The Chevy Volt Concept is Dead. Is that good?

well it's the second channel and that can only mean one thing and I don't know what it is let's get into the weeds so since this is the second channel that fans running it's gonna shut off in the next five minutes or so but I'm not bothering to turn it off beforehand that's how much I care no I'm kidding I do like having these discussions with you and today's discussion is one that I kind of I don't know how I feel about this and I'm pretty confident that it's not like we as a society are going down the wrong path but I do think there's more to consider so as I'm sure most of you know though it has been quite a while since I made a video on the topic I'm an electric vehicle enthusiast I Drive now a lot a Chevy bolt and officially my car is a Chevy Volt because they're both in the family and it's kind of complicated right now but in any case the Volt is technically my car but I've been driving the bolt a lot because it suits right now I'm doing more driving than anyone in the family so for now we've kind of traded cars for a little while but anyway I know electric cars I know a lot about them and I believe that they're a good thing and one of the arguments that has been floating around out there from certain people not everybody but certain people I used to think was pretty dumb but it's starting to Minh to weigh on my head a little bit and that is that currently the trend is to put more batteries into an Eevee meaning you put more bigger better a bigger battery in it so we can go farther on one charge cool that sounds great but is it and it's reminding me of arguments that we've had in the past regarding the Chevy Volt now so let's think about waste here the argument is if you're only driving typically 50 miles a day why do you have a car with a 300 mile battery your battery's six times larger than it needs to be you're hauling around all that weight for no reason now if you rewind to like 2011 there were people who had Nissan Leafs who would then confront people with Chevy Volts and they would say why do you haul around that internal combustion engine and gas tank with you when you're only driving 20 miles a day so this is a thing that has been a thing in the AV space for a while and you know as time has gone on I'm not one who thinks of building lithium-ion batteries as being a terrible thing I don't think the environmental impact is nearly as bad that's continuing to burn fossil fuels particularly because the batteries can be recycled at the end of their life which you cannot do with petroleum products because once they're burned they're in the atmosphere and then we're done and just to be clear because a lot of people I'm gonna get ahead of you in the comments because this is gonna attract a lot of people saying some questionable nasty things because they don't like electric cars the whole reason we are switching to them is because they are energy agnostic they can run from nuclear power they can run from solar power wind power anything so we don't have to keep extracting resources to make these run we do have to extract a lot of resources upfront to build the thing but if you had a solar array on your roof and some way to store the day's energy so you can put in your car when you're back home or better yet there are solar panels at your workplace and you're able to charge from them but that's a little lofty goal right now but in any case it is possible to fuel an electric car with a zero environmental impact for probably a decade at least before the battery becomes unusable but anyway I'm already like way off track so the Chevy Volt concept is dead GM just continued the Volt in February and I'm sure there are probably some new ones still for sale and dealer lots but it's dead and they've gone hard or into full EVs and have kind of axed the plug-in hybrid which is a thorn in my side because I don't consider the Volt to be a plug-in hybrid because it is the other cars that are called plug-in hybrids are often nothing like the Volt in terms of either their range or how they function but that's another thing so basically my question here is is the death of the Chevy Volt concept a good thing so let's rewind to when it was first created and I'm going to throw the bones who the so this is an annoying thing about talking about electric cars is there is there art there is still tribalism like there is with any car brand and there's also a sense of righteousness which bugs the crap out of me so I'm gonna throw a bone to you people that have that sense of righteousness and say you're right it was the Tesla Roadster that convinced GM to produce the Chevy Volt why does that matter like it doesn't prove that Tesla is it just it bothers me it's it's a good fact to know it's not something you can deny but it's also like it doesn't prove anything it doesn't mean that Tesla is a better company because their actions convinced another company to do something else now obviously GM has some you know they still make giant trucks and stuff so it's not like they're all in on V's but my point is just let's not start talking about the past as reasons why we should or should not support the actions of one company because anyway I just get a little set up with that righteousness so if you if you understand what I'm coming from cool if you don't that's also cool so if we go back to 2010 GM wanted to produce something like an electric car and it was decided that I believe the story is that Bob Lutz Lutz I think he wanted it to be fully electric but then his bosses were like that's not feasible it's gonna be so expensive because remember this is 2010 so well I said like 2006 when everything was starting to get rolling but the first bolt came out in 2010 so batteries were still very very expensive so what they decided to do was they decided to develop a hybrid powertrain which can also function without the engine at all and so they built a battery pack designed to meet the daily commute needs of the 80th percentile of the population and then that's what the Volt is it's a electric vehicle that happens to also have an engine in it so that way if you need to exceed its range it's not a problem at all so basic so to boil it down into a sentence GM tried to make a vehicle which could become feasibly electric with the smallest battery pack size possible and at that time it was precisely because of cost because if they you know the the Gen 1 volts battery pack I believe was estimated to cost something like $15,000 originally because it was like you know pioneering tech and so they didn't have they