A Very Light Car

Yes, EA absolutely thinks he does! The best summary of his position is in his own words: "Chevy is apparently populated by a bunch of assholes"

No, both EA and Bonkers are happy to see new tech. EA thinks it should already be applied to lower the price and weight, as in, carbon fiber! Neither of them appreciate the economics or the engineering that it took to bring us what we already have. EA says he'll buy an econobox eventually. More power to him... except that it includes most of the very elements that he's complaining about! Bonkers is touting whatever Aptera-looking darling that will probably never make it to market as proof that current tech is bloated and grossly overweight. Other than that, the rest is merely the two of them tossing out every insult they can think of, eg, a link to a popular mechanics article means I read popular mechanics. Much the same as you've run into and endlessly countered in dozens of threads that were much longer than this one. I don't have your stamina, but I do admit to mining the depth of irrationality it takes for Usenet posters to claim that they can do better than what GM spent a billion to accomplish.

That's easy to say when you aren't the engineer who has to design it to meet the design criteria -- and the price.

Very often initial designs are more complicated than necessary. I'm actually surprised at Ed's take on this. Mine is not a slur on chevy engineers per se. But it COULD be a slur on management who may not be listening to some of their engineers.

Bottom line is, you don't know, Ed don't know, and I don't know why s*it is the way it is in the Volt. You swing from the dick of the status quo, and I'm simply asking why has chevy foregone a much simpler strategy. You yap yap yap yap about ICE, motor sizes, s*it you basically know nothing about cuz you don't understand basic parallel circuits. When parallel circuitry (in the Volt's case) is one of the keys to its function. See below.

Mebbe there IS a good reason for the Volt complexity. But you haven't explained it, no one has. Mebbe in the new thread.

Yeah, but at $18K, and 2500#...... LOL AND at about the same net-mpg's as the Volt!!!!! You edit wonderfully....

Bonkers is touting whatever

GM spent billions pandering to assholes like you, not nec'ly solving hybrid engineering problems.

I've already outlined how you can MANUALLY accomplish all that the volt does. If there's a flaw, point it out. If not, please, finally, stfu.

And note one thing: the Pruis c et al DO need some highfalutin software et al to accomplish the ICE/battery "optimization" you mis-spoke about.

But the Volt does not operate this way: It simply runs the batteries to empty (actually it doesn't or isn't supposed to, but that's another story), and then simply switches over ICE/generator mode. What's so fukn complicated about that? What's so expensive?? What's so cutting edge?? It's an obvious common sense strategy -- the crux of which, dare I mention it again, is the diesel-electric locomotive.

Why? Do you generally see Ed agreeing that engineers are assholes?

WTF? You've thrown everything except the kitchen sink at them!

Give it up. Admit that it takes what it takes to do the job.

What I know is that it took a billion dollars of engineering to produce the Volt. It has won engineering awards and customer satisfaction awards. It can be cost effective for a lot of people. And I know that anything you can think of has been thought of by thousands before you and didn't make the cut.

Idiot.

No, you haven't been asking anything, merely idiotically ranting.

Jesus Christ. That is the same as the s*it about me not knowing what a kwh is. Do you really think you're helping your case with such stupid tactics?

Mebbe you should have faced reality and admitted that from the get go.

I've explained plenty, but you're immune to reason. But why would you need the help? Just use some common sense and ask yourself, if both Toyota and GM are doing something more complicated than you envisioned, there must be a reason for it.

What, the answers are supposed to come to you? I gave you about a dozen links! Why not read the info instead of digging a deeper hole?

No, it's going to take more than that. Weatherboarding perhaps.

No, it doesn't. And if you don't understand it by now with all the help you've been given it's because you don't want to know.

It was never a simple concept except in your misunderstanding that it was merely a series hybrid. It is in fact a very complicated concept.

Because it needs to be complicated to work. Yes, simple minds can envision something simpler working better. As soon as I see you driving that I'll start taking you seriously.

It is NOT heavy. It's about the weight of the battery heavier than my Camry, but has better utility. Which is an accomplishment that required some good engineering. It's about the weight of a Camaro or a Taurus, neither of which anybody thinks of as behemoths.

