Since most Buyers finance, the (overall) Volt price would not be as great an issue as the monthly payment, 84 month car financing period would be GM’s “Killer App”.

Do the cycle using the current EPA drive regime and using the US-06 cycle and you’ll see some real world results that you can directly compare with any type of vehicle, regardless of drivetrain and carrier/fuel combinations using the same metric. Stick those metric results on car windows for sale. Nah, that’d be actually useful to consumers for direct at vehicle efficiency comparisons, apples to apples. Why do it that way?

The Teeny issue you are missing is the at minimum $100k cost of the fuel cell. But it’s easy to ignore the actual problem by pushing your preference.

Get the real built ready for the real world out the factory door cost of a fuel cell down to $2-3k and THEN you will have an argument. At that point you ”might” have an alternative to the existing range extender.

Your paragraph
justification on
some of these
threads seems to
be getting
progressively
worse over time.

You might want to
look into that.

By using hydrnol reformation, a hydrogen
fuel cell could become more practical than
a PHEV.

First off, a fuel cell car doesn’t have
to be plugged in for 8 hours at night
( not during the day for goodness sake ).

Second off, a fuel cell car has plenty of
trunk space at 13 cubic feet of space for
the Honda FCX Clarity.

Third off, a fuel cell car can go 200 to
518 miles on electricity alone from
it’s fuel cell.

Fourth, a fuel cell car’s hydrogen can
come from methane which is better
for the environment when it is reduced
to carbon dioxide.

Fifth, hydrogen can come from algae
under the right conditions which can
be grown off of the CO2 emitted by
coal plants.

The battery in the Volt either needs to
drop in price by a factor of 10 or store
7 times the electricity. I don’t see either
of those possibilities coming to fruition
any time soon, or at all. The only problem
remaining for fuel cell cars really is
handling and producing hydrogen.
The fuel cell can be built cheaply
using carbon nanotube electrodes
and mass production. Hydrnol or
something similar could be the answer
to the handling problem.

I don’t care whether I save money on my Serial Plug-In Hybrid or not.
Don’t care how long it takes to recoup my cost either.

All I care about is driving a vehicle that helps reduce dependence on foreign oil.
———————–
That characterizes future Volt buyers rather well. Volt is a niche vehicle and it will require niche buyers. The minority of us who do not care about price and economic sense, but want to see OPEC choking with oil. Good luck with that

But the Volt is’nt a pure battery electric vehicle, and thus because it in fact does consume a liquid fuel of some kind must therefore have a miles per gallon equivalent.

Although the Volt can save some people money personally. When what your saving is “tax” that the government relies on, the government will just need to find a new way to shift tax costs onto you… reducing your actual savings.

From a pure economic standpoint, its better to see if the Volt “saves” money by looking at the actual price before taxes of gasoline. Since the US is a country with very low gas taxes in genernal, this is a better metric if your looking for productivity gains (economic benifit)