were trying to make this a mass-market appeal car and so obviously they're not going to push you know they're not going to try to put a 40 kilowatt hour battery pack in it and sell it for $60,000 because already what at whatever the first selling point was was quite high but that's basically the entire theory of the Volt is how can we make an electric a feasibly electric car with the smallest battery possible that doesn't mean the car is useless past that small range so that was what the Volt tried to do now fast-forward to 2019 as batteries have become cheaper we're not in the u.s. anyway seeing many cars many electric cars that are that much cheaper because we're not making cheaper battery packs we're making bigger battery packs so we're using the same amount of money to make bigger battery packs so if you look at for instance the Nissan Leaf the base model of the Nissan Leaf starts at $30,000 and now it has a 42 kilowatt hour battery pack which is about double what the first Leaf was a little more than double so we're no longer bothering to sell 80 mile range v's because there's not much of a point but my the catch is is that correct is that what we should be thinking about and could that potentially be wasteful so the people who manage to live their lives with low range eby's like the original leaf or the Renault Zoe is it Zoe years oh I don't know I've never heard that pronounced they often say why bother paying for a big battery that you only use a few times a year why bother carrying that weight around with you using and paying for that thing which you're rarely going to use which again mirrors the complaint that was put upon the Volt which was why bother carrying an engine around with you if you're not going to use it that often and the answer to both of those questions is because sometimes I need to go farther than the car can take me and so or sometimes I need to go farther than I do on an average day and I don't want to have another car to satisfy those needs I only want one vehicle so the question becomes what is a smarter use of resources is putting in perhaps triple the size battery that we may typically need smarter or instead should we just sacrifice a pure Eevee to put in an internal combustion engine to cover those you know those relatively rare instances of needing more range so and now because battery packs are cheaper we could conceivably make a car like a volt with something like an eighty or a hundred mile evie range which could satisfy 99% of all trips traveled and then it would still have an engine to take over those extra you know if you wanted to go on a road trip you have an engine and by the way just hopefully if you haven't started writing yelling at me in the comments for how anti Tesla I am I just want to say back in the day there were these really smug volt owners who would say on forums things like oh you guys have your superchargers well my car carries around a supercharger that I can just refuel at any gas station in everywhere social how about that so it's smugness writ large that bothers me those vault owners were so they had their heads in the clouds it's a completely different idea shut up anyway so again what what is a smarter use of resources putting in a smaller battery and sacrificing a pure battery electric vehicle to have an engine and its support components or putting in perhaps triple the size battery that you might need so that way you can more feasibly use it as one you know as your only car and the answer is I don't know but the reason why I wanted to I started these thoughts on Twitter was mainly because there is a misconception about the Volt and there are still people and not to single someone out but there is a discussion I had on Twitter who don't get it and it's like this car has existed for a decade practically and they still don't get the concept because it's it's hard to explain and that's what you know people got mad at GM for not effectively marketing the car it's a hard car to explain and you know because of the dealership model the dealers weren't really great at explaining it to people either so the people who understood the car that people who had clicked to went to the dealership and bought one are thrilled with it I love the thing it's been completely reliable it's incredibly comfortable and it manages to fill a need in such an ideal way using technology from ten years ago but anyway I'm digressing I'm digressing a little bit what I wanted to say was the Volt for those of you for those that do understand the Volt concept they also they often don't understand exactly how it works and what I was planning on doing was making this room and I I was planning on making a video about it and then transitioning into should we be abandoning this concept I've since I may still make a video on the Volt because it's very interesting and I would I do wish people understood it a little better because I think a very common imagination of the car is people imagine it as both a an electric car and the gas powered car so in their head they're thinking of this very complicated car that has an electric drivetrain and a gasoline drivetrain and when the battery is discharged then the car switches to a completely different drivetrain no that's not what happens the car is basically a hybrid but it has bigger motors so that way you can operate without you know it can actually accelerate get to speed and behave as a normal car and it has a much larger battery pack but the key is unlike other hybrids if you took out the engine the car would operate fine the Volt is an electric car first the engine is only doing work to provide most of the time electricity to the car after the battery has been depleted and it's not like there's another system going on it's actually pretty freakin remarkable and seamless and foolproof because and this this is the heart of my argument and I'm really bad at just talking about stuff so if you cool so if you watch this channel and hopefully you know that but the thing that people imagine the Volt as this incredibly complicated thing but if you took out its engine and the motor drive unit you would find that it looks exactly like the engine and transmission of any car it looks like you know a Civic with an automatic transmission a corolla of any four-cylinder bolted to a transmission is what it looks like it's just the transmission has six orange cables coming out of it going to the voltec drive unit because the voltec drive unit is literally a transmission it's designed to bolt up to an engine but that engine might as well not be there unless