Production 2011 Chevrolet Volt leaked
September 9, 2008 by George Skentzos
The Chevrolet Volt has caused quite a stir in the US and around the world as GM races Toyota to bring a next generation plug-in production hybrid vehicle to the market.
Its official reveal isn’t scheduled until September 16; however official images of the production Volt with members of GM’s executive team have been leaked onto the web.
The styling has been dramatically evolved from the initial Volt Concept whilst still retaining a futuristic appearance.
Unlike conventional hybrids, the Volt is driven solely by its electric motor, with an onboard combustion engine powering a generator which in turn feeds the Lithium-ion battery.
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DanMan – i agree that hydrogen isn’t the answer, i was just telling SamR what it was all about. I think Mitsubishi has it right with its Meiv concept, full electric cars are the future, BUT for the time being we just do not have the battery technology to allow a full electric car to have a commercially acceptable range that is also light enough and affordable enough for average cars. The tesla is a good case in point, yes its very very fast and has a reasonable range and all the rest of it, but the battery pack is still the heaviest part of the car and the only way they could make the whole concept work was to package it all in a lotus elise chassis. Now you can’t have a lotus elise chassis under a family sized car. Even tesla would admit that their car would be over 2 tonnes if it was a medium sized sedan as opposed to a small roadster. Additionally the tesla is still a very expensive car.
So in summary, yes full electric cars are the answer, but the battery technology to make them viable is still some time off. This is where GM have it right. They have made a full electric car in the Volt, however as the battery technology isn’t available yet to give the Volt an acceptable range on the batteries alone, they have had to put in a small petrol motor to provide additional charge. When the battery technology becomes available to give the volt the desired range, while also being light and affordable, GM can quite easily remove the petrol engine. This differs from both the prius and the Honda which both rely on the petrol engine to operate, the volt on the other hand can operate without the petrol engine all together, it just has the petrol engine to extend the range. This is where I think GM’s technology is superior to both toyota’s and honda’s. People have a problem with GM and automatically assume that if there are three hybrids, one from GM, one from Toyota and one from Honda, then the GM one must be the least advanced, its people’s natural perception. But in this case, the Volt really is the most forward thinking hybrid of the lot and is only a short hop skip and a jump away from being a full electric vehicle, unlike Toyota and Honda’s which are still fully integrated with their petrol motors. If the Volt had Mitsubishi’s in wheel electric motors then it would be truly visionary!
sorry to go on and on, but it seemd that alot of people where writing off this car without even fully understanding what its all about and why its so different to the prius. I wanted to enlighten a few people of the facts here, that being that the volt is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT concept to the prius. And it’s a much better concept to boot
Hi Guys,
I like some of you also thought that hybrid cars would be an intermediate step between the future, which is hydrogen.
However, I think hydrogen as a potential automotive fuel will probably never match plug in electric cars.
www . efcf . com/reports/E04.pdf
To summarise that article, which is from the european fuel cell forums:
A car running on compressed gas hydrogen has a total efficiency of 22%
A car running on liquified hydrogen – 17%
Modern diesel cars – 25%
A hybrid diesel car – 33%
Plug in full electric car – 66%
I did notice that the article assumed the production of hydrogen would be from electrolysis (efficiency 0.7), and I think there are different industrial manufacturing processes that would be more efficient, but even if take away the energy loss from electrolysis you still only have hydrogen cars at 32% efficiency.
Hydrogen would obviously be more convenient though as you would presumably be able to fill your tank up much like you do with petrol/lpg, whereas a plug in electric car might take hours to recharge (at best).
RoFlmaTiC – “refuling” a full electric car in a timely manner is indeed difficult, but i have heard of companies working on “rapid charge” technology with the eventual goal of re-charging a cars batteries in under 5 minutes. It’s all about the technology though, and how far away it all is. The volt is the first REAL car that bridges the gap between todays technology, and tomorrows technology. It incorporates the best of today’s technology and can be easily updated to a full electric car when the battery technology becomes available.
Richo and RoFLmaTiC, you are both right with the issues with using hydrogen fuel cell technology and fast charging batteries. Fast charging is a long way off, and typically relied on the use of supercapacitors to achieve it, however supercapacitors may never be able to store sufficient energy to provide the required range by themselves.
Yes, hydrogen fuel cells as a power source are not as efficient as plug in electric cars as a system, but where many people fall down is by not considering energy density. We currently use petrol/diesel because liquid hydrocarbons are extremely energy dense, petrol has an energy density of 13,500 Wh/kg, Lithium ion batteries have an energy density of 350W/kg. This is why the Tesla car needs 500kg of batteries, compared to the C63 which might need 50 kg of fuel.
So for vehicles that require long range, plug in electrics are limited. Yes battery technology will improve, but so will hydrogen storage and fuel cell efficiency. As for hydrogen, its energy density is 39,000Wh/kg, the difficulty is that a litre of H2 at 150 bar (similar pressure to a scuba tank) stores 405 Wh/L, because hydrogen is so light. So thats why the Honda clarity stores H2 at 2000 bar.
So you can see that as technology improves we will be able to store significantly more hydrogen into smaller cylinders at higher pressure, probably faster than we can improve battery technology. Hydrogen fuel cells can be easily refueled (same system as LPG), and unlike battery technology fuel cell technology is still very early on in the development process, it will improve significantly with time.
Yes to generate hydrogen gas takes more energy than if you had just directly put that into a plug in car, but if the energy source is renewable, then where’s the loss? If you power the hydrolysis with solar or wind, then energy efficiency is not as important, as the world has more than enough energy, its just we currently use extremely limited resources for energy. With hydrogen fuel cells, you are trading in energy efficiency of the system with energy density, and in this case, energy density equals range and power. Thats why I think Honda is on the right track with using hybrids as an interim solution while we get the hydrogen infrastructure ready.