charlie rose ,lutz and the chevy volt 8-21-08

seen charlie rose (pbs) interview lutz on the chevy volt he even un coveredone corner of the car for a teaser
and this is the final version which has a drag coeffient of about.26
it looks alot more rounded off that the concept version in the recent gm commercials
whats the consensus on this idea
i think its good becase it goes 40 miles on one charge which is about what most home comversions go
plus it relives the one fear the genral public has about electric cars range
note:if you dont know the chevy volt will go 40 miles as a all electric car and after that a small gasoline genarater will charg the batteries
while you drive so there is no"what if the battery goes dead problem"
funny the same company who killed the electric car is looking like the first to raise it from the dead
lets keep our fingers crossed

On another site I read that Lutz basically complained that educated people on the coasts would not or did not buy their cars.

I know I've been avoiding American cars for a long time after some notably crappy ones in the early 90's.

the volt is not gonna be $40k, it will be $70k, he said 16kWh for the pack, and if you use the 40 mile range, thats 400Wh/mile, 3 times the power of the honda insight.

i don't think GM will survive, this will be bad, i wonder if any of the big three survive, maybe sold to the russians.

the burn in unit supposedly had 16k miles, i assumed 400 cycles, it sure would be nice if they really could talk about the cooling problems, control processor glitches, but they are there to sell cars, the idea of cars, and the car culture.

the managment is throwing this hail mary, hoping that a guvment rebate program for EV autos will save them. GM really should build a prius copy, and then sell it on nationalism, but people would still buy the prius. i expect the honda fit hybrid to be a big hit too, and the koreans now have hybrids. it is like sheldon brown's theory of the multiple stages of manufacturing culture, substitute hybrid and plug in hybrid now, for hub design and manufacturing quality of bikes.

i hope you are wrong on the price ive heard the 30,000 price is said to be 35,000 now i hope it does not go higher
of course the first couple of years will have the typical enginering problems
i know a lot about this even though im a truck driver the company i worked for the last 9 years
which is now closing its doors do to chrystler ideling the fenton mo plant was a quality sort and rework company
basicly when a vender mesed up we would sort and sometimes help fix the problem and i drove the parts back and forth
its always the worst at a new launch but gets to a much better level in a couple of years
i know gm has a bad rep but lets not forget they were the first with a lot of inovations like the automatic transmision and such
and if they press the issue others will follow (ie ford chrstler honda and toyota)and improve everything
compatition will get these things going as long as consumer demand is there and i think it will be as long as there is a way
to make electric cars have a backup system whatever it is to keep going once the batterys go dead even if it means occasionally burning gas
occasionly burning gas is much better than always burning gas right???????????????????????????????????????

http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/08/19/1/a-look-at-the-new-gm-volt-with-designer-bob-lutz

Thanks for the heads-up. I need to watch this again. That firt part - where Charlie got into the EV1 especially - shows Lutz to be a great politician with a well-practiced party line. To suggest that they couldn't sell an electric car on one hand, while showing obvious distaste for the Japanese car companies that have been making what so many Americans want to buy (and thus kicking GMs tuckus)...gack.

He hit it on the head, though, when he basically said that the stock owners would have someone's head if they stopped or slowed the pickup and SUVs. It appears GM chose to put all their eggs in the high-profit basket instead of reading the writing on the wall that's been there since the '70s fuel crisis.

And blaming CAFE standards - the lowest in the world - for being 'forced' away from the 60s muscle cars?!

My dad's retired GM. I grew up in the shadow of plant moves, strikes, layoffs. Flint, MI is a ghost town. And I won't shed a tear when GM is taken over by a foreign company just before it goes bankrupt.

