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Originally Posted by stovt001
This is great for CAFE standards (I defy GM to justify shooting down the Z28 now!) but does this really apply to the average consumer? Drive less than 40 miles a day and you get infinite miles per gallon of gasoline. Drive more, and you won't get anywhere near 230. This issue will be interesting as these types of cars become more common.
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This rating supposedly takes that into account. I expect by the end of the year, we will have a finalized rating procedure that we can examine and determine if it's realistic or not.
Somebody at GM elaborated on this in the video...I will see if I can find it.
EDIT; as I watch this video, I noticed that Fritz expects the first generation Volt to only sell 60,000 units. That either means really low production, or really short life-span...I bet the latter, because he also mentioned there are teams working on the second gen car already....
EDIT2: Watched the EPA rating bit of the video. Timestamp: 19:20. Apparently, in rating a car like this, there are two different metrics used. Big number here is 25Kw/100 miles, because it's an electric car. This tells us the electrical efficiency of the car. How much power is used to travel 100 miles?
The second metric is your common city/hwy ratings. And these are determined by assuming that a portion of your driving is being done while in electric-only mode, and another portion of your driving is being done with the range-extender engine on. The splits in driving mode is biased towards electric only mode. This together with other factors (to be explained later this year), makes this procedure a fairly realistic estimate when put in contrast to other vehicles on the road (which is really what the EPA rating is meant to be used for)