For the Volt, How’s Life After 40 (Miles)?

SITTING behind the wheel of a 2011 Chevrolet Volt prototype on Wednesday, I found myself confronting what may be the greatest fear that future owners of electric vehicles will face: a battery-charge indicator showing just a few miles of remaining range.

If I were out on a desolate Interstate in a vehicle powered solely by batteries, I’d be praying to the god of electrons for a place to pull off and plug in a charging cord. But my drive is at General Motors’ proving grounds here, and I’m about to experience what the Volt’s vehicle line director (and my passenger), Tony Posawatz, says is the car’s trump card: a gasoline-powered generator under the hood.

Like other reporters, I had already driven Volt prototypes in the battery-powered mode, and they were predictably smooth and silent. But for eventual Volt owners, a crucial — and so far unanswered — question is how the car will perform when the battery’s charge is depleted and all electricity is provided by an onboard generator, driven by a gasoline engine, that has no mechanical connection to the wheels.

Will it be a slug? How annoying will the noise of the generator’s engine be in an otherwise mute car?

G.M. engineers say that a fully charged Volt is capable of 40 miles of purely electric driving before the computer calls for the generator, which has an output of 53 kilowatts (about 71 horsepower), to start and sustain the battery’s minimum charge level — the “extended range” operating mode.

So what is life after 40 like in the Volt?

It takes a few laps of Milford’s twisty, undulating 3.7-mile road course to deplete the remaining eight miles of battery charge. With the dashboard icon signaling my final mile of range, I point the Volt toward a hill and wait for the sound and feel of the generator engine’s four pistons to chime in.

Read more . . .

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Tags: chevrolet, chevrolet volt, electric vehicles, volt, volt electric

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 11:20 am and is filed under Automotive, Innovation, NY Times, Project Energy, Shape of Things to Come?, environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.