Journo experiences Volt's electric-to-hybrid transition, says it needs improvement
Chevrolet Volt pre-production IVER prototype - click above for high-res image gallery
We long ago had a chance to drive the Chevy Volt mule in all-electric mode, and more recently took a ride in the IVER (integration vehicle engineering release) version. We found the Volt's performance was rather impressive for a vehicle still under development. It was clear at that time that there was still room for improvement, though, and the question of how it would perform after the gas-powered generator kicked in remained unanswered since GM was not allowing anyone from outside the company to experience it. Would there be a sudden jolt of power during the transition or would it perhaps produce a howl reminiscent of the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz? Now it seems those questions are being addressed as GM has just started to allow media to drive the IVER and experience that change.
So how was it? According to Lindsay Brooke over at the New York Times, the initial moments, as the engine comes to life, are "inaudible and seamless." Very nice. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter the sound suddenly surged as the car became cognizant that its battery was lower than desired and attempted to quickly return to its preferred level by revving itself up. Clearly, there is still some refining to be done. The overall impression was extremely positive though, the regenerative braking in particular garnering some amount of praise. We look forward to soon gripping the wheel for ourselves and giving you our in-depth reaction. Thanks to wincros for the tip!
Gallery: Quck Ride: Pre-production Chevy Volt
[Source: New York Times]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
gorr 11:07PM (11/20/2009)
Regenerative breaking should be better then the prius because their electrics motors are bigger and more powerful and the battery is larger.
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NeilBlanchard 11:26PM (11/20/2009)
Hi,
It is my understanding that the amount of regenerative braking is limited by how quickly the battery can take the charge. Maybe GM has used a (ultra?) capacitor to do this? (Which then charges the battery as fast as it can take it.)
Sincerely, Neil
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Tohe 12:10AM (11/21/2009)
Say it is 2020, I'm driving a used Volt down the road, the battery depletes and the generator kicks in. Soon after, noises cripple into the cabin, obviously all that fine tuning is long gone! Will I then be able to shut off the generator? recharge the battery and go on, or will I have to take it to the shop?
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jpm 2:20AM (11/21/2009)
...probably take it to the shop. GM has said themselves that they need to maintain profit for dealers.
Tohe 6:52AM (11/21/2009)
Yeah that is GM
...and that is why they will need another bailout in the foreseeable future.
Gary 11:45AM (11/21/2009)
I would be surprised since GM's new products are on a roll.
why not the LS2LS7? 2:05AM (11/22/2009)
You will have to take it to the shop. The generator in the car is not designed to provide enough energy to move the car without the battery pack as a buffer to smoother out periods of high loading.
jeff 12:32AM (11/21/2009)
having spent plenty of quality time with a series hybrid of my own, I will not be surprised if the noise and harshness from a constantly high revving (relatively) engine becomes a bit of an issue with this car's reception. I'm sure GM is working really hard to optimize this thing, make it as quiet as possible, but there's no doubt that people are gonna have a hard time accepting the fact that their engine needs to chug along at 3000rpm to catch up and recharge the battery a bit while you're sitting at a red light.
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Alan 1:31AM (11/21/2009)
I thought they already indicated that unless the battery is absolutely desperate they're not going to let the engine rev high when the vehicle isn't moving. I'm prepared to give GM the benefit of the doubt over the Volt, they know what will be turn offs. Most people should only ever have to hear the engine occasionally if they plug in every night, which is the whole point anyway. If you're paying that much for a car it would seem a shame to miss out on any grid electricity based miles!
Mark_BC 3:34AM (11/21/2009)
Those Chevy logos in the center display and on the wheel are awful! I hope that's not standard. Please... we don't want to be reminded that this is a Chevy product when we're driving it.... Here's a hint.... look at the styling of the Tesla Roadster. They have ANALOG speed gauges. K..I..S..S..
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Gary 11:57AM (11/21/2009)
Yeah, GM used an LCD screen with the sole purpose of displaying the Chevrolet logo 100% of the time and for nothing else, because, you know, electronics are so cheap nowadays that it was cheaper to do that rather than to make a physical logo made out of plastic and mount that on the dashboard.
P.S. If you looked at the other photos, you can see that the center LCD screen shows other stuff too.
