GM getting serious about the Volt

[Matt_S]

It seems very likely they'll bring it to production in the near future.

Link to article

 

[Kestas]

The only thing truly holding back production is the development of a decent battery for the car. The article is upbeat, saying that the future battery holds promise -- but the technology is not yet developed, and I personally don't see any promise that it will be ready in the near future.

In fact, for all the presentations I've gone to related to electric cars in the past 15 years, the only thing holding these technologies back has always been battery development. Until that is solved, we can only dream of these alternate vehicles.

 

[ShiningArcanine]

As a consequence of the design of the Chevrolet Volt, the need for better battery technologies is only necessary for the plug-in feature. Since it has an electric engine with an on-board generator that runs on gasoline, it really only needs a Nickel-iron battery, ultra capacitors to capture the energy from the regenerative braking function that the Nickel-iron battery would not be able to quickly store and transformers to allow the battery to output higher voltages than its chemistry would otherwise allow so that the on-board generator does not have to modify its RPM level quickly in order to sustain rapid acceleration and also, to start the car as a Nickel-Iron battery could handle both functions.

Such a vehicle would not have the plug-in feature, but it would have better fuel economy than anything that General Motors presently makes and would never need a replacement battery.