It looks like the Subyukonade option is winning!!!!
Multiple choice - What could GM do to increase EREV sales? Ideas? (2nd try)
[Disclaimer - opinions and poll setup here entirely my own - not speaking for anyone else].
[Also - sorry to a few who already voted - the original setup I had was missing at least one key option, so it seemed best to delete and repost.]
There have been stories recently that GM is considering ending Volt sales. As well there is some indication it is headed in a strong BEV direction. This poll is to brainstorm a bit as to ways that GM could improve sales of vehicles equipped with its impressive EREV technology.
[Also - sorry to a few who already voted - the original setup I had was missing at least one key option, so it seemed best to delete and repost.]
There have been stories recently that GM is considering ending Volt sales. As well there is some indication it is headed in a strong BEV direction. This poll is to brainstorm a bit as to ways that GM could improve sales of vehicles equipped with its impressive EREV technology.
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I too would like a Volt sport wagon. Certainly no SUV. Too tall, too ugly, too inefficient. We've had two Volvo wagons in our marriage. Unbelievable cargo haulers that are the same size and efficiency as their sibling sedans. Americans have been fed this SUV coolaid to the total detriment of the environment, aesthetics, and handling. A good wagon was always a better option, I say bring them back!
Ok, this is pretty funny, and yes it is winning. I wonder if the results would be useful to GM to get a quick additional idea of what folks want. I've always thought it was pretty obvious that EV powertrains should be offered in larger-interior-volume vehicles, but so far there have been very few by the US manufacturers other than Tesla.It looks like the Subyukonade option is winning!!!!
Over the few years that I've periodically been around on this forum the issue of a larger EREV has often come up. As well as the issue of why GM chose to make two more or less weirdmobiles instead of two really compelling vehicles. By compelling I mean vehicles that can compete as vehicles against other vehicles, ICE or not. Tesla has had success with that approach.
If I were looking to replace my gen 1 volt today I'd very likely buy a Honda Clarity phev for the reasons that Viking enumerates. Basically its a much more compelling and well priced vehicle than the Volt. And they don't treat the safety features like the crown jewels only bestowed on the gentry. But whether it is a success or not will be interesting to watch. So far it looks as though Honda isn't exactly pushing it.
If I were looking to replace my gen 1 volt today I'd very likely buy a Honda Clarity phev for the reasons that Viking enumerates. Basically its a much more compelling and well priced vehicle than the Volt. And they don't treat the safety features like the crown jewels only bestowed on the gentry. But whether it is a success or not will be interesting to watch. So far it looks as though Honda isn't exactly pushing it.
Clarity doesn’t work for most of us who are far away from a fuel source.Over the few years that I've periodically been around on this forum the issue of a larger EREV has often come up. As well as the issue of why GM chose to make two more or less weirdmobiles instead of two really compelling vehicles. By compelling I mean vehicles that can compete as vehicles against other vehicles, ICE or not. Tesla has had success with that approach.
If I were looking to replace my gen 1 volt today I'd very likely buy a Honda Clarity phev for the reasons that Viking enumerates. Basically its a much more compelling and well priced vehicle than the Volt. And they don't treat the safety features like the crown jewels only bestowed on the gentry. But whether it is a success or not will be interesting to watch. So far it looks as though Honda isn't exactly pushing it.
Of note, the Bolt is fairly heavily marketed in SoCal. Full page ads in the L.A. Times are fairly common and there are some TV ads But SoCal is a receptive market as there is a distinct environmental bent and regular gas averages at least $3.50/gal due to taxes and low pollution formulations.
Volt commercials were common in the beginning but the marketing folks had to do ad cost/benefit calculations. SoCal would seem to be the place where marketing would work best. You do see a lot of Volts and Bolts but they're niche vehicles.
Volt commercials were common in the beginning but the marketing folks had to do ad cost/benefit calculations. SoCal would seem to be the place where marketing would work best. You do see a lot of Volts and Bolts but they're niche vehicles.
Four adult males fit easily into a Bolt, even the 6' + guys are comfortable in the back seat. Go up a step in platform size, make it a hatch, and you have a full size car for practical purposes.Ok, this is pretty funny, and yes it is winning. I wonder if the results would be useful to GM to get a quick additional idea of what folks want. I've always thought it was pretty obvious that EV powertrains should be offered in larger-interior-volume vehicles, but so far there have been very few by the US manufacturers other than Tesla.
One consideration to the proposed Subyukonade is that class of vehicles need to have some tow capacity. Surburban/Tahoe with tow package is over 8000 lbs. for example.