It's easy for me to say because I've talked with former engineers who worked for Aptera at length.

Why do you think KiddingNoOne feels he has to slam Aptera constantly and completely ignore the Edison II? I know the reason. Do you?

It's easy for anyone to come to the conclusion that for electric cars to work they need to be very light weight. It helps when you read what the engineers have to say rather than what marketing has to say. =============================================================

iirc, that hysterical asshole kidding also implied that weight was an ADVANTAGE ito regenerative braking. Now, while this is in and of itself true, it is so thermodynamically big-picture ignerint (to wit, what was the energy required to GET that weight up to speed), Kidding will be talking about his backyard perpetual motion machine, and how it's making his electric meter run backwards......

Light weight and CdA are indeed ultra-important. Mindnumbing to think that weights of cars, across the board, have increased 50% since the '80s.... not my analysis, but from Motor Trend or Car/Driver or somesuch.... Oh, Oh, but the safety of the li'l children.....

?? I'm chill. But I'm not asleep. d8-)

The Doble had a design goal and they met it. Unfortunately, it produced something they couldn't sell enough of to stay out of bankrupcy. Millionaires were in short supply, and they had enough other choices among the builders who were going bankrupt for the same reason.

The Volt, if my guess is right, will go down in automotive history as a ground-breaker that tested all sorts of ideas, and solved them as well as they could be solved. First of all, it had to look and feel like a regular American car, not like some flyweight freak that looks like it would blow away in a good storm.

First off, it's not a plug-in hybrid. That was the first idea for the whole thing. Second, because of the way railroads are graded and the operating parameters, it doesn't have to deal with a fraction of the load/speed ratio that a car has to handle.

A diesel-electric locomorive basically is a diesel with an electric transmission, not a serial hybrid.

Try it and see where you get. My recollection is that one of the best of the EV homebuilts, a Honda CRX with Li-ion batteries and ultracapacitors to handle passing and climbing hills, cost well over $100,000 to build. And that was with mass-produced, off-the-shelf components throughout and no accounting for labor costs.

'63 and earlier VWs, too. Jeez, I hated when you had to kick that lever over when you were out in the middle of nowhere.

Not quite. It would result in your frequently running the main batteries down to the bottom. Depending on battery type, that is NOT good for their service life.

Market demands and production cost. They didn't build it for people like you and me.

If it was just an IC-electric car, fuel efficiency would suck a big one. You would have both the generating and the motor losses, which are greater than for a mechanical transmission.

The Volt makes out because it has big batteries, allowing a smaller (and more efficient) IC engine, plus some of its range is all-electric.

I'm not following you. A plain serial hybrid always uses the electric traction motors for all power delivery. When the IC engine is running, you have that additional power output to drive the electric motors, in addition to the batteries.

Either way, you need a big electric motor.

Only in your edited mind.

When I'm ready to swing from GM's dick, like you.

Oh, gee.....

It has won engineering awards and customer

In VERY narrow circumstances, mebbe. But not at $45K.

And

But you are still swinging....

You can't read on grade level, apparently.

Well, DO you know what a parallel circuit is?

You already explained it. You run on batteries only, and don't have to worry when they run out, cuz the ICE kicks in. Batteries first, ICE second. Volt explained it that way also, but you did such a better job!! Have I missed something?

Now, the Volt COULD in principle operate like a prius, where the batteries and ICE work together, but then.... but then.... but then.... You wouldn't be able to satchet on by gas stations, then, would you??

It DOES work in parallel mode whenever the computer determines that's most efficient, you drooling nincompoop. How many ways does it have to be explained to you? Forget waterboarding, the only way to fix you is a lobotomy and a reload of the data.

Too bad they can't sell anything. I wonder why? Maybe he thinks he's building race cars, and can build production vehicles out of carbon fiber and cure them in an autoclave?

Let's see...look at something built cheaper than a F1, and built to a price point...an IndyCar rolling chassis, maybe. $385,000.

That's without an engine or transmission, of course. Or a body.

Whatever. Without the first, there certainly wouldn't be a second.

Too many conversations get off track and blow up. This one is simple: Given the technology available, the tolerable cost, the safety requirements and marketability, the Volt is the first serial hybrid anyone has been able to build in production.