Time to go for a quick drive in my 1997 VW Passat diesel station wagon with 380,000 miles on her. 42-50 MPG with a 1500 lb load and 950-1100 mile range? I guess GM had their butts handed to them by the Germans as well as the Japanese. :lol:

And the Canadians! Range-extended EV wrapped in a Miata skin: http://aztext.com/zero_carbon_car.cfm

lust a side note
]heard the other day in brazil were they run on 100% ethanol cars are getting 500,000 + miles on one engine because alcahol burns so clean
and did you know that ice,s were designed to run on alcahol in the first place and weremodified to burn gas because gas in a buy product from
turning oil in to products for industry and gas has no predetermened formula its just the crap left over at the end of the day
so if we switched to alcahol it would be better for our engines and the earth
a chevy volt thats backup genarator that runs on ethanol now thats what i call a clean vehicle with no range limitations
and doable with no breakthrougs but a better battery would make it even better

i disagree. converting 30% of the corn crop to alcohol is a crime against humanity. osama doesn't have to do a thing and our greed will win over converts to him no matter how many troops we send to every corner of the earth. before they made it law, there were only about 700 million people starving and it had been declining. now it is back over a billion and climbing higher. every one of those poor people in africa may not know anything about the world, but they know that we are driving around in fat cars while their babies are starving to death in their arms because we are burning up their food in our cars. hearts and minds, i can only hope obama will change it, but the corn processors have bot and sold the congress on this, what a shame when we could be conserving an equivalent amount of energy so easily, and give the food away to the poor for free and osama would no longer even be relevant when we would rise in moral authority.

my concern is that lutz is crazy. they have decided to somehow pretend they have skipped ahead of the japanese manufacturers because they are going straight to electric. in fact they are making a super inefficient hybrid, too heavy to travel anywhere on batteries, and the extra motor they have to add to drive a separate generator is just stupid engineering, and the motor will not produce enuff power for people to drive the Volt for long distances. it will be like driving around in a big chevy with a honda 600cc motor, it will be horrible, the exact opposite of what detroit makes now, with 600hp motors for 2 seats and 2 tons of flash trash.

my point was that they could be building a hybrid just like toyota and honda, which both have exceptional performance. but like lutz said, they felt like they cannot compete, which is the defect they should be solving, but they have gutted the engineering staff and just have marketing people making decisions. i wish toyota could actually just take over GM or ford so as to save the company from certain death, those jobs are needed in the rust belt. not everyone can go join the other people who left to work in the oil fields.

i think the push to convert the truck and domestic passenger car fleet to CNG will get a big push now that the democrats will come to power. the public initiative in california will be the precedent for a national campaign to convert as much as possible to CNG, and build the battery packs to add to the current hybrid fleet for those who have short commutes. within 10 years we could drop gasoline consumption by 50%, and we will have to because the major saudi field ghawar is about to water out. i follow this myself on the oil and gas boards, and many experienced people think it could be happening already, but covered up by the saudis, but within a decade for sure. our major source of oil in this country is from an offshore mexican field which is dropping twice as fast as predicted, almost 37% in the last year. it will not be long before venezuela won't even be able to export oil if they keep up the chavez agenda, and the saudis have redirected their own focus to support the chinese, and pretty soon the russians will refuse to allow their oil to go to our country. if you haven't already started preparing, it will be hard for you. not just my opinion, this is really happening, but politicians will never tell you if you still are susceptible to their lies that we can reach energy independence by burning the corn crop and paying 10 times as much for food. ADM and cargill will give them the money to get them relected.

Cellulosic ethanol will likely come out on top: it uses waste or weed for feedstocks, which will be cheaper in the long-haul.

In May 2008, Congress passed a new farm bill that will accelerate the commercialization of advanced biofuels, including cellulosic ethanol. The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 provides for grants covering up to 30% of the cost of developing and building demonstration-scale biorefineries for producing "advanced biofuels," which essentially includes all fuels that are not produced from corn kernel starch. It also allows for loan guarantees of up to $250 million for building commercial-scale biorefineries to produce advanced biofuels.[8]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulosic_ethanol_commercialization

cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels are just more boondoggles to bankrupt the country. just like the boondoggle for the corn processors. my point is that it is easier and more effective to stop the consumption of oil. there is just no leadership and our country is now made of people who think it is their national birthright to have everything they want, and then they call that 'freedom'. sacrifice is an evil term in our consumer driven TV inspired brainwashing to have more, better, bigger, until there is no more money left in the world for us to borrow.
this is such a far cry from what principles governed the original structure of our economy (frugality made efficient manufacturing a priority, allowing our economy to grow faster than the autocratic economies of europe and britain) up until the 2nd world war. after that we got it all for free on the back of cheap, essentially free, energy so that the invention of the turbohydramatic by GM after the war was considered an advancement that our country deserved because we had won the war (this is real reason behind GM's management's decision to introduce it in the olds back in '47).