But is SoCal getting bombarded with ads because they are a receptive market, or are they a receptive market because of these ads?Of note, the Bolt is fairly heavily marketed in SoCal. Full page ads in the L.A. Times are fairly common and there are some TV ads But SoCal is a receptive market as there is a distinct environmental bent and regular gas averages at least $3.50/gal due to taxes and low pollution formulations.
Volt commercials were common in the beginning but the marketing folks had to do ad cost/benefit calculations. SoCal would seem to be the place where marketing would work best. You do see a lot of Volts and Bolts but they're niche vehicles.
Exactly. I don’t want my people carrier to look like a Honda Fit, and I need to be able to tow an airstream, horse trailer, 16 foot utility trailer, 12 foot cargo trailer, and a full rack wagon with hay. The bolt just doesn’t cut it. I need a Subyukonade!!!Four adult males fit easily into a Bolt, even the 6' + guys are comfortable in the back seat. Go up a step in platform size, make it a hatch, and you have a full size car for practical purposes.
One consideration to the proposed Subyukonade is that class of vehicles need to have some tow capacity. Surburban/Tahoe with tow package is over 8000 lbs. for example.
Back to the OP’s poll, the simplest way to increase EREV sales... make your entire lineup EREV, everything from Corvette to Camaro to Impala to asilverado Equinox to lacrosse to Escalade. Don’t market it as an electric car, but instead as Prius killers. Don’t make cars look like a dorky electric (I’m looking at you i3, Prius, murai, clarity, Bolt), make them look normal with 50-200+ MPG. Don’t give people a choice of an ice only vehicle. They get to choose between Voltec and Boltec platforms.
I know, I way ahead of my time...
Hi - Clarity PHEV is roughly comparable to the Volt in its specifications and EV-only range and (as a PHEV) is as close to any fuel source as any Volt is.Clarity doesn’t work for most of us who are far away from a fuel source.
Unfortunately, as Foxtrot points out, the Clarity PHEV is not exactly being pushed by Honda. For example:
https://insideevs.com/honda-offers-6500-lease-credit-clarity-phev-zev-states/
You’re right, I was getting the fuel cell variant of this vehicle mixed up with the PHEV version. Though, I would never own a Honda - never wanted one in my lifetime, why start now? Sorry to all the accord and civic owners out there, I’ve just never been the type of person to follow the crowd. And for those spouting quality, all of the american manufacturers have come a long way over the decades.Hi - Clarity PHEV is roughly comparable to the Volt in its specifications and EV-only range and (as a PHEV) is as close to any fuel source as any Volt is.
Unfortunately, as Foxtrot points out, the Clarity PHEV is not exactly being pushed by Honda. For example:
https://insideevs.com/honda-offers-6500-lease-credit-clarity-phev-zev-states/
They also crippled it's EV ability - from what I've read in reviews/announcements, the engine always kicks on if you floor it or are at hwy speeds(?!).Hi - Clarity PHEV is roughly comparable to the Volt in its specifications and EV-only range and (as a PHEV) is as close to any fuel source as any Volt is.
Unfortunately, as Foxtrot points out, the Clarity PHEV is not exactly being pushed by Honda. For example:
https://insideevs.com/honda-offers-6500-lease-credit-clarity-phev-zev-states/
Kinda defeats the purpose of having the large electric motor setup like a volt.
