"If a lower gear is being used while going downhill, this causes the vehicle to have improved control of vehicle speed by using a combination of engine and regenerative braking depending on vehicle conditions."
Last time I checked the Volt's engine had no effect on slowing a moving vehicle.
The car also doesn't have multiple gears per se; certainly not in any way that the driver can select. The "L" gearshift setting doesn't affect gear ratios. I don't know offhand how it would affect speed and control when going downhill.
knodal said:
Actually, I do expect Chevy to put out a manual that applies to the $40K car they have sold me, not an aggregate of a bunch of older cars with different technologies.
I have experience in the publishing industry (with over 20 books on computers to my name), so I understand the technical writing and editing process pretty well. No doubt they've re-used materials from older manuals for a number of reasons:
- It's cost-effective to cut-and-paste from older manuals.
- It's UN-BLEEPING-BELIEVABLY boring to write the same thing over and over and over and over again! They'd either be sending people to the loony bin or have horrible turnover if they had to write 100% new manuals for every car.
- Writing the same thing multiple times means there's a greater chance of errors appearing -- on the 3rd time writing, some detail might be overlooked; on the 5th time, another detail will be stated wrongly or in a confusing manner; and on the 8th time, a typo will creep in that will turn a sentence into utter gibberish. Re-using the same well-tested paragraphs, by contrast, means they can be fairly certain it's accurate -- until, of course, the technology changes radically, as it has with the Volt.
Another factor is that the authors and editors are probably not the engineers who designed the car. The manuals may cross the desks of those engineers, but they've probably got more important things to do than to scrutinize every word of a rather dense and boring manual. Thus, something obscure like the reference to gear ratios could easily slip through. The reference to a spare tire might be a little more surprising, since I'd expect that to be on a manual-preparation checklist. ("Does any version of the car come with a spare tire? Does any version of the car have a sunroof?" Etc.)
Speaking as an author, I'm utterly unsurprised that the Volt's manual has a few references to technologies that the car doesn't use. Putting together an owner's manual is not a glamorous and exciting job, and no amount of money thrown at it will guarantee a document with no mistakes.
That said, anybody concerned about these issues should certainly contact GM. If the people who put together the manual are professionals, they'll be collecting errata to be incorporated into the next printing or revision.
