Commentary

Volt electrifies fuel economy debate

Alex Daley

Government Motors dropped a public relations bomb a few months ago when new Chief Executive Fritz Henderson announced that the forthcoming Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid car would get an astonishing 230 miles per gallon (that's 98 kilometers per liter, for our metric-system friends).

I will chalk it up to a classic apples-to-oranges comparison. After all, the Volt will be powered more by coal than by oil. The mileage claim is based in part on the idea that the average driver puts less than 40 miles per day on his or her car, and that because the Volt is plugged in overnight, it has enough juice to make it back and forth to work having barely sipped a drop of gasoline.

But hop on the highway for a 230-mile ride to visit a client or take a vacation, and you're likely to use quite a bit more gas than your window sticker would have you think -- probably by an order of magnitude.

Environmental Protection Agency mileage guidelines are based on a bunch of hypothetical "typical" driving patterns. And the makers of conventional and plug-in hybrid cars are lobbying hard to change those patterns to reflect well on the broad range of possible outcomes these funky two-mode drive trains could have, with their on-again-off-again relationship with the gas tank. And the GM announcement of 230 mpg is based on some unpublished, unverified agreement the carmaker claims to have reached with the EPA on how to judge the car's performance in the city.

However, if GM's claims prove true that operating the car off the electric grid costs about one-third of what it costs on gasoline at today's prices, it won't matter what formula the EPA uses. There are sure to be many more public relations moments between now and when Volts are a common sight on the road, including years of arguments about the environmental impact of moving the burden of powering a car from oil to a predominantly coal-powered electrical grid. But more electric cars are coming, one way or another, and the impact will be major on the economy and the environment.

And the electric race is only beginning. Car companies are in a scramble to buy and build the components that will power tomorrow's cars. They are building so furiously that the cars are often announced before all the parts have even been invented.

Tesla Motors notoriously sold out its first year's volume of cars well before developing a transmission able to withstand the incredible torque these electric motors can put out, and delayed the initial shipments by months as a result. And according to recent statements from GM, some parts of the Volt are not yet fully baked, and there is a risk they won't all be complete by the scheduled launch date.

Despite GM's struggles to bring the Volt to market, there's no doubt that technology is changing the automotive industry and that miles per gallon will soon be an inadequate metric on which to judge the efficiency of a car. Fortunes will be made and lost in a way that has not been seen in the automotive industry in half a century or more.

Alex Daley is a senior editor of Casey's Extraordinary Technology, a new publication of Casey Research in Stowe, Vt.