you are out of battery range and that's and the thing is the drive unit itself is so much simpler than automatic transmission and this is what I think people this is where I think the misconceptions comes from is they they cannot imagine a an electric car that can also run on gasoline as being simpler than a conventional car but it is because there's there aren't multiple gear so basically and I I left the white this is the remnants of the previous video I left the white board out here to draw a little diagram for you I'm a great artist so this as I said this is a simplified diagram but if you're looking at the engine and drive unit of a volt it looks like an engine in transmission because it's designed to fit into a Chevy Cruze because you gotta remember the Volt is really a cruise in disguise but you have a four-cylinder engine but again this is not doing anything if the car has any charge unless you either ask it to or it's below 32 degrees Fahrenheit or 15 degrees Fahrenheit because it will run the engine do provide heat which I'm not going to get into that yet because actually that's you can argue is either bad or good I'm having mixed feelings about it but anyway there are only motor essentially there's motor generator a motor generator b:k planetary gearset and three clutch packs that's what I drew in red that's it okay there are only three things that actually engage and disengage in this transmission motor generator a is smaller motor generator B is the bigger one and it is what generally propels the car especially under heavy acceleration and there is a clutch pack which can connect a to the engine a clutch pack which can connect a to B and in that case they're connected through the planetary gearset and they can actually work almost like a three-speed transmission so the volt actually has under drive direct drive and overdrive which a lot of v's don't have and with efficiency advances it's not really like that's super important but then there's another clutch pack basically just to connect the transmission to the wheels and those three don't quote me on that because I think it's a little more complicated than that but basically there's only three clutch packs in this car and if the car has any battery power at all this clutch pack connecting motor generator a to the engine is disengaged so this engine does nothing at all and so there are four operating modes and if you want to learn more about this I would recommend this video from the weber automotive Weber University in Utah I think it's great and I was gonna reference this and this is where I got much of the information however just let you know he made an error which he corrected in the description and I'm going off of the description so mode one is B does everything the wheels are basically connected to B a is sitting pretty mode two is a and B are then connected together and it can provide power either through a or B or both and this gives it more potential more different gearing ratios etc and it's more efficient so generally it's going to use big motor be when you're accelerating and if you're cruising it will use a and B together in whatever is the most efficient combination that's mode 1 and 2 that's the easy modes so when it's working in an AV and B do all the work the engine sits here doing nothing at all the car has an electric of air conditioning compressor electric power steering the engine is not required for anything at all and that is why I get a little annoyed when people keep calling this a hybrid because the engine sits here doing nothing most of the time then when your battery is depleted motor a and B get separated and then a gets connected to the engine so this clutch pack here connects a to the engine initially a will spin the engine to start it then the engine is running and after a brief warmup period then the engine starts turning a and this is mode 3 so now the engine is turning motor-generator a which generates electricity to power motor generator B and this is a series hybrid so in mode 3 the engine is spinning a generator to generate electricity to move the car from the other motor and mode 3 is like I said it's a series hybrid and in this configuration they would still call this an electric vehicle that has a range extender but then there's mode for mode four connects basically all the clutch packs on so a is connected to B like it is in mode two meaning that there and because B is connected to the wheels the engine does power the wheels at high speeds it only does it at high speeds because it doesn't have gear ratios and that's the only speed that it can feasibly move the wheels but because of this the Volt is not considered an extended-range electric vehicle it's considered a plug-in hybrid even though functionally it's exactly the same as something like a BMW i3 Rex it just has a smaller engine and a bigger gas tank it drives me insane that this technicality makes the car something that it's not because if you compare it to something like the Honda clarity the Honda clarity is very close to being a Volt but it's my understanding that the engine will still start if you floor it or under other circumstances where it needs more power the engine on the Volt does not start period unless it either you asked it to you're out of battery range or it's really cold because it will like I said it will run the engine because it's going to heat it up to provide extra heat for the car and then just spinning motor generator a provides electricity to turn on the cabin heater too and like I said it's up for debate whether or not that's smart but the the it just boggles my mind that the vault gets disqualified as being considered an electric vehicle that has a range extender because in mode for the engine is technically powering the wheels the reason why it's annoying is because that's the most efficient thing you lose energy when you convert mechanical energy to electrical energy and then electrical energy back into mechanical energy so mode 3 where a is running as a generator for me isn't that efficient and that's why the first gen volt gas mileage is not impressive at all and that's probably part of why it you know it just never needed refinement because what GM tried to do was they tried to make a hybrid powertrain that could conceivably also be an electric car which they did it works it works super well the problem is that it's not super efficient running on gas because you have those energy conversion losses at highway speeds it's better because again you do have the engine coupled to the wheels to some extent but it's not the