I find the new Chevy Volt electric vehicle quite annoying. Expensive
even after huge tax-subsidies from a big union company that borrowed
massive sums from the Federal government. So Obama - please leave the
auto industry alone and get back to the golf course. But the most time-consuming aspect is trying to uncover how many miles
per unit of electricity (kwh) the darned thing will travel. The
equivalent of mpg for a gasoline vehicle. I challenge you to find
this at Chevy’s web site on this car
(http://www.chevrolet.com/pages/open/default/future/volt.do). Chevy shows average US electricity costs of less than $.12 per kwh.
But even this is not definitive on their site. It says for users that
drive less than 40 miles per day the cost of electricity is about
$1.50. My principal residence is in Lake Tahoe, Nevada and there I pay a flat
rate of about $.12 per kwh. But less than a 100 miles away I have a
second home in California where I pay as little as about $.10 per kwh
during the winter. But during summer peak period I pay as much as
$.60 per kwh (five times Chevy’s assumption) and even during the
summer nights and weekends my marginal cost for electricity averages
about $.38 per kwh (a little more than three times their assumption).
So obviously this car makes no sense for me in California. The price of electricity really matters in the economics of this new
vehicle. And when I am accelerating from 0-60 mph in an extremely
slow 9 seconds, I want to make sure that I am at least saving some
money. If one assumes that you are going to drive your vehicle 30 miles per
day (10,950 miles per year) then I will be spending $411 (at my Nevada
home). Using Chevy’s assumed $2.95 per gallon price for gasoline I
would spend $1,077 per year on an equivalent 30 mpg gasoline vehicle.
So in this typical case (at my Nevada home) I would save $666 per
year. Even after the $7,500 tax credit I would be spending at least $10,000
more for this electric vehicle than I would for a comparable slow and
small vehicle. So the payback would be $10,000/$666 = 15 years (plus
a US government that is another $7,500 towards its next trillion
dollars in Chinese debt). This is the problem when we get politicians that can’t balance a
budget and can’t efficiently allocate resources deciding what kind of
cars their government-sponsored companies are going to produce.
even after huge tax-subsidies from a big union company that borrowed
massive sums from the Federal government. So Obama - please leave the
auto industry alone and get back to the golf course. But the most time-consuming aspect is trying to uncover how many miles
per unit of electricity (kwh) the darned thing will travel. The
equivalent of mpg for a gasoline vehicle. I challenge you to find
this at Chevy’s web site on this car
(http://www.chevrolet.com/pages/open/default/future/volt.do). Chevy shows average US electricity costs of less than $.12 per kwh.
But even this is not definitive on their site. It says for users that
drive less than 40 miles per day the cost of electricity is about
$1.50. My principal residence is in Lake Tahoe, Nevada and there I pay a flat
rate of about $.12 per kwh. But less than a 100 miles away I have a
second home in California where I pay as little as about $.10 per kwh
during the winter. But during summer peak period I pay as much as
$.60 per kwh (five times Chevy’s assumption) and even during the
summer nights and weekends my marginal cost for electricity averages
about $.38 per kwh (a little more than three times their assumption).
So obviously this car makes no sense for me in California. The price of electricity really matters in the economics of this new
vehicle. And when I am accelerating from 0-60 mph in an extremely
slow 9 seconds, I want to make sure that I am at least saving some
money. If one assumes that you are going to drive your vehicle 30 miles per
day (10,950 miles per year) then I will be spending $411 (at my Nevada
home). Using Chevy’s assumed $2.95 per gallon price for gasoline I
would spend $1,077 per year on an equivalent 30 mpg gasoline vehicle.
So in this typical case (at my Nevada home) I would save $666 per
year. Even after the $7,500 tax credit I would be spending at least $10,000
more for this electric vehicle than I would for a comparable slow and
small vehicle. So the payback would be $10,000/$666 = 15 years (plus
a US government that is another $7,500 towards its next trillion
dollars in Chinese debt). This is the problem when we get politicians that can’t balance a
budget and can’t efficiently allocate resources deciding what kind of
cars their government-sponsored companies are going to produce.
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