 3: one at the lowest level of the ICE’s high efficiency range, one at max sustained output for the generator, and one at max efficiency. I hope they can tweak the ICE so that max efficiency will be between 20-25KW. It would make sense that they try to “softly” match the power demands on the way up the power curve but more rapidly respond to decreased power needs so that the Volt doesn’t end up at slow speeds or stopped at the higher generator ouputs.