General Motors is considering an unusual program to keep the price of the Chevy Volt within the grasp of the average auto buyer: renting them the battery pack. The Financial Times reports that GM is considering selling the car for the price of a Chevy Malibu, and then charging owners a monthly rental fee for the batteries. Volt chief engineer Frank Weber estimates an average owner would pay about $25/month for gas, compared to $125 for a traditional Malibu. The battery pack would rent for about $100/month giving a similar total operating cost. Oops! Unless we're missing something, Weber forgot the cost of plugging in to recharge the battery. Since the primary reason most people look at any kind of hybrid is lower operating cost, we've got to say this seems like a bone-headed self-defeating marketing idea.
Find Reviews by Make:
Read all comments
You forget that this isn’t about mileage. Like the Prius, it’s about being the green early adopter on your block. This will be the first wide scale American super-clean car, and I bet they’ll sell at a premium for several years.
Charging costs for non peak hours will be trivial. Look it up. I mean yes there will still be some cost, but it is 5-10% of normal gas price for same miles driven. Of course some of that is just not paying road use tax.
I mean this thing is meant to be a global vehicle, and I could see that being really nice in a market with 50% petrol tax burdens.
I don’t think GM has much of a choice regarding battery rentals as the cost of a Li-ion pack is prohibitive. With current technology, the expected useful lifespan of a heavily used battery pack (w/deep discharges) is going to be pretty short and consumers would be quite ticked if they forked over a huge amount of money only to have to get a new pack in a few years. If they come out with those cells good for several hundred cycles, they’ll last longer but still probably cost a 5-figure fortune.
Don’t forget the cost of the 220V adapter if you’re looking for a quick charge. Figure another $1000.
Some places don’t have off peak electricity rates offered. Where I live here in northern Delaware, unless I can ask to sign up for a plan with someone I don’t know about, the primary utility here doesn’t offer off peak rates to residential.
Also, what’s the combined efficiency of the Volt, the average electric power plant (which may or may not produce carbon emissions), and the delivery grid versus the efficiency of an average combustion engine?
Charging costs for non peak hours will be trivial.
Supply and demand. As the number of people using “non peak” time to charge their cars increases, the demand on the power grid during those hours will rise, and they’ll stop being “non peak.” Prices will rise to reflect this reality.
It’s just a gimmick to, er, overcharge the buyer for the car. Your $250 per month payment becomes a $350 per month payment, but the manufacturer will insist that your payment is $250, even though it’s $350.
That’s the kind of parsing that has made car dealerships America’s most beloved profession. 2+2=3, payable with a check for 5.
Excellent question TreyV. Most of the U.S. still gets electricity from coal, making these so-called green cars a whole lot less green. Also, our electric grid is aging and on the verge of being overtaxed already. Adding plug-in electric cars to the strain will only exacerbate the problems.
Rentable battery packs are a great idea. The next step would be to commonize battery pack design such that they fit into any electric or hybrid vehicle. Then have stacks of charged packs on the ready at your local gas station or at least at some charging station reasonably within the range of your electric vehicle….
I’m waiting for the next innovation: We’ll give you a car for free!
But the steering wheel will cost you $400 per month.
Oh, and we’ll rent you the seat belts for $50 per month.
guyincognito:
i also like the idea of common battery packs, but we’ve got to be careful because everything is still in such an early stage. i’d hate to have the electric cars of 2020 be crippled by backward compatibility with today’s technology.
also, people seem to be unable to properly care for their ipod batteries (hot, cold, sun, draining, etc), so i don’t know how much battery swapping i’d want to do with other people anyway.
$1,000 for a 220v adapter??? I’ll be right over to wire one for you, and I’ll only charge you $750 (which means I’ll be making about $1,500 an hour). I’m serious. I do it all the time when I need 220v in the barn, out at the driveway, whatever…
Sounds like smoke and mirrors taken to a whole new level.
Instead of paying the oil companies $100 a month, why not give that money to cash strapped GM! Great business plan if it works.
Of course, instead of clean burning cars, that power is now going to be provided by your local oil/coal/dead puppy burning power-plant.
But hey, at least we’ll feel like we’re doing something green right?
Noting that the Volt will be marketed under GM’sglobal, mass-market Chevrolet brand, Frank Weber, the carmaker’s chief engineer, said that it “needs to be affordable to the buyer of a normal mid-sized car”.
At an estimated $100 a month x 10 years (i.e. the estimated battery life) = $12K. So instead of paying the $12K up front, you’d pay it over time (assumning 10-year ownership). Fun with numbers.
Just a quick question. Assuming there will be huge numbers of Li-ion and Nickel metal batteries wearing out. How will we dispose of them? Isn’t there lots o’ environmentally unfriendly stuff in those batteries?
