Teardown reveals Chevy Volt's electronic secrets

[user removed]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZCp5h1gK2Q

I guess it will be kind of difficult to figure out what went wrong when 2 billion dollars went up in smoke.

regards
Mech

[mechman600]

Originally Posted by Varn

Yep Electric Vehicles are coal powered. Where does electricity come from?..... the outlet and as we all know that outlet doesn't pollute.

Coal powered electric cars still produce 21-58% less CO2 than gasoline powered equivalent cars, according to this:
Greenhouse gas emissions

Efficiency. ICEs are 25% efficient on a good day. EVs are 80%+ efficient. A bad fuel source (coal producing electricity) with good efficiency becomes good, or at least decent, doesn't it?

Hydrogen? Horrible. 6X the CO2 of an ICE when the hydrogen is produced from natural gas, which is most hydrogen. When it's not derived from natural gas, it comes from lots of electricity + water. Where does the electricity come from? Wait for it.......COAL.

[NachtRitter]

Originally Posted by Old Mechanic

I guess it will be kind of difficult to figure out what went wrong when 2 billion dollars went up in smoke.

regards
Mech

$1.4 billion according to this: Andersen Air Force Base B-2 accident - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. And it sounds like they did figure out what went wrong.

[NachtRitter]

Originally Posted by Old Mechanic

...

Long ago GM adopted the concept of "planned obsolescence" when you could buy a 57 Chevy for $1600 new. Maybe you feel that $40k + spent on a car today is chicken feed, but lets see where that $40k gets you the day the warranty runs out. Your resale value will be pitiful.

regards
Mech

Exactly... which is why one should never buy a daily driver vehicle new. There are plenty of used vehicles sold in the last decade that are reliable, comfortable, fuel efficient, and safe.

And while I can't argue that your 1971 vehicle meets all your criteria, it is unlikely that it would meet my criteria for daily driver / cross country driver with the comfort, efficiency, and safety features I expect to have for me & my family. As a group, the vehicles built new in the past 20 years are significantly more reliable (and comfortable, fuel efficient, and safe) than the vehicles built the 20 years before that.

I do agree that it would be hard for modern vehicles to meet the "fewer than 1/10 of 1%" replaced parts that you have, but I don't agree that unique vehicles such as the Volt are automatically destined for the recycle bin within 40 years because of their complexity... maybe a larger percentage of the parts will be recycled, but I suspect the vehicles as a whole will be sought after by the current generation of folks who embrace the technology... just look at the first gen Honda Insight... 20+ years old with a fairly high resale value and there is a generation of folks keeping them running and getting absolutely incredible FE out of them... in some cases even when the electric assist is disabled! The Volt is another vehicle like that... it will be tweaked, hacked, reverse engineered, modified ... and because of the ability to modify, the ability to use it like an EV for short trips while still being able to drive it across country, and the uniqueness of the vehicle, I believe the resale value will likely remain fairly high.

It would be interesting to see, 40 years down the road, what the % of Volts are on the road vs the % of your 1971 vehicle on the road today. It may not be a fair comparison since the production numbers are likely different, but I'd hazard a guess that the Volt % will be higher.

[SoobieOut]

Originally Posted by NachtRitter

$1.4 billion according to this: Andersen Air Force Base B-2 accident - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. And it sounds like they did figure out what went wrong.

From the website, it sounds like the cause of the accident was rain, disturbing a critical sensor.

This makes me wonder about the Chevy Volt, and other EV's handling bad weather. Driving rains, lightning, snow, extreme hot and cold.

I was reading that many Hybrid batteries can be damaged by hot weather conditions. In fact my Hybrid has a warning label on the door about baking the car after a paint job can damage the batteries.

Ever been in a parked car in that has sat in the Pheonix sun? What will this do to the Lithium batteries?

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Stan

Or your computer's operating system...

Windows XP - 45 million
Mac OS X - 86 million
Debian Linux - 324 million.

That number for the Linux OS is just plain nuts. Maybe if you include all the possible hardware drivers, and all the application software that can be said to be part of a Linux distribution, you might get somewhere close, but the core OS itself is pretty compact.

[gone-ot]

Originally Posted by tjts1

LOL who are you to judge? How many complex integrated circuit controlled systems have you programmed?

GOOGLE the book title "TRS-80 Assembly Language Made Simple"...I'm the author.

[IamIan]

Originally Posted by mechman600

making hydrogen to power a car produces six times the CO2 than if you powered the same car with gasoline in the first place.

The long tailpipe emissions of a hydrogen car are six times that of a gasoline car.

Electric is better in every respect.

Some of that ratio might be changing eventually ... to narrow that 6:1 gap down ... even if not enough to change the results.

They are making algae which produce H2 as a byproduct of photosynthesis instead of the natural plant hydrocarbon sugars... currently not any where near cost effective ... but it will be closer than the current gap... even if it still will not close the gap.

Although other technologies can convert solar energy to electricity more energy efficiently than photosynthesis ... the modified algae based version is a self replicating system ... solar cells and the like might be more efficient energy conversion ... but they don't self replicate more of themselves... so the modified algae has a potential production benefit.

Once the conversion has been made they each have their own additional sources of loss:

BEV:
electricity has the grid losses ... charger losses ... battery cycle losses ... motor controller losses ... motor losses.

Hydrogen:
Has more distribution losses ... to compress it , transport it, refrigerate it, etc ... has far more losses in the ICE ... than a electric motor ... and if you use a fuel cell you have all the losses of a BEV expect you trade a battery for the fuel cell ... and I don't know of any ( even prototype ) fuel cells that can get to the cycle efficiency of modern Batteries.

So in Short:
Due to the additional losses in distribution, compression, refrigeration, and conversion to mechanical energy ... Hydrogen wold have to be produced from the initial energy source more energy efficiently than one could produce electricity from that same source ... That's a really really tall order ... none of the current systems I know of are that energy efficient at producing hydrogen ... and even if some of the new ones reach a even point at production ... Hydrogen still have other losses down stream ... in order for it to be equal at the end use , it needs to have a significant production efficiency benefit ... which it doesn't have ... and doesn't look like it is ever going to.

- - - - -

As for the Volt ... if 8 Million lines run everything for the 787 Dreamliner as the article claims ... 10 million ( ~25% more ) does seem kind of out of scale for the Volt ... Think about that scale for a minute ... the Dreamliner has a larger electrical system ... more feedback and sensors from the jet engines than the Volt gets from the ICE ... additional aeronautical instrumentation ... more communication system not only the the plane but the wifi / phone service / entertainment / etc ... for all the ~290 passengers... yeah ... Me thinks they could improve the efficiency of that code considerably.

Although as others have already posted ... they might not care to spend the cost of labor to do so when the cost of the computer chip is so low.

[Stan]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

That number for the Linux OS is just plain nuts. Maybe if you include all the possible hardware drivers, and all the application software that can be said to be part of a Linux distribution, you might get somewhere close, but the core OS itself is pretty compact.

[drmiller100]

Originally Posted by Old Tele man

GOOGLE the book title "TRS-80 Assembly Language Made Simple"...I'm the author.

gazinga!!!! That is pretty ironic, and good for you !

Once upon a time I was a programmer, then moved towards networking and databases.
I respect the heck out of the Assembler and C++ guys - a bit tedious for me as I don't have the patience.

Today I am a lowly mechanic, just like you are an old teleman......