greatest for the gen 2 volt they got it so the Gen 1 volt gets 35 city 40 highway when running on gas so like a little bit better than just a regular car of the same size the gen 2 volt gets I think like 45 43 so it's closer to a hybrid but like a Prius is always more efficient than a volt because on gas because trying to do this with two big motors and using the engine to spin a generator just isn't as efficient but the point going back to what I was making earlier the the thing to consider is it is this potential well but the thing to remember is this is not complicated this is not an automatic transmission with all of its clutch packs different gear sets to make now eight or ten different gear ratios and it's not a CVT either it's not like a you know a Toyota hybrid system which has a CVT in it it's literally just two motors and generators three clutch packs a planetary gear which I didn't show the planetary gear set and then the final drive gear set and that's essentially it it's cleverly packaged it works and it works really well one of the fun little facts about this is because all of these components can be spun you know when it has to whenever any of these clutch packs have to engage the computer will match the speeds of the motor so that way there's basically no wear on the clutch pack at all so say a needs to start the engine right well when a couple's itself to the engine it stops first it comes to a stop couples itself to the engine then starts up again when a and B need to couple to each other so you switched to either mode four or more or mode two it will speed up the motors so that way they're matched before it engages and I love it's it's interesting because now that I've learned how the car works you can actually feel it doing these things it's really really subtle but it explains a little better what exactly is happening so if for nothing else in this video I hope you learned a little bit about the Chevy Volt and how it's not this extraordinarily complicated engineering feat it's basically a hybrid that has a bigger motor and a bigger battery and while it's not as efficient at being a hybrid as something like a Prius it can be an Eevee it is an Eevee when it has any charge and it just drives me a little crazy because a lot of people either don't understand this or they think that the car is vastly complicated so I need to restart the camera because I'm running out of time and then I have a few things to wrap up so the crux of the issue is is it worth carrying this around instead of a triple of three times as they battery I I still don't know my gut says maybe but there's other stuff to consider because the engine requires you know a fuel tank a catalytic converter evaporative emissions equipment and you know all the other stuff that an engineer's crankshaft position sensor is an oil pump and all that stuff it's made a little like when people worry about the reliability of the Volt first of all I would say by and large it's been pretty reliable and I think a large part of that is the engine doesn't run a lot if you if you were to just look at this engine like I think on my Volt it's got 72,000 miles on it now the engine was only running for about 14,000 of those miles so the majority of the time the engine was off so yeah it's gonna wear but also the engine will probably outlast the car because it is it doesn't run a lot and the other thing I'd like to point out is that people freaked out about that and they think that oh well there's gonna get bad gas in the lines they thought of that the car has software in it where if you haven't run the engine for six weeks it runs it for about five minutes it considers it calls it maintenance mode and then it won't do it again for another six weeks and if you haven't used any gas in a year it will basically say your gas is stale you need to use it and so it will just force you to run on gas until you Kemp T that tank and then ask you to fill it up again so there have been no issues with still gas and getting off topic a little bit the first gen volt supposedly requires premium which I highly doubt through the case because the second gen volt does not require premium and it has a higher compression ratio engine I think they said I think they required premium because they thought it would store better and they just were kind of afraid of putting regular and let it in the tank I'll tell you I've done it many times the car was fine not saying you should but I think the requirement for premium is BS so so going back to the question at hand what what is a better use of resources is is the thing I'm getting at batteries are getting cheaper to make sure but if you consider that you could build three cars like the Volt it's maybe even four using the same cost of batteries than like a long-range Tesla then things start to seem a little different and then you also have to consider that well if batteries are just gonna keep getting cheaper than that cost you know the crossover point keeps moving so what really is the best again I don't know but I am thinking about it because the loss of the Volt concept to me seems at the same time logical and also kind of bad because it has a lot of it has a lot of real-world benefits one of the biggest ones is that it's like an Eevee with training wheels so I was the first one in the family to get an electric car of any sort and you know I quickly learned that thirty eight miles of range sounds like you're gonna be using the engine all the time but I wasn't you know my first when I had the car I didn't have a very long commute but you know it was basically I'd get to work back and it would still have ten and twelve miles of range and at that point I think my round-trip commute was like 24 miles so even in winter the engine might barely start but usually it wouldn't and the other thing is you know the Volt becomes an electric car charging off a regular outlet overnight you know you don't and I made videos about this earlier because of that very fact it's like level one charging actually does a lot more than you think because you don't drive that much on any given basis but but if you have you know if you ever want to learn anything about Evie and I have I have other Evie related I want to do a charging glossary of sorts but um yeah anybody anybody have any questions about either the bolt or volt feel free to ask me because I can answer them but my last I have two last two things to add people who want to drive electric but need to go on long-distance regularly either need to wait for more faster DC fast charging because as much as I