Loboc:
Grease keeps the terminals from corroding by air/water/electrolyte. (They are mostly all sealed now, so, acid spills are rare.) It’s better to use those little felt washer thingers and use spray terminal anti-corrode though.  

It’s called dielectric grease

Herm: TG is an entertainment show, they will make fun of it.. in any case high performance is not important to me but apparently it is to many people.. luckily this does not affect the efficiency of an electric car too much (it may actually increase the range).. perhaps a slightly heavier motor and inverter if that. It affects the efficiency of a spark ignited ICE a lot, a bigger engine that you run most of the time at low throttle settings has a lot of throttling pressure losses. This is the reason that a small ICE with a turbo is being used in modern cars to increase MPG, witness the amazing 4 cylinder Equinox.Just about the only thing that affects the efficiency of an electric car is how fast you drive it, aerodynamic drag is the most important issue after you pass 45mph.  

Well, there is little difference between power lost through inefficiencies and power lost through burning rubber! I’m a little disgruntled to still see GM managers burning rubber and touting the ‘performance’ of this high-tech car. Not only will this be the first serious electric car, but it will be the most “grid guzzling” too! GM wouldn’t have it any other way. Come on, GM, let the consumers burn all the rubber they want, if they want to at all.

With a series, plug-in configuration like the Volt, the output power is *the* most critical design decision, and it *does* affect the efficiency. It affects the size of the motor and battery, as well as its life, and the size of the engine and generator. The heavier the car, the less efficient. I don’t want to bash the Volt, the Volt’s architecture and performance is critical for the first PHEVs (excuse, me EREVs) to be purchased; GM made the right choice to develop this massive powertrain for the first generation. But I hope batteries continually improve and ICEs continually shrink so we can get more *miles* from electricity.

I agree that downsizing the engine is the “lowest” fruit, but the 2nd Gen Equinox does not have a turbocharger, just a naturally aspirated, direct injection, high compression, variable valve, 2.4L I-4 gasoline engine.

In any case, after driving all these cars around the incredibly short on-ramps and fast speeds on California roadways, I figure 0-60 of 8 seconds was the absolute minimum that would be safe to drive around here. I submit as totally anecdotal evidence that two of my several friends that own Priuses have been rear-ended around here (in the Silicon Valley).

I think I can cut the Volt some slack on the raw 0-60 time because it has no transmission. I hardly ever actually need 0-60 performance, anyway, what I’m looking for is 20-75 (for those on-ramps) or 75-85 to get out of the way of people trying to merge into my rear fender all the time. In those cases, the point is that the car is already moving and so you can’t do a high-rev, drop-clutch high speed launch that it takes to get those fast 0-60 times, anyway. With the manual transmissions, I don’t have to wait long to get the engine RPMs where I want them, but with automatics, it always seems like it takes forever after I put my foot down for the system to work out that I really need to move NOW and I expect the Volt to be particularly good in that regard. So, while it’s probably not as quick as I’ve been accustomed to, I think it’s probably quick enough for me to feel comfortable buying. It is a major step in the right direction and I’m willing to cut it a little slack. I’d really hate to see a 0-60 in the 9 second range. I honestly don’t know if I could bring myself to buy if that were the case, no matter how much I want this technology to succeed.

Herm:
One thing I have always done is sit the battery on a piece of 1/8″ neoprene rubber.. I feel that protects the battery a bit from road shocks but if you have a severe vibration environment then you should get one of those Optima batteries..I never understood why people put grease inside the terminals.. grease is not conductive!  

Something underneath the battery also protects a metal tray, and is a great idea.

But another of the the main problems when the installation occurs by a “do it yourselfer”, is that if the hold down is not re-installed, every bump you go over has the battery taking a slight leap up in the air and come back down with a shock to the interior.

Sometimes even when a grease is only applied to the outside of the terminals, it melts down in between the contact surfaces in a hot engine compartment. Another situation can happen when someone disconnects one or both of those greasy terminals, and gets the grease introduced between the contact surfaces that way.

There are very may techs who believe that I am over representing this. Not a one of them is competent with software damage cause and effect isolation diagnostics. But more and more are catching on every day and come back to very seriously respect what I advised them, and they genuously let me know how much they appreciate these facts on behalf of their customers.