GM boosters like Marcy Wheeler love the Volt. They also like to compare it favorably to a Prius, as seen in that article.

Which of course means that they’re morons.

Yes, the Volt has finally made, in a very limited fashion, its real world debut. The results? Somewhere between ‘pathetic’ and ‘utterly hilarious’. More on that after an introduction.

Let’s start with the obvious: the Volt is a dirty, dirty car, not a green one.

There are a few things about plug-in hybrids that should be explained before any discussion of their merits. Number one is that the US generates the preponderance of its energy through burning coal. Although newer coal plants are much, much cleaner than old ones, there is simply no such thing as ‘clean’ coal. At all. Ever. It’s a fantasy.

What we don’t get from coal, we mostly get from natural gas and nuclear power. Nukes wouldn’t be so bad, if the US had a competent regulatory environment and adults running the show to deal with the waste issue. Nukes are, after all, basically carbon-free in emissions terms. The waste from fission plants is a real pain, however, and as yet we have no coherent national plan to deal with it, so it just piles up in random collections, waiting for, someday, Yucca Mountain to open, or some other site to stash it.

Not that this stops us from using the power plants in the meantime, because we’re idiots.

So, firstly, plug-in hybrids get their juice mostly from coal, which is filthy. In fact, it’s so filthy that running a plug-in hybrid on electricity is slightly worse for carbon emissions and the environment than running a Prius on gas.

From this figure, it is clear that the carbon intensity of the generation technology plays a
significant role in the total GHG emissions from PHEVs. In 2010, current coal technologies
result in 28% to 34% lower GHG emissions compared to the conventional vehicle and 1% to
11% higher GHG emissions compared to the hybrid electric vehicle.

(Page 7)

That’s the first way in which your plug-in is worse for the environment than a gas hybrid, but not the only. Plug-ins like the Volt rely on lithium-ion batteries for their energy storage. Really, really big lithium-ion batteries. There’s just one hitch:

Lithium is rare, expensive, and in the future can only be obtained in quantity through strip mining the third world. Bolivia in particular.

Oops.

This is bad for the environment, obviously, and awful for indigenous people. But the real kicker for the US is that it’s terrible politics as well. We’re trading, in essence, Saudi Arabia for Bolivia. That’s a winning strategy.

So a plug-in hybrid like the Volt is, right out of the gate, an awful idea for the environment. It runs on dirty coal juice, mostly, and it uses an extremely rare material extracted from the third world for its batteries.

But what about the performance of a specific bad idea? How does the Volt fare in real world tests?

Not well. First, check out its fuel economy:

It all depends on how you drive. Suppose you have a 20-mile round-trip commute, and you plug in your Volt every night when you get home (a full charge requires as few as 3 hours). Congratulations! Your fuel economy is infinity, because you’ll never run the battery pack down all the way. But if you have a 100-mile commute, you’ll be driving at least 60 miles a day under gasoline power, so you’ll have to refuel on a regular basis. And in an Edmunds fuel economy test of a Volt with its battery depleted, the car returned only 31.4 mpg in mixed driving. That’s far below the typical fuel economy provided by regular hybrid vehicles.

31 miles per gallon. My Prius, which is last generation, gets, in the real world (I’ve verified this myself), up to 48 mpg on gas. It varies a lot by weather and road conditions, but in the very worst, coldest, most slippery winter conditions it still gets 35-36 mpg. On old tires.

So when it runs on electricity, it’s dirtier than a Prius, and when it runs on gas, it’s dirtier than a TON of cars.

But the Volt has even more issues when you talk about winter driving:

CHICAGO It’s a tough week to be the guy who led development of the Chevy Volt’s battery. Consumer Reports says its tests showed the battery’s range is a paltry 23 to 28 miles in cold weather, far below the 40 miles originally promised.

“The financial payback is not there,” said Jake Fisher, a senior automotive engineer at Consumer Reports Auto Test Centre. A hybrid, he said in an interview, would make more sense. (The Volt — which runs as a fully electric plug-in vehicle and switches to gasoline power once that battery is depleted — cost Consumer Reports $48,000 at a dealership before a $7,500 federal tax credit. Toyota’s Prius is about half that price.)

…

Batteries that are too cold are reluctant to release electrons, and batteries that are too hot don’t live as long. In electric vehicles, that means charging more often. In an extended-range vehicle such as the Volt, that means the vehicle will switch over to gasoline sooner than it would in moderate temperatures.

To deal with this problem, auto manufacturers like GM and Ford sandwich their batteries’ lithium-ion cells with materials that can heat or cool the battery when it is in danger of growing too hot or too cold. But that technology only goes so far.

“When you’re driving in the cold, you want heat. That’s going to shorten your range, no matter what kind of battery you have,” Fisher said.

Ah, GM. Glad you recognize, too late, the inherent physics involved here. Batteries need controlled temperatures.. and cars can’t provide them. Because you use cars outdoors.

Duh.

Any other problems we should know about?

“When you are looking at purely dollars and cents, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense. The Volt isn’t particularly efficient as an electric vehicle, and it’s not particularly good as a gas vehicle either in terms of fuel economy,” David Champion, senior director of Consumer Reports auto testing center, told reporters Monday.

…

Champion believes a hybrid, such as the less expensive Toyota Prius, may make more sense for some trips.

“If you drive about 70 miles, a Prius will actually get you more miles per gallon than the Volt does,” Champion said.

….

Champion called the five-hour charging period “annoying,” and he criticized the Volt’s heating system.

“You have seat heaters, which keep your body warm, but your feet get cold and your hands get cold,” Champion said.

Well, I guess the frostbite *would* deter Volt owners from driving their cars in conditions that expose its shoddy design.

Like winter.

In summary: the Volt is a car that requires you to strip mine the third world and suck down vast amounts of dirty power so that you can run a car that loses a third to half its electric range in the cold and then guzzles gas at 31 mpg while you lose circulation in your toes.

I’m so thankful there’s a massive $7,500 tax credit to encourage idiots to buy this thing.