P.P.S. Looking at other Blogging websites, it looks as though the LCD display in front of the steering wheel is customizable. Perhaps there will be "digital analog" dials to appease you. Sheesh.
Laurens 4:41AM (11/21/2009)
Noise needs to be coupled to an increase in speed, strangely enough. This is also a complaint when using a CVT. Personally, the whirring of a generator wouldn't bother me to much. It's more other brands marketing, that make people aware there is something missing in life :-)
But then, I also have no problem with diesel engines.
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Unknown 8:11AM (11/21/2009)
Neil your understanding is wrong. With a 16kWh battery you can take tons and tons of regen braking.
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bvz 1:48PM (11/22/2009)
I don't think the energy capacity of the batteries is what he was asking about. The question was *how fast* can the batteries absorb energy. That is one of the drawbacks of current, production ready battery technology. You simply cannot dump an arbitrarily high amount of energy into it in a short period of time. Kind of like trying to fill a gas tank... you might have a 30 gallon tank, but that does not mean you can fill it with 30 gallons of gas in one second (the limiting factor is the size of the filler tube, just like batteries only being able to charge at a certain rate).
That said, I have no idea how GM is handling this one... Perhaps they only capture a small amount of the regenerated electricity?
why not the LS2LS7? 2:12AM (11/22/2009)
It'll take enough almost all the time in regular use. If you brake hard, you lose energy, otherwise you can capture most of it with regen.
On the track, you can't capture enough because on the track you use hard braking all the time.
David Martin 10:02AM (11/21/2009)
For understandable reasons research is focussing on developing batteries and fuel cells in tow separate design efforts, and in the field of fuel cells have mainly focussed on using hydrogen, the simplest to use on-board and which kicks the issues off onto the infrastructure.
However, it is also possible to look at what the characteristics we would like are.
If you put batteries, fuel cells and reformers together you are asking a lot of technology, but OTOH they work together to mitigate each others issues.
For batteries, you can overcome the issues of range and cost for long range.
For example, a car which can fully substitute for an ICE vehicle really needs at least 50kwh, and preferably 75kwh or so.
If you take the batteries in the Leaf as some sort of base line minimum for a car which can be useful without compromising size and comfort too much, then you have around 26kwh extra to the 24kwh Leaf at minimum.
If you allow for progress in battery technology, you might be looking at $300/kwh.
That's around $8k extra for decent range, or 34kwh extra compared to the Volt, at a cost of $11k extra if you are going the plug in route.
To my mind, looking at the price of present fuel cell vehicles makes no sense, as they are prototypes and have not really got a great deal to do with final production costs.
Toyota reckon they can bring fc vehicles down to the same ball-park as ICE in around 5 years.
It is going to minimise costs for a fc setup if you have a fair amount of battery energy to provide acceleration, and in a fc you have no problem with noise as you do in a small ICE, not to mention that you can throw out a lot of the stuff needed to run an ICE as the fc is still pure electric.
A heavy battery input would much reduce the force of two arguments against hydrogen fuel cells, as a lot of the time most vehicles would be running on pure electric so the inefficiencies of producing hydrogen or methanol would not matter nearly as much.
As for infrastructure, if only perhaps 40% or so of miles are done using the fuel cells, and that is mainly on long journeys, the needed infrastructure is much reduced, which is one of the main strikes against hydrogen.
This would be further reduced by the use of methanol or DME, although of course you are then doing on-board reformation.
Volvo is making good progress in this technology, applying it at the moment to trucks to build a variety of multi-fuel vehicles, including some which use biogas - much more efficient than ethanol.
Of course, some of the steps needed to do this may not work out,a nd nothing is happening for at least 5 years, but there would seem to me to be advantages in this approach as opposed to just seeking to increase battery size to improve range.
Cars like a Rolls-Royce Phantom, which may use up to around 100kwh of batteries if they go for pure batteries, might be the first to find it more economic to combine batteries with a fuel cell, but also for makers like BMW who will be reluctant to sacrifice either their performance heritage or range would surely find this an attractive route.
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Joeviocoe 1:20PM (11/21/2009)
"Toyota reckon they can bring fc vehicles down to the same ball-park as ICE in around 5 years."
