CR Gets It Wrong Again

[DonC]

Also, note that main line of complaint is more about the assumptions about the design process made by the CR blog article's author - the consumer-side justification is a bit of a tangent.

Complete tangent. The problem is that if the blogger had any idea what he was talking about he wouldn't be coming up with some dumb idea that every purpose built EV has to have flat cells that are placed under the seats. In fact he's so uninformed that he doesn't know that the Tesla uses thousands of cylindrical 18650 cells not large flat format cells, a fact which by his definition makes the Tesla NOT the purpose built EV he claims it is. Egads.

The big differentiation between whether an EV is purpose built is in the exterior design and, more specifically, whether you're primarily concerned about drag or weight. For a traditional ICE design you're concerned about mass, aerodynamics, and rolling resistance. For an EV you're looking at aerodynamics, electrical loads and then mass and rolling resistance. The Volt, the Leaf, and the Model S are all purpose built EVs. Only one uses large format cells placed under the seat but all are built to minimize drag.

[zete]

I've always thought "CR" stood for "Completely Ridiculous". It's the only way to explain their grasp of statistics and how they apply measurements to anything.

[John_Maine]

If there are 5 in your family and you can only have one car, a Volt won't do it.

[mikeg3]

If there are 5 in your family and you can only have one car, a Volt won't do it.

Not necessarily. I heard someone tied an extra passenger to the roof. Arf!

[saghost]

If there are 5 in your family and you can only have one car, a Volt won't do it.

If there are five in your family and you can only have one car, they won't be comfortable in the Leaf or Prius or Cruze, either. Center rear seats in compact (and even midsize) cars are mostly seats of last resort for when you have to make it work, not comfortable places to be every day.

[cmr]

If there are 5 in your family and you can only have one car, a Volt won't do it.

neither will a leaf or a focus or any other little car. if you have a family of 5 you are squarely in tahoe/suburban territory.

[Jeff N]

The author at CR, Eric Evarts, is a little fact-challenged at times. In fact, I challenged his facts last year on his garbled PR rewrite effort on the 2012 Prius Plugin introduction.

It's a classic. :-)

http://news.consumerreports.org/cars...ol-access.html

[dwl]

I think everyone is missing the most important thing. It's an article that references the Volt and the comment section isn't full of explosion jokes and EV haters.


By the way, about the 5th seat, I'm not going to say whether it was good or bad overall. But I haven't had anyone react negatively to it. And, to my surprise, even had one person react positively. He thought it was a luxurious design feature. And I was the one that had to point out that it was a design compromise that not everyone was happy with. There was one instance, however, where I was playing sober cab and had to drive someone else's car because there were 5 of us. But that's the only time that it's affected me personally.

[marlow]

Lets remember that the Volt was designed during very trying times at GM and the fact that was designed and built as well as it is, is a amazing to me.

I am sure (now that they are selling over 1,000 a month) that they will have more vairitions coming out in the comming years, to satisify the needs of almost all. How many Corvets are sold each month?

I bealive that the comparisons to the history of public acceptance of the Prius, will be proven some what accurate, except that the Volt will be accepted faster.

We need to get the word out that while the Volt is not cheep, that it is not an expensive version of a cheep car.
Even many Chevy sales persons seem to perpuate this myth by offering to sell prospective Volt costumers a Cruze when thy complain about the price, when they should be telling them to compair it to similary priced and equiped cars.

Public perception is that all economy cars are cheep cars, this is not the case for the Volt, so public perception needs to be changed and this takes time.

[CarZin]

I can't remember the last time I trusted Consumer Reports to help me buy a product. They really suck at the high end stuff, anyway. I prefer looking at user reviews to consumer reports.