To put it simply, the complexity of the system isn't really important. It works, there's nothing that a driver needs to or could do anything with, to, or about it, and as long as people are willing to immediately turn to trained professions if it fails (and the vast majority of people are), then the complexity exists only in a sealed box and isn't relevant. And we see that expressed in reduced operational complexity (Voltec vehicles could easily exist with a self-setting parking brake and transmission lock and a "D-N-R" selector) and drastically reduced maintenance requirements. (For example, annual tuneups, coolant flushes, transmission fluid changes are gone. Quarterly oil changes are gone. Weekly liquid fueling gone. Those things are 5- and 10-year, bi-annual and monthly or quarterly tasks now. A thousand dollars of maintenance costs or probably 40 hours a year of shade-tree labor has been reduced to what could end up a $300-a-year deal with some dealership/3rd party service contract for hybrid/Voltec/powertrain work that's still a profit for the firm offering it. Presuming there's enough market penetration to keep the work flowing, that is. The THEORETICAL arguments we have here are just that: theoretical. We can't influence most things, and those we can (when to use L vs pedal vs paddle, whether to use cabin heat or seat heaters, when precisely to force air recirculation, all that nonsense) doesn't really matter that much because it'll only add a mile or to of range that we're probably not using to get to the grocery store and back anyway. It's fun, but it doesn't accomplish much at all.The Voltec system is a marvel, but it's far from refined or simple. Making the system an order of magnitude simpler (which for example would get rid of half the theoretical discussions on this board, and make the average IQ salesman look like he knows what he's talking about)
So the vehicles ARE simple on the outside, where it matters. Compare that to (for example) steam locomotives, which are simple on the inside (it's nothing but a container to boil water in, and steam pressure is used to move a couple of pistons) but complicated on the outside. You've got a fire to maintain, by hand. You've got a boiler level to check, by hand. You get to (by hand) adjust the timing of the steam injection into the cylinders and how much. There's 20 different lubrication points that need to be addressed every eight hours or 200 miles of operation, whichever comes first. You need to descale the boiler, clean buildup off the inside of the firebox, and check everything for corrosion several times a year. The steam goes to at least two and usually about six small turbines to supply power for lamps (via turbine generators) and pumps (getting more water INTO a boiler at pressure is a job, unless you want to stop every 20-50 miles, wait six hours for thing to cool and depressurize so you can add more water, then spend four hours heating it back up again) and compressors for braking. It's a tremendous amount of work, for the simple engine.
I'll take the complexity on the inside, thanks...
The trick is that battery charge rates are kind of limited by chemistry. Lithium Ion batteries should never be charged faster than in 30 minutes, from "empty" to "full" (actual capacity, not including state of charge buffers at the top and bottom end). That's a "2C charge rate" -- twice the capacity of the battery per hour. Going faster is very hard on their eventual useful number of charge cycles, even with good thermal management. Keeping the charge rate below 1C (an hour from "empty" to "full") gains about 30% MORE charge cycles to end-of-life. And limiting to 0.5C charge rates add another 15% to the expected cycle count or so. Plus, you can actually get more electrons in before "full" at slower rates. A battery that takes 100kwh at some small fractional C might reach "full" by voltage after only accepting 85-90kwh at 2C, and there's nothing you can do at that point. There's only 85 in there so you've lost 15% of your range being in a hurry for that charge. Slow charges, slow discharge, avoiding deep charge/discharges and good thermal management is how Volts take batteries that usually only last for 1000 cycles and push them to 5000-6000 cycles and warranty the batteries for eight years. (Twice a day charging for eight years is 4380 cycles.)I have been wondering - if DCFC is moving toward higher kW (maybe 50 kW on a decent CHAdeMO station back when I had a Leaf, but that looks to be improving), and if the Volt offers less than 20 kWh usable (my 2013 only seems to use 10.x kWh for each drive but I don't know about Gen2) then maybe the charge time on a Volt at a DCFC could get down to as little as 10 minutes using present tech, and even less in the future.
It is a reasonable guess that it's the former. For each dollar I spend advertising a truck, I will sell more trucks than a dollar spent advertising a Bolt. Marketing folks have to earn their keep. They have to be precise in estimating the sales response of their spending. Some folks seem to be saying car companies should take a stand on electric vehicles and push them hard even they don't sell well.But is SoCal getting bombarded with ads because they are a receptive market, or are they a receptive market because of these ads?
Question: Is there any car company properly marketing their EREVs or BEVs?
Good info. The proposed large vehicle EREVs will need big chargers that have physical limitations to very quick charging.The trick is that battery charge rates are kind of limited by chemistry. Lithium Ion batteries should never be charged faster than in 30 minutes, from "empty" to "full" (actual capacity, not including state of charge buffers at the top and bottom end). That's a "2C charge rate" -- twice the capacity of the battery per hour. Going faster is very hard on their eventual useful number of charge cycles, even with good thermal management. Keeping the charge rate below 1C (an hour from "empty" to "full") gains about 30% MORE charge cycles to end-of-life. And limiting to 0.5C charge rates add another 15% to the expected cycle count or so. Plus, you can actually get more electrons in before "full" at slower rates. A battery that takes 100kwh at some small fractional C might reach "full" by voltage after only accepting 85-90kwh at 2C, and there's nothing you can do at that point. There's only 85 in there so you've lost 15% of your range being in a hurry for that charge. Slow charges, slow discharge, avoiding deep charge/discharges and good thermal management is how Volts take batteries that usually only last for 1000 cycles and push them to 5000-6000 cycles and warranty the batteries for eight years. (Twice a day charging for eight years is 4380 cycles.)