They (and others) have been saying "in 5 years" every year for the past 10 years now... Are you going to believe them next year, or the year after?
"As for infrastructure, if only perhaps 40% or so of miles are done using the fuel cells, and that is mainly on long journeys, the needed infrastructure is much reduced, which is one of the main strikes against hydrogen."
Problem with infrastructure is that if demand for it goes down, the cost skyrockets.
How much would each kg of hydrogen cost if a brand new filling station only gets 5 customers per day? Sure you could build fewer stations, but then they wouldn't be placed in convenient locations. And it is not like simply adding another pump to existing gasoline stations. Hydrogen stations need separate pumps, tanks, compressors, pipes, logistics, distribution, etc. Pretty much the only thing that a hydrogen filling station can keep is the convenience store and employees.
So if you put FCVs on the road but go half assed on the infrastructure, the costs will be transferred to those 40% who still fill up with H2.
My solution would be to use biofuels in range-extenders (towable, rentable, or on-board) to supplement driving on longer trips. The filling infrastructure is already here. And the flex-fuel technology is already here and cheap.
Tony Belding 11:31AM (11/21/2009)
I think its funny how the article was so broadly positive about the Volt, yet the headline here on ABG picked up the one rather minor negative bit to trumpet. Yellow journalism is alive and well.
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jeff 11:48AM (11/21/2009)
I don't think that's the case at all. It's just that the audience reading ABG has been waiting to hear about charge-sustaining performance for months, and this headline sums up the case perfectly: it's not ready yet, and they have 9 months to sort it out.
David Martin 2:09PM (11/21/2009)
Joevoicie,
You state that we have been told repeatedly that FC units for cars would be practical and economic in 5 years.
Maybe so, if you listened to what small start-up companies such as Ballard were saying, to raise funds, or reading some journalistic hype, particularly if you were not following the technology at all closely.
Present arguments for the relative nearness of fuel cell technology are much more soundly based, and it is not essentially germane to it whether some have ill-advisedly said that it would be ready prematurely.
The gains in power, compactness and cost are real, not relative, and many of the ways in which it will be further advanced are quite clear.
In, say, 1990, none of these things were true, and those who gave credence to some sensational newspaper articles or PR pieces have no-one but themselves to blame.
If you look at the progress that Toyota, Honda and BMW have made in the last few years, then around 2015 does not seem unreasonable to hope for some economic practicality.
Are we sure to succeed? By no means.
But neither are we guaranteed to be able to get the very large improvements in battery costs and power that we need to move that into a state of universal applicability.
Sure, if we manage to build lithium/air batteries economically or some such then the market for fuel cells would be much reduced, but on current trends of improvement it appears that fuel cells with a large lithium battery are perhaps the best bet to get decent range, if you want to avoid using an ICE as in the Volt, which as I mentioned introduces more complication than sticking to all electric.
As for the price of hydrogen fuel stations going up with fewer users, of course what we are looking at is keeping the number of users at each station roughly constant, and building less to save costs.
I am less familiar with the infrastructure needs in the States, but certainly in the UK and elsewhere in Europe a ~40mile all electric range would be fine around town, and the vast majority of journeys at distance are done on the motorway.
The numbers of hydrogen stations needed would be really very limited, as you would primarily be putting in the pumps on the motorways.
This may in any case be needed even if the vast majority of cars were pure electric, as it is an awful lot tougher to do long distance truck journeys on any variant of battery technology.
I see you have not addressed my own preferred solution, which builds on the work of Vovo and others, and is base on methanol, DME or biogas, all of which can be used in variants of fuel cells, or in adapted ICE or Sterling engines.
There is no way in the world I can see folk lugging trailers behind them, anymore than erecting sails to go down the motorway!
It is so much simpler just to hire a more powerful car.
We have a whole raft of new technologies maturing at a similar time, give or take 5 years.
It is my contention that there are significant synergies between them, and that together they can be greater than the sum of their parts.
Premium cars such as Rolls, BMW and Mercedes would certainly like long range without lugging around many hundreds of kilograms of rarely used batteries, and their premium cost gives some flexibility to implement fuel cell technology.
That would certainly be their preferred option to having a tiny ICE engine blasting away at high revs.
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