On our campus today is one of Chevrolet’s concept cars, the Chevy Volt. It seats four or five, can go 40 miles on electric only, has a gas tank to run a generator to charge the battery (as opposed to a hybrid-engine vehicle, which actually will use the gas engine to run the transmission directly). For a typical American’s 60 mile daily commuting needs, this car will get 150 miles per gallon.
The price?
Estimated to be between $25k and $28k.
Not bad, considering it’s a new vehicle touting brand new powertrain technology. It would, however, be nice to see that price-point come down to the cost of a standard sedan of similar size – say $19k to $20k. It’s a beautiful car – at least the concept car I saw today was.
The car should be in production in a couple years.
One of my coworkers (no, DynamoJoe, not you) mentioned that he was impressed by the lines on the car, but then talked about the environmental impact this car might have on the Earth. While the car, if run within the 40-mile range of no-gas, will produce zero emissions from itself, it still depends on a power source that is, primarily, driven by fossil fuels.
Until the United States decides as a nation to invest more in renewable energy resources such as wind and solar (which my family actively does by power-offset credits, which are ostensibly invested by my power company, Florida Power and Light, into renewable energy resources), and into less-polluting conventional power production, such as nuclear power, we still will rely on fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas to power our new, supposedly clean, electric vehicles.
I applaud Chevy for thinking outside the box on this one, and giving us what some of us demand – cleaner transport options, but we might still do better.
