If I remember correctly all 3 of them had cars that could get 40-50 mpg with off the shelf parts in the early '90's. Al Gore was promoting it and they all used their "full" sized cars.
Segment from an October 1992 SciFi Buzz program on the Sci Fi Channel.
General Motors concept car for 13 years in the future (2005).
100 MPG, 1400 pounds, carbon fiber body, swap out engine pod, gull wing doors, 2 stroke 3 cylinder valveless engine.
The one with the gull wing doors was in the movie 'Demolition Man'. They also had the GM Lean Machine in it too. There had other concept vehicles in the movie too.
Hmm - An engine pod that can be replaced with another. Sounds like the smart took on this concept. 4 Bolts drop the engine and trani, Slap in another one, sounds smart.
Same problem that GM had with its electric car in the '90's - not a big enough market for it to sustain the costs.
That's simply not true. The problem with GM's electric car was that they only produced about 800 of them when they had thousands of people on their pre-order list. Then they only allowed them to be leased, not purchased, in California and Arizona. And despite there being a long line of people wanting to convert their lease into a purchase, and a longer list of people waiting for the chance to lease an EV1, they recalled all the leases and scrapped all but 20 of them.
I know this because I wanted one, and called GM several times trying to get them to sell me one in upstate NY. Turns out the only EV1s left (about 20) all now live in the town next to mine, and are serviced at the very Saturn dealership that I had my Saturns serviced at for 14 years. I've seen them in the repair bay, and even got a guided tour by the technician they trained to service them here. GM refused to sell or lease me one because I was not in their test area, and had no way to service the car. They claimed the liability of selling the car to me would be too high. I offered to sign a full waiver of liability, even waive my right to any warranty, and still no dice.
The failure of the GM electric car had nothing to do with demand, it had to do with supply. GM had a huge demand and offered a pittance of a supply. And when the numbers showed there was huge demand, even with the crazy artificial restrictions they placed on the trial program, they pulled the plug. Don't believe me? Just Google EV1 and you'll see tons of reports from lease holders and journalist talking about this.
The EV1 had it's own fan club, and it's own list serve, which I am still on. It was from that list that I found out about the smart coming to the US, and how I was able to be one of the first people to sign up for a smart reservation.
That's simply not true. The problem with GM's electric car was that they only produced about 800 of them when they had thousands of people on their pre-order list. Then they only allowed them to be leased, not purchased, in California and Arizona. And despite there being a long line of people wanting to convert their lease into a purchase, and a longer list of people waiting for the chance to lease an EV1, they recalled all the leases and scrapped all but 20 of them.
I know this because I wanted one, and called GM several times trying to get them to sell me one in upstate NY. Turns out the only EV1s left (about 20) all now live in the town next to mine, and are serviced at the very Saturn dealership that I had my Saturns serviced at for 14 years. I've seen them in the repair bay, and even got a guided tour by the technician they trained to service them here. GM refused to sell or lease me one because I was not in their test area, and had no way to service the car. They claimed the liability of selling the car to me would be too high. I offered to sign a full waiver of liability, even waive my right to any warranty, and still no dice.
The failure of the GM electric car had nothing to do with demand, it had to do with supply. GM had a huge demand and offered a pittance of a supply. And when the numbers showed there was huge demand, even with the crazy artificial restrictions they placed on the trial program, they pulled the plug. Don't believe me? Just Google EV1 and you'll see tons of reports from lease holders and journalist talking about this.
The EV1 had it's own fan club, and it's own list serve, which I am still on. It was from that list that I found out about the smart coming to the US, and how I was able to be one of the first people to sign up for a smart reservation.
So, if the demand was there & there was a profit to be made, why did they kill the electric car?
Regardless of how many people there were on the wait list, GM's official position is that there weren't enough to justify the costs. Until I hear a better explanation, I'm going with that.
The volts battery pack holds the energy in a gallon of gas. Look like a problem to anyone? Like it or not, $ rule the real world.
karl
Actually that’s the beuty of it please read on! It keeps weight down instead of having tons of batteries. The volt will get many hundreds of miles out of six gallons of gas, it’s the generator supplying the energy to power the motor instead of batteries but it does it more efficiently.
So basically you will go farther than the prius and use less fuel and not have the pollution of all the dead batteries after 10 years when all the priuses go bust! Has anyone done the research of what a priuse will cost after the batteries die and need replacing! I think it’s around $3500 for the pack not to bad but I still feel the volt has a place and is still a great piece of teck!
Basically here
"Because it will have both an electric and a gasoline motor on board, the Volt will be a hybrid. But it will be like no hybrid on the road today. Existing hybrids are gasoline-powered cars, with an electric assist to improve the gas mileage. The Volt will be an electric-powered car, with a gasoline assist to increase the battery's range."
GM says the gasoline engine will do less work in the Volt than in any previous hybrid. The electric motor, engineers claim, will be able to power the car all the way to 100 miles per hour, for up to 40 miles. The gasoline engine is just a generator that kicks in to recharge the batteries when they are near empty.
According to GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz, the Volt will use its GPS system to determine how long to run that engine. "The car will know how far you are from home," Lutz told reporters in September, "and it will only run the gas engine long enough to give you enough charge to get you home where you can actually plug it into the wall outlet. So the car will be smart enough to know where its home base is."
GM engineers estimate that the average driver will be able to travel 40 miles before the gasoline engine even ignites. But the range of the Volt under battery power alone will change based on how much weight it is carrying, how fast it is traveling, and other factors. The 40-mile figure is significant, however, because most Americans drive less than 40 miles per day. For many owners, the Volt would function as an electric car virtually all the time, using gasoline only when they took longer trips than they take on a typical day.
If the Volt were forced to pass current EPA tests, engineers estimate that it would be rated for 48 mpg -- about the same as a current Toyota Prius. That is true because the EPA's test requires hybrids to finish certain "cycles" of driving, in the city and on the highway, with their batteries carrying nearly a full charge. The Volt can do that with Prius-like numbers, according to GM engineers. But it isn't designed to work that way.
The Volt is designed to finish most drives with its batteries holding as little as 30 percent of a full charge. If the Volt is allowed to run the EPA's circuits that way, designers say, it can complete the tests using its gasoline engine less than 15 percent of the time -- and receive an MPG rating in the hundreds. That's closer to what the Volt driving experience will be like for most owners.
so to the average driver who drives less than 40 miles will never need the gas for the others who drive a little over you will basically get 6 to 900 miles per tank if your lucky.... workes for me!
It's new, appreciated information for me since I haven't been following the Volt.
My understanding is that there are generally two types of hybrids: parallel and serial. The Prius is parallel where the gasoline and electric motors can both provide motive force. The Volt appears to be a serial hybrid where the motor charges the batteries which run the electric motors.
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