GM Shows What Drivers Can Do With The Volt's 40 Mile Electric Range

Seems like a good idea behind this video. It certainly helps one visualise the benefit.

The picture is the volt that Gm should have made.

And that gasoline-free 40-mile start we enjoyed, courtesy of clean, free, electricity, has a 90% chance of being brought to you by a fossil fuel burning generating station. Doesn't it feel great to do your part in saving the environment?

welcome to the united states of not my problem.

If this is true I would never need to purchase Gas except for when the weekend getaways to the city and beach house. Maybe I need to look a little closer at this

Please do look "closer at this." Environmental impact aside, compare the cost of electricity to move your car, as compared to gasoline. Hmmmm, it's pricier, just like electric water heaters versus natural gas water heaters. Next, compare the total cost of ownership (TCO). Hmmmm, we've been ignoring the cost of replacement batteries, and that our government is taking some of our tax dollars and using them to subsidize the car makers. Without those subsidies, electric and hybrid cars would be prohibitively expensive, and therefore not have a consumer market. And when starting with dead batteries and running on gasoline power alone to charge the batteries and to propel the vehicle, the *honest* test of miles per gallon in a hybrid, lugging around those heavy batteries is detrimental to fuel economy. So purely from a "dollars and cents" standpoint, electric and hybrid cars aren't a very smart idea at this time. Hopefully, they may get better in the future.

But if we also consider the full environmental impact, and consider the volume of "rare earth" metals that are needed to make a hybrid or electric car, and the manufacturing process of those huge chemical batteries, and the process for recycling those huge chemical batteries that wear out in just a few year, things start looking a lot less clean. And last, but not least, 90% of the "clean" electricity we use to charge those huge chemical batteries, comes from burning fossil fuel or incinerating garbage. Whew! That's not clean at all, is it?

Our love affair with hybrid cars, hydrogen cars, electric cars exists because we look only at the last link in a chain, and deem it to be a Good Thing(TM), while ignoring the rest of the story. Well, that and the auto-makers and media sell us stories that we swallow, hook, line and sinker.

The one positive outcome of all this, is that research may get us to a state in which we discover technologies that are both fiscally and environmentally sound. We're nowhere close at this time, but at least people have woken up, and they're starting to think about this.

But don't just trust blindly in what I say. Do your own due diligence.

Cheers!

Steve, Could not have said it better.

Steve, you need about 45 billion upvotes.