The Volt sits in this category, as do things like the BMW i3 with the range extender, the Chrysler Pacifica minivan, the Prius Prime, and scattered other vehicles. It's not designed to propel the car down the road for long, just to store braking energy and use it for acceleration (though some will allow use for a bit of low speed driving).īeyond that, you have PHEVs - Plugin Hybrid Electric Vehicles. A typical hybrid has a battery pack in the 1kWh range. It improves fuel economy, and the Prius, in particular, uses some creative valve timing on the gasoline engine to improve efficiency more, at the cost of power production. When you decelerate, the car can recover the kinetic energy into a battery pack, and can use that energy to accelerate away from a stoplight. The Honda Insight and Toyota Prius are the most commonly seen versions of this sort of vehicle. But you might!Ī "Hybrid" is a car that uses both a gasoline engine and a battery pack for propulsion - and doesn't allow you a way to recharge that pack (from the factory - I know people have added external charges to some of them). As someone who thinks steam cars are awesome and yet doesn't own one, well. Presumably, if you're the type of person who thinks a steam car is genuinely cool, you might hear the term ECE - External Combustion Engine. It means someone with a non-electric vehicle parking in a charging station. The phrase "Getting ICE'd" does not mean getting killed, in the context of electric vehicles. That means "Internal Combustion Engine." It refers to pretty much every vehicle that doesn't have a battery pack for propulsion (a "traction battery"). We'll start with what everyone is familiar with: ICE. If not, I'll explain a few of the various terms in common use you might run across, and what they mean. If you're familiar with electric vehicles, hybrids, and such, you can just skip this section. Or, more commonly, make it home without having to find somewhere to charge.īut, on the flip side, it uses a far smaller battery pack than pure battery electrics - and it makes far better use of that pack! Once the battery runs out, the gas motor kicks on, and you can drive it across the country on gas. When you set off, you run in a pure electric mode for the battery range - 20-60 miles, depending on which version you have and the outside temperature. This means that you plug the car in at night (or during the day) to charge the main battery. The Gen 2 (2016-2019) upgrades to about a 50 mile battery only range, a larger gas engine, and a different transmission design, but works out to the same thing - some battery range and then a gasoline engine for longer travel. The Gen 1 Volt (2011-2015) has a 30-40 mile battery only range in the summer - plus a decent little gasoline engine and a useful gas tank (9 gallons) that can run it down the highway pretty much as long as you can find a gas station every few hundred miles. It's somewhere between a pure electric car and a hybrid - but, in reality, it's far better than either! probably half a dozen terms I've seen over the years. The Volt, on the other hand, is a "plug in hybrid," a "series hybrid," a "range extended electric vehicle," or. It's confusion for the sake of confusion as far as I'm concerned. And some marketing people at Chevy should be strung up for that bit of cutesy confusion, because it doesn't help anyone. If you're not familiar with the Volt, you may be in the process of confusing it with the Bolt - which is also a Chevy product. Plus, they depreciate like mad (just like all other electric cars), so you can get one cheaper than you might think! I think it's the "sweet spot" for electric transportation at this point in time, I think it's rather significantly more environmentally friendly than a pure BEV for most use cases, and I think that, for most people, it's a really, really good car and highly worth considering if you're interested in cheap, (slightly) environmentally friendly car transportation. Since it's my blog and I can post what I want, I've decided to talk about the Volt for a while. We picked up a used 2012 Volt with under 30k miles, and have been using it quite a bit, because, well, it's our car. Some while back, I tossed in a (little noticed) comment at the end of a post that we'd obtained a Chevy Volt. )įor those who don't live in a place where a short range BEV is a valid option - consider a used Volt! It can do everything, though if you don't have any charging capability, don't buy a Volt. I give myself permission to use my work in this way.
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