“It seems far less of an all-electric drivetrain vehicle than claimed,” Ace of Spades writes, adding, “It also doesn’t seem to post anything like the mileage and range claimed.”
Ace links to this lengthy post at the Gawker-affiliated Jalopnik.com car blog and concludes:
The part about the powertrain is a sorta inside-car-baseball question of whether the car runs on all-electric, and only uses the gas engine to recharge the battery, or whether the gas engine runs to drive the wheels, which would make the Volt a bit like most other hybrids, and not really some new thing at all.
It appears the gas engine does run whenever the car approaches 70mph.
Which is good news and bad news for me. The bad news is that the vehicle does not use only its batteries, as promised, when approaching these speeds.
The good news is that I’m surprised it can approach these speeds. *
Anyway, it looks like the finest auto engineers available in the White House Strategic Communications Office have produced precisely the sort of politically-engineered vehicle you would have expected.
* Perhaps Al Gore’s son was one of the high-speed test drivers.
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