It’s an urban legend/myth that millions of electric-car batteries are going to be dumped into landfills and we’ll all glow in the dark. These people aren’t stupid: the batteries were designed from the git-go to be thoroughly and relatively easily recyclable. After all, they contain a lot of rather valuable materials, and they’re designed so those materials can be recovered. No, midnight dump trucks will not be backing up to superfund sites and dumping out tons of bad ju-ju.
Via Wikipedia:
“Subcritical fossil fuel power plants can achieve 36–38% efficiency. [. . .] Nuclear power plants generally cannot reheat process steam due to safety requirements for isolation from the reactor core. This limits their thermodynamic efficiency to the order of 34–37%.” No idea of the efficiency of the distribution grid (or the Volt).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_plant
And:
“The efficiency of various types of internal combustion engines vary, but it is lower than electric motor energy efficiency. Most gasoline fueled internal combustion engines, even when aided with turbochargers and stock efficiency aids, have a mechanical efficiency of about 20% [1][2]. The efficiency may be as high as 37% at the optimum operating point in engines where this is a high priority such as that of the Prius. Most internal combustion engines waste about 36% of the energy in gasoline as heat lost to the cooling system and another 38% through the exhaust. The rest, about 6%, is lost to friction.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine
Again, Wikipedia:
“Brushless [DC] motors are typically 85-90% efficient, whereas DC motors with brushgear are typically 75-80% efficient.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_motor
So, very crudely: 0.20 efficiency of ICE versus 0.37 (power plant) X 0.85 (DC motor) X 0.94 (drive train losses) = 0.296 efficiency. At this point you are ahead, but there are still losses in the distribution channel and losses in the charging and storage system to consider.
Efficiency is a fun engineering question, but it really isn’t the issue; the level of emissions is. Even if an electric motor was net-net less efficient, it would still be beneficial if the creation of the energy produced less overall pollution.
Fotobits makes a good point. If plugging into the grid requires getting clean electricity produced by a dirty source that is already overutilized, then there may be no benefit at all to plugging in. The value of plugging in should be measured primarily by what is involved in producing the electricity.
This is also where diesel fans lose the plot. While they fixate on the alleged efficiency obtained from a given unit of fuel (fuel economy), they forget that consuming that fuel creates particulate matter unique to diesel that just so happens to be highly harmful to humans and other mammals. When one focuses on a specific Holy Grail, instead of taking a holistic view, the end result is flawed decision making that misses the big picture.
I suspect this has already been said, but I’ll bet that if electric cars and/or plug-in hybrids truly proliferate, and I mean by the millions, the country’s next massive, overwhelming infrastructure problem will be the nationwide collapse of the electric grid–unable to build powerplants fast enough to keep up, massive blackouts, resistance to nuclear plants, cities like Houston and Miami entering a Third World state of existence, industries able to operate only eight hours a day, laws allowing power use at certain time only for certain people…we’ll all be wishing for IC engines again.
Efficiency is a fun engineering question, but it really isn’t the issue; the level of emissions is.
In the context of global warming, the excess heat produced by millions of inefficient engines probably adds up to something significant, too.
If GM actually rents battery packs to consumers it will be one of the biggest blunders GM has made in years, and that’s from a company that’s already made many blunders in the past several years.
For the sake of GM’s survival, I sincerely hope they don’t go with such a stupid move. Of course, if they do it would not surprise me, and this marketing plan would fall flat on it’s face possibly leading to the market shunning the Volt.
Also interesting is the FT article mentions GM has assigned 150 engineers to the Volt project. I’m not sure how true that is, as I’ve heard numbers ranging from 100 – 500 engineers working on the Volt. It’s interesting because I’ve heard that Toyota has 1000 engineers specifically assigned *just* for it’s hybrid system development. The development of specific hybrids like the Prius is assigned to other engineering teams. A curious point for those who are arguing about whether or not GM will take away Toyota’s hybrid lead.
I don’t know why so many people are worried about batteries ending up in some landfill when there are perfectly good “reefs” for that in Lake St. Clair/Erie/etc.
I’m skeptical that electricity costs would be “trivial”, as I so often hear. As it is I pay about $100 a month juicing a 1-bedroom apartment that’s vacant and quiet most of the day, and for which I use most electricity during non-peak night hours.
How much more will it cost to accomplish the nontrivial work of moving 2500 lbs of metal 40 miles a day, 30 days a month?
I’m guessing a LOT more than anyone’s owning up to.
In any case, I have no idea if I’m charged lower rates in non-peak hours anyway, or if so, how much. Not on my bill, not on the utility’s website, have never heard a thing about it.
The other half of the consumption equation is to drive less. However, charging customers a fixed per-month fee isn’t going to encourage less use at all.
The comment somewhere above about the rental plan being introduced as a result of poorer than hoped for battery life strikes me as likely. I know that the L-Ion batteries that I’m using (cell phone, iPod and laptop) haven’t exhibited nearly the durability of the older style batteries for other things (including an older laptop). In particular, they’ve demonstrated major degradation when ambient temperatures aren’t optimal, and they seem to have a shorter useful life-cycle. Possibly the ‘new’ batteries will solve that, but I have a (very) small amount of experience with batteries and power management in my work, and I’m not being filled with confidence here.
