Missing the Point

There has been a lot of press lately concerning the launch of the long-delayed Chevy Volt, the first of the so-called “plug-in hybrids” to reach the market. Although generally similar to the hybrid cars already on the market, plug-in types like the Volt offer the option of recharging the vehicle’s main battery from an external source instead of the small gasoline-burning engine carried onboard, and the option of not engaging the recharging engine until after the battery’s own range is exceeded. The upshot is that if you drive a Volt 40 miles (to the edge of its battery range) on battery power, and then use the recharging engine to put another 10 miles into the battery (at 50 mpg) you will effectively have covered 50 miles on 0.2 gallons of gas – effectively 250 miles per gallon. Rather a lot, really…

Needless to say, these reports have generated a huge backlash from people who complain (correctly, as it happens) that the car’s true mileage is much lower than the 230 mpg the company claims, assuming that you want to drive it more than 50 miles between recharges from a conventional electrical system. Stories like this one on CNN Money Online try to provide both sides of the story, but a lot of the readers (check the comments section) seem to be focused entirely on the math of the situation – which does, in fact, fall short of the 230 mpg hype for long-distance and highway travel. However, I can’t help thinking that all of these nay-sayers are missing the point…

Consider, for example, someone living in East Lansing (as I do) and working at MSU (which I also do). My commute is only about 8 miles a day (round-trip); even allowing for extra mileage to go out for lunch or swing by the grocery store on the way home, it’s rarely more than 20 miles per day. With a recharge cost of about 50 cents for 40 miles , it’s possible that my whole week’s driving would cost less than a single gallon of gas – or less than 20% of what it would cost me to power my car using gasoline for the same period. Even when we were living in Redondo Beach (and driving 32 miles round-trip to and from work every day) we could still have commuted without ever buying (or burning) a gallon of gas; in East Lansing it’s entirely possible that we could go for months at a time without ever burning any gasoline…

Of course, if you add in a renewable power source, these calculations get even more absurd. A bank of photo-electric cells capable of generating and storing 8 kilowatt hours per day, for example, or a wind turbine with a similar output, would give the Volt owner an almost unlimited supply of essentially free mileage. Even if the price of gas returns to last year’s levels, or extends into one of those nightmare $9/gallon scenarios, Volt owners will remain relatively unaffected. If General Motors can get enough Volts into service to lower the price, making the vehicle accessible to the general public, it could really be the game-changer they’re hoping for…

Even more to the point, perhaps, even this basic application of the technology has the potential to dramatically lower the amount of fossil fuel consumed in this country, lower the amount of particulate matter in the air, and improve our foreign trade balance, all while providing jobs for the nice people here in Central Michigan who will get to build the Volts. But if GM does not handle the mass-production of the vehicle correctly; if they allow this to become a curiosity (like the EV-1) or a rare commodity with a huge waiting list (like the Prius) or a high-priced luxury item that will never produce enough in fuel savings to make it worth the purchase price, then this whole product will become nothing more than a big, sick joke…

Let us hope that General Motors, at least, gets the point of this exercise. And that they choose wisely…