28 February 2012

Shocking

Rico says his friend Tex sends this cautionary note:
Eric Bolling of Fox Business Channel's Follow the Money, test drove the Chevy Volt at the invitation of General Motors.
For four days in a row, the fully-charged battery lasted only 25 miles before the Volt switched to the reserve gasoline engine. He calculated the car got 30 mpg, including the 25 miles it ran on the battery. So, the range including the nine gallon gas tank and the 16 kwh battery is approximately 270 miles. It will take you four-and-a-half hours to drive 270 miles at sixty mph. Then add ten hours to charge the battery, and you have a total trip time of 14.5 hours. In a typical road trip your average speed (including charging time) would be twenty mph.
According to General Motors, the Volt battery holds sixteen kwh of electricity. It takes a full ten hours to charge a drained battery.
The cost for the electricity to charge the Volt is never mentioned, so he looked up what he pays for electricity.
He pays approximately (it varies with amount used and the seasons) $1.16 per kwh.
16 kwh x $1.16 per kwh = $18.56 to charge the battery.
$18.56 per charge divided by 25 miles = $0.74 per mile to operate the Volt using the battery.
Compare this to a similar size car with a gasoline engine only that gets 32 mpg.
$3.19 per gallon divided by 32 mpg = $0.10 per mile.
The gasoline powered car cost about $15,000, while the Volt costs $46,000.
So they want us to pay three times as much for a car that costs more than seven times as much to run and takes three times as long to drive across country? Ridiculous.

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