Imagine if we could tap directly into the fantastic 360 v high voltage generators to supply power to the whole house...in the meantime we use the modest but great 12 V , 1500 watts inverter for the next hurricane /storm. The car as the power plant for the house has been explored by Honda and Tesla, that would be a great excuse to buy VOLTEC.
I selected only one bullet point: increase advertising. When the public sees that GM is working to SELL this car, they will become interested in BUYING one. The Volt and Bolt are excellent vehicles as they stand now. IMO, there is nothing major that has to be changed to make them outstanding cars.
I suppose another choice in a not-really-within-their-power way is to get the price of fossil fuel to go up. As an adjunct, I suppose GM could be more supportive of policies that encourage higher mileage requirements of manufacturers, as the EREV powertrain helps them satisfy those requirements more readily.
Hi - someone mentioned that they see this as good information, and it does seem like it, but are there any additional sources we could reference on some of this? And, are you saying it is all-encompassing (across all chemistries, thermal management, charge management, etc.) or are there exceptions? Just for one example, would Toshiba's recently announced improvements look like they could be an exception (or perhaps some batteries would not be considered conventional lithium ion and so not fit the rule?.... or perhaps some other consideration such as insufficient testing as yet?)The trick is that battery charge rates are kind of limited by chemistry. Lithium Ion batteries should never be charged faster than in 30 minutes, from "empty" to "full" (actual capacity, not including state of charge buffers at the top and bottom end). That's a "2C charge rate" -- twice the capacity of the battery per hour. Going faster is very hard on their eventual useful number of charge cycles, even with good thermal management. Keeping the charge rate below 1C (an hour from "empty" to "full") gains about 30% MORE charge cycles to end-of-life. And limiting to 0.5C charge rates add another 15% to the expected cycle count or so. Plus, you can actually get more electrons in before "full" at slower rates. A battery that takes 100kwh at some small fractional C might reach "full" by voltage after only accepting 85-90kwh at 2C, and there's nothing you can do at that point. There's only 85 in there so you've lost 15% of your range being in a hurry for that charge. Slow charges, slow discharge, avoiding deep charge/discharges and good thermal management is how Volts take batteries that usually only last for 1000 cycles and push them to 5000-6000 cycles and warranty the batteries for eight years. (Twice a day charging for eight years is 4380 cycles.)
https://www.greencarreports.com/new...te-recharge-for-new-electric-car-battery-cell
Toshiba claims 6-minute recharge for new electric-car battery cell
Sean Szymkowski
162 CommentsOct 19, 2017
"...Engineers tested a 50-amp (0.6 kilowatt-hour) prototype battery with the same technology and, Toshiba said, the results showed the latest anode structure retained the lithium-ion battery's longevity, safe operation, and low temperatures.
"Specifically, the prototype retained 90 percent of its capacity after 5,000 charge and discharge cycles; Toshiba says the six-minute fast charging operated in colder conditions, too...."
Best single source for all this is http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/Hi - someone mentioned that they see this as good information, and it does seem like it, but are there any additional sources we could reference on some of this? And, are you saying it is all-encompassing (across all chemistries, thermal management, charge management, etc.) or are there exceptions? Just for one example, would Toshiba's recently announced improvements look like they could be an exception (or perhaps some batteries would not be considered conventional lithium ion and so not fit the rule?.... or perhaps some other consideration such as insufficient testing as yet?)
You're correct with the implication that not all lithium ion batteries are the same. When most people, me included, say "lithium ion", they're talking about normal lithium cobalt oxide cathodes with carbon anodes, and the characteristics I talked about are appropriate for those. Technically, lithium iron phosphate, lithium manganese oxide, etc are all "lithium ion" as well, but LiCo had a half-decade head start and does a lot of stuff really well that the others just don't get a lot of time.
The Toshiba battery is a lithium–titanate battery, and the big difference is that the anode (positive pole of the cell) is a titanium crystal lattice instead of a carbonate crystal, which is strong enough to make an anode with about 25 times as much surface area, and THAT is what makes the faster recharge rates possible. The downside (not mentioned in the greencar article) is that these batteries are rather more expensive than LiCo and are only about 60% as energy dense, due to the cells having a lower voltage. So you need more battery to make a kwh of storage, which is heavier and bigger than the same power's worth of LiCo. A Bolt with the same battery form-factor would probably have only about 40kwh, have a practical range of about 150 miles, but if you got access to a 350kw charger, it'll charge up in 10 minutes.
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