and this is the thing I am totally willing to wait a half hour to charge my car but a lot of people are not and there's gonna be a lot of people probably in the comments of this video that are gonna talk about that very thing so the question then becomes they they either need to wait those particular people either need to wait for DC fast charging to get much better which I think it will but of couldn't tell you how quickly that's gonna happen or they need to have another car and the whole point of the Volt is to allow one vehicle to do both things to be a daily electric vehicle and a road trip capable vehicle seamlessly and the problem is it's just a really hard concept to explain and while you don't have to put a lot of thought into the car it's best if you do and some people just don't want to deal with that I I'm putting this in later because I forgot to add this point the other thing to consider is would you be quiet the other thing to consider is that if you have if a car like a Volt that had an 80 100 mile range was the norm that means infrastructure to charge the cars becomes less critical so basically like the Tesla supercharger network and whatever other DC fast charging networks that exist or are about to exist have to be there to make a long-range car possible to go coast-to-coast which is fine but if you had a car with a 100 mile range that also had an engine then you know for 360 days of the year you just would probably never have a need to go to anything like a supercharger and then for the 4 or 5 other days of the year you just stop at the gas stations that already exists I'm not happy with burning more gas but I am seriously questioning what would have a greater impact sooner should we wait for more long range cars and have more long range infrastructure or what it makes sense to push out a larger number of short range cars for that are cheaper that do need gasoline to go long distances because the actual manufacturing cost of each car is almost certainly going to be less and cost I mean emissions it's almost certainly going to be less for a car like that and if the gasoline part is a 1 percent of the time situation then yeah you are burning some fossil fuels but if you look over the life of the car it's possible that it's actually better I haven't you know I don't know if anyone's done any studies like this but you know it's true like engineering explained just did was not just did but he did a video about the environmental costs of an e V and that they recoup themselves pretty quickly which I'm not denying but I am saying that like there definitely is a higher impact of making a car with a really big battery so is it worth sacrificing a little bit of long-term emissions to whittle away at the upfront emissions it might be I don't know I have a feeling it's not because we are going head first into big battery v's but it still just makes me wonder I'm gonna end by saying that I don't think Tesla's and other long-range cars are bad that's not what I'm saying because I I agree that batteries are getting much cheaper very quickly and who knows how long it's gonna be before this whole thought experiment makes no sense at all it might not even make sense at all today I don't think that's the case because when you consider that you can still get cheap cars new for like you know under 15,000 I can't imagine the drivetrain parts of that car cost more than three or four thousand dollars you got to remember the bulk of the car is not the drivetrain it's the car it's the metal body it's the seats it's the trim it's the glass it's the sensors and everything so yes an electric car is simpler because you know it doesn't have a gas tank you can basically just make a battery on a skateboard put the motor wherever you want and boom it's a car but that doesn't mean it doesn't have all the other parts that cars have it still has a suspension it still has sensors switches latches all the other stuff and you know I'm not trying to throw shade at Tesla but it's like it's not like Tesla's have been everybody buys a Tesla nothing ever goes wrong with it stuff goes wrong with the cars it's just their cars it's not the engine is one small part but I want to I want to end by saying that and I probably said I want to end a bunch of time I'm on the AV side I really am and there was a thing I did and I cannot I cannot for the life of me like remember exactly where this happened or when but I was arguing with someone about how infrequent the need for long distance travel is and he was saying something like because it was it was a matter of like where you live is your mindset of what's normal so he said something about it's normal to drive 300 miles a day in his neighborhood or because I think it was he was in a rural area and he needed to drive a lot and I said well you're you're very much an outlier for the general population and he didn't believe he was because his idea of normal is people have to dry three or four hours a day just to you know be a human where they live and I was like that's you're fine living that life I'm not saying that you shouldn't but I'm just saying you don't represent who everybody is and he would not let up he was basically just like no you were wrong more people need to drive more than you think so what I did was I went to cars.com and I looked at all cars for sale that were like 2013 or newer and then I wanted to see how many of them had no I only looked at one model year right I looked at like all 2014 cars and then I filtered it to see how many had 400,000 miles on it cuz that's basically what he was saying he was saying in his area it's normal for someone to buy a car and put 80 thousand miles a year on it so I wanted to see how many cars are actually of all the cars for sale on cars calm right now of that model year meet or exceed that range and it was like a half of a percent something like ten cars total and so I said this is the reality people don't drive that much there are people who need to drive that much I'm not saying you don't exist but I'm the same topic but I am saying that you know it's it's really frustrating that you can't see that your life is different from the majority of other people's lives and like that's getting into fun topics about humanity and how we perceive each other which I don't want to get into right now because already it's really annoying right now but anyway I'll end it here just remember the Volt is not that complicated there's weeds everywhere we should get into them and just because one thing seems like it makes sense doesn't mean it's the be-all end-all