we waste enuff energy with uneeded night lighting and inefficient lights to use 24% of our current electric generation to convert 20% of the passenger fleet to plug ins, without upgrading the grid at all. we can remove the 24% of our current ng consumption used by gas turbine generators to use by CNG vehicles, which is what t boone pickens is proposing, along with the push to build windfarms. if we just had a little leadership and sacrifice, we could easily reduce gasoline consumption below 5mmbpd, and we might be able to keep oil below $200/bbl in 10 years when ghawar and cantarell and venezuela run out. i don't think we can so all my bets are on domestic oil producers, all of it. go buy some DNR while it's cheap, they just bot the conroe field last week. that will protect you a little in the future.

Very little corn goes towards food. Corn is a terrible crop to grow to get alcohol. It takes lots of fertilizer and special machines to harvest it and most of the crop is stalk that is quite often burned. Field beets are much better and you can grow them just about anywhere. They were called mangles back in MN on the farm. They grow about 1/3 out of the ground so they are easy to get out.

Butanol.


- Butanol has a higher concentration of energy, almost equivalent to gasoline. Ethanol does not.

- Butanol can be directly mixed with gasoline as a direct replacement, with no engine modifications. Ethanol cannot.

- Butanol can be pumped through existing gas lines without harm to infrastructure. Ethanol cannot.

- Latest Butanol bio-reactors can produce as much or more from a bushel of corn than Ethanol.

- Butanol can also be produced from multiple waste products with minimal impact on existing food sources.


Overall, I'm not a big fan of using any food products to produce fuel to drive my car, especially when that food could be shipped to some 3rd world country to feed children who need a decent meal. Waste should pretty much be the only source for bio-fuels, imo.

What was my previous occupation? Nuclear Engineer.

I really believe Generation IV nuclear power technology, which will not only produce electricity for electric automobiles, but the thermo-chemical Gen IV designs will allow for mass production of Hydrogen at a very low cost. This will allow Hydrogen injection to our Natural gas infrastructure for home heating, and liquid hydrogen will be the perfect replacement for our future fuel-cell railroad infrastructure. Gen IV nuclear energy will be one of the greatest energy sources for our infrastructure for the next 50 years.

my personal opinion is we need a equal mix of
gas
methane made from garbage
electric
cng
desil
hydrogen fuel cell
alcohol made from the unused waste of farm crops
biodesil
wind
water
solar
more drilling
coal
and all together in a mix so we are not reliant on just one technolagy
energy diversification like what you do with your 401k so if one thing bombs it dont destroy you
just my 2 cents
ps i dont like the idea of growing our fuel for the reasons given by the oppisition to corn based alcahol
but alcahol and methane gas can be made from any organic waste product that now ends up in land fills
we should better use or waste to produce energy to supplemnt our growing energy needs

Ja, when I said cellulossic-E would come out on top, I meant for ethanol production. I'm a WVO burner, myself.

I agree that conservation is the best method for meeting energy and food demand, but it ain't gonna happen. It's contrary to human nature, in a big way:
Why is speed so addictive? Simple: instant gratification.
Why are ridiculously large vehicles so popular? Simple: prestige.
Why won't more people use public transport? Simple: fear.

So, how to meet the demand? Biofuels.
Global hunger is not a supply problem, it's a logistics problem buried in geo-political manipulation.
http://www.thetrucker.com/News/Stories/2008/8/26/USgrainexportssnaggedbyinfrastructuredelays.aspx

I think biofuel is the long range answer, at least till we get real fusion nuclear, or can tap the earths magnetic feild or some other totally star trek tech. The corn going into biofuel is not human food, till you run it though a cow or pig first. Rice and wheat, are another story. Biofueling it should be illegal. I think the cost of the tractor fuel and fertilizer are the culprits there. But trash biofuel, from any cellulose waste is a big untapped source. But I think the most promising of all is the algea fuel. It can produce both oil, and large ammounts of cellulose for alchohol. And the land used can be worthless desert. I'm excited about that one, and not just because they are building a plant for it in my town.