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NEWS
Volt chalks up 100 million miles in the US
When is a milestone not a milestone? When it's built on “electric miles”...Opinion
GM is trumpeting the success of its Volt PHEV with the factoid that the US Volt fleet alone has now travelled “100 million electric miles” (160 million kilometres) – equivalent, it points out, to a trip to Mars. Some media outlets have responded by writing it up as “241 million emission free kilometres” – but is this the case?
The thing is, GM can claim that every mile travelled by a Volt is an “electric mile”. It is, after all, propelled only by an electric motor.
But does that make every mile emission-free? Of course not. The Volt is a plug-in hybrid with a 1.4-litre petrol-powered range-extender engine, a modified version of the one used in the Cruze. And if our experience in it is anything to go by, it’s economical but comparatively few of those miles are emission free. During this driver’s week with it, that motor was putting in a fair bit of time, not just on the highway but around town.
GM claims that in the US, “[the] average Volt owner travels more than 65 per cent of the time in pure electric mode as the car was designed – only using the gasoline-powered generator for longer trips.”
The company says those US figures translate into about 900 miles (1440km) – around six weeks for the average Volt driver – between stops at the pump. And, it adds, “many Volt owners quickly exceed that average, based on an EPA-estimated 98MPGe...” (What’s MPGe? See below*) For the purposes of the press release, GM found one driver who claimed he’d gone 1900 miles (a little over 3000km) on a tank, and another commuter who’s using 80 per cent less fuel and saving over $150 a month on a 55-mile (88km) daily round trip.
You’re not likely to find such stories Down Under, thanks to two factors. First, with the US population more decentralised than Australia’s, more of those Americans contributing to that average would live by short commutes than is the case here – short commutes being well inside half the car’s official ADR-derived EV range of “up to 87km”.
Worth a quick diversion here are the numerous fine-print opportunities that go with terms like “up to”. The GM people who wrote the US press release explain “up to 87km” thus: “For the first 38 miles (which is just 61km), the Volt can drive gas and tailpipe-emissions free using a full charge of electricity stored in its 16.5kWh lithium-ion battery.
“When the Volt’s battery runs low, a gas-powered engine/generator seamlessly operates to extend the driving range another 344 miles (554km) on a full tank,” it continues. The local specs claim an extended range of “over 600km”.
Secondly, there’s the difference in charge availability. When US commuters get where they’re going, there’s a much higher chance they’ll be able to hitch their Volt up to a public charging post, allowing them to top up the battery, helping their Volt avoid booting up the burner to get home. Down Under, charge stations are still largely restricted to home, a few workplaces and a couple of shopping centres showcasing their developers’ green creds.
In a Today Tonight kind of way, the US scenario all adds up to great news. GM’s release says the average savings the Volt delivers its average driver amounts to $US1370 a year. That’s nine weeks of groceries at $151 a week, or 228 car washes at $6 a pop, or 137 ten-dollar movie tickets. In aggregate, it amounts to more than two supertankers’ worth of petrol unburned. Calculated at a cost of $4 a gallon, it means Volt owners have saved about $21 million.
This kind of material tends to shift between the meaningless and the subtly deceptive. Even before we start taking into account wider issues like coal-sourced power, “electric kilometres” are not “zero emission kilometres”.
Where there’s less room for quibbling is in the Volt’s top spot two years running in the influential Consumer Reports buyer satisfaction survey. Although it’s a commercial enterprise, Consumer Reports knows the importance of independence and objective credentials. It doesn’t like companies using its moniker for the purposes of endorsement. We had to find out for ourselves which “leading consumer testing organization” GM was referring to in its release.
* About that MPGe figure: The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses MPGe (miles per gallon equivalent) to translate energy consumed by electric vehicles into that most commonly understood of automotive energy consumption yardsticks, miles per gallon – long ago flipped into litres per 100km in Europe and Australia. Calculated using a standard conversion factor, it bridges the gap between gallons of petrol and kilowatt-hours of electrical energy. By EPA calculations, one US gallon (3.7 litres) of petrol amounts to 33.7kWh.
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Written byJeremy Bass
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