Channel: Technology Connextras

Views: 389,026

Rating: 4.8628335 out of 5

Keywords: chevy volt, tesla, electric car, EV, chevy bolt EV

Id: DMZ163EYmCY

Length: 37min 35sec (2255 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ZobeidZuma]

Man, I tried to watch this video, but after about 15 minutes my patience ran out. It seems like he's still rambling and trying to get around to his point, whatever it is.

The Volt is discontinued, but there are still PHEVs on the market from other car companies. They don't seem to be generating a lot of excitement or sales. It's all very well for this guy to argue that PHEVs are better in some way, but it seems like people who are spending their own money on new cars mostly see things differently.

[u/jmwint]

The volt has all of the complexity of and ICE care and also an EV ...

[u/GrouchyTime]

This is sad as the volt is the best EV on the market.
If toyota would make a volt style EV with a gas backup then they would steal the market.

[u/duke_of_alinor]

The volt concept continues in FC cars? Same idea, charge batteries from on board generator which needs to be periodically filled at a station.

[u/V8-Turbo-Hybrid]

I don’t think GM gives out all PHEV concept although they decided to let Volt died. I’m serious that GM only effort in pure EV strange. Charger network hasn’t been perfect, and current EV mileage in general hasn’t been enough for many people.

[u/Loki-Dad]

Yes. 2000 moving parts in ICE engine. Terrible stupid technology