Another topic that’s come up is time-metered power. To my knowledge, household usage in the U. S. is seldom, if ever, time-metered. There are no cost benefits in particular to using power in the house during peak or non-peak hours. Someday, that may change, but probably not anytime soon. Also, I’m not certain that charging will occur primarily during off-peak hours. Peak hours are, at least in California, from about 1:30-6:30 or so (according to caiso.com) – surely a significant number of people are going to start getting home during the later portion of this time and will plug in their chargers… And, for that matter, what about those who will charge their car at work?
-S5
To my knowledge, household usage in the U. S. is seldom, if ever, time-metered. There are no cost benefits in particular to using power in the house during peak or non-peak hours.
That’s actually a really good point. Where I live (central Ohio), the electric company only stops by once every other month to read the meter. I’m not aware of anything on said meter that tells the reader dude at what time I used any given kilowatt-hour. All my bill says is, “last time we read it, the number was X, this time it’s Y, so you used Y-X kilowatt-hours.”
Very interesting. Exactly how my electricity is metered 60 miles from Manhattan. Which means that the “non-peak hours” charging economies that the EV people reflexively talk about have become–and are–an urban myth.
Utilities offer ‘off peak’ pricing to stimulate demand at night because it costs them money to idle plants when demand drops.
I’m not at home right now so I cant check but I’m pretty sure my utility meters peak and off peak usage. I live in the suburbs of Milwaukee.
The Volt has a 16 kwh battery. It will probably cycle ~40% but let’s assume 50%. So if you come home at night needing to charge 8 kwh at a rate of $.10/kwh that’s only $.80 per day or about $25, the same amount GM figures you’ll be paying for gas.
Kevin: Most residential power is used by appliances like your refrigerator and by devices in standby mode like your TV and computer. Standby certainly draws less power than when it is in operation but still can draw significant amounts because it is drawing all the time.
If I remember my numbers correctly, the DOE said the existing infrastructure could handle ~180 million electric cars, primarily charging at night.
I wonder if GM will force customers to rent their battery packs or if a market will form for higher capacity batteries customers can purchase?
There are such things as Time of Day (TOD) electric meters.
Here’s a link to a Connecticut Light and Power (CL&P) FAQ about “Rate 7,” which can save money for those customers who use most of their electricity during off-peak hours. However, in this case, you’d need 57% (minimum) of your demand to occur during hours defined as off-peak.
For regular (i.e. normal / most) customers, Connecticut Light & Power simply ‘asks’ that we try to help lighten demand for electricity by using measures such as running major appliances after 8 P.M., but there’s no financial reward for doing so.
So it looks like if you sign up for a special rate plan (here in CT), which involves the non-standard TOD meter, then yes, they can tell what you are drawing from the grid by time of day.
P.S. Here’s a link to the “Time May be on Your Side” brochure (Adobe .pdf file) where specific mention is made of the special Time of Day (TOD) electric meter.
Time-metered power is what is sold to most large businesses, and some utilities are beginning to roll it out to households. In the interest of efficiency, I’d welcome it’s use, but only if the rate which the utility paid you for power you generate (via solar, or whatever) also was priced accordingly.
Anyhow my point was first that there is not presently a mechanism to make people want to charge only during ‘off-peak’ hours, so the assumption that the current power system will handle this gracefully is questionable in my mind. In addition, the electric-only range of most of the solutions proposed so far is such that a significant number of people are likely to want to charge at work, precisely during peak hours in some cases…
-S5
It’s difficult to see what GM’s thinking. Buy the car and rent a major component to make it useable?
People who would rent the component would probably just lease the car, anyway. People who prefer to buy cars aren’t going to want to rent a chunk of it to keep it on the road; they like to be done with payments after a few years.
If GM’s thinking about this to keep the apparent cost of the car down, they’re probably out of luck. The Volt, as envisioned (never forgetting that, unlike the Prius, the Volt is vaporware), looks somewhat simpler than a Prius (no PSD or conventional transmission) and, therefore, should be a little less expensive to build. How much more advantage does GM need to make a cost-competitive vehicle?
If the rental program is a ploy to insulate the customer from the cost of battery replacement, that’s probably doomed to failure, as the Volt won’t hit the streets until the battery question is settled with real-world experience (which, so far, appears quite good).
That’s a deal breaker for me. I’ll buy the car if the price is right. But I sure won’t dole out $100/month for infinity.
this is a great innovated idea and i hope it is sucsessfull with more great vehicles to follow. in helping out with the charging of the car couldn’t we, for example: say your going to work and instead of finding the shady spot in the parking lot you get the sunniest spot you can find for direct rays. then instead of placing a sun shade in your windshield it is actually a solar panel that plugs into your car while you spend your 8 hours at work. and do the same at home. It may not power the car completely, but it would help whatever, just a thought and idea to help