Excellent comments from all. I suspect there are more MA’s and Ph.D’s here than there were in the design team for the Chevy Volt.
As an ex- lab rat myself (who got decent grades in high school math), my question about the Volt is, has anyone calculated the amount of emissions from coal-or-oil-fired power plants resulting from the kWh’s needed to recharge one?
Like it or not, the majority of our electric grid is powered by fossil fuels, and barring an outbreak of sanity in Washington (i.e., getting realistic about the need for new nuclear and hydroelectric power sources), it will be that way for a long time to come. Holy Wind and Holy Sun just won’t cut it, period.
With that in mind, the “rationale” for the Volt, or any other electric vehicle disappears completely. If the electric power for it is not coming from an “environmentally benign” source, it’s not doing a solitary thing to “save the planet”- it’s just hiding its emissions by moving them somewhere else. Somewhere a lot “dirtier” than a modern ICE vehicle, whose tailpipe efflux is mostly water vapor thanks to a generation of improvements in emission controls.
If the electricity comes from coal or oil, the Chevy Volt is nothing but the “green” version of a 19th Century traveling showman’s “patent medicine”. Or, as it was called back then, “snake oil”.
cheers
eon