Of course it's overweight and overpriced. That's typical of the first of anything. Either that, or it's too light, and it breaks. The original English Ford Cortina, for example. They purposely built it too light, and then added metal until it didn't fold up. The MGB took the opposite tack. It was heavier than it had to be. Neither company had built a unibody before, and no one usually gets it right the first time out (Except for Nissan, but they just copied a BMW )

I owned two cars that weighed around 1500 lb. or less, and there was a time I swore I'd never own anything that weighed over 2000. But everything has changed, particularly safety, and all cars are heavy -- except for a Lotus Elise. My 2-door Focus hatchback coupe weighs 2600 lb., fer chrissake. It looks like it should weigh 1000 lb. less.

In general, I think that all hybrids are interim cars; two complete powertrains just can't survive. But we don't have any better fuel economy target right now than a serial hybrid. One hopes they'll get lighter and cheaper. But I don't see any hybrid coming in as light as a comparable all-IC car.

The real question will be how much fuel they'll consume, and what type. Weight is important but it's not the only issue. There are some really heavy cars out there that have great highway economy, even with IC only. For example, the Audi A6 2.0T Quattro: 5,100 pounds gross weight, 33 mpg.

That's better than my 2600 lb. Focus.

The curb is more like 4000. It puts the 40 mph ICE only of the Volt in perspective.

Yup, and the regen of the hybrids take a lot of the sting out of accelerating the weight.

Well, I know that Aptera went bust and sold out to the Chinese. Anything else?

Jon, when you pile up some automotive design engineering experience, you'll have something of your own to talk about. In the meantime, trying to second-guess and criticize the engineering behind the Volt is an exercise in foolishness.

There's more to it than building some one-off that you can show off to the press. There are a lot of one-offs and prototypes out there that looked good at first glance. Then you look at the manufacturing that would be required to make something like them in production, even in modest quantities, and you realize that most of them don't have a chance.

Hope springs eternal, however, and most of them keep going until, like Aptera, they go Chapter 7. So now the Chinese may take another stab at it.

Good luck. Car production in composites is an iffy proposition. Bodies are one thing; structure is another. As I said, a production, all-the-same IndyCar is $385,000 for a rolling chassis. It isn't because there's so much composite material in it. It's because the entire process is expensive and slow. These aren't fiberglass fishing boats.

They went Chapter 7, Jon. That's the end of the line. When they're in Chapter 7 bankrupcy, their assets get sold off. They're liquidated.

But it isn't usually engineering that kills them. Sometimes it's "bad management," but that's usually a general cover for marketing idiocy. They tried to build something that no one wants to buy.

We'll be very interested to see if either of them ever reaches production. But I doubt if they will.

We'll frack the nose off of Teddy Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore and drive CNG Civics before all but a small number of people would buy one of those wheeled insects.

It's been apparent for quite a while that cars like the Volt, at their subsidized price at least, could serve a sizeable portion of the market. But sales were poor and I was getting skeptical that the public at large was willing to make a change. I was thinking that in general terms, at a time when purchasing power is in an inexorable decline, it would be impossible to get enough people to take any pay now to save later approach. Then there's the hair trigger knee jerk reaction to things like the Toyota gas pedal and the Volt fires. An irrational story can get legs and sink anything for no good reason. But I'm slightly more optimistic now. Hybrid sales are improving and no other shoe has dropped. Reviews remain overwhelmingly positive and the miles driven are creeping up to the point that everyone might know someone with an EV. Attitudes on gay marriage seemed to hit a tipping point seemingly overnight, so maybe there's hope for EVs as well.

Yeah, you don't have a linkedin group. :)

The Aptera certainly got free press like the Wienermobile.

I liked the concept. If it could have been built for the $20k target I think they could have had a niche market. Sales at least in the hundreds per year, something like kit cars I imagine. But they couldn't possibly make an EV version for that price, especially in relatively small numbers. And anybody who bought one at any price would have to accept the strong possibility of owning an orphan. The company's best hope would have been an ICE kitcar version. As for mass market, forget it, DOA. I can't believe they ever thought they should get government funding for a doomed concept.