March 2, 2007

A Shocking Innovation

So, Chevrolet has created a new concept car, The Volt, which can run solely on electricity, provided your commute is no longer than 40 miles round trip. If your trip is longer than 40 miles, the engine can switch to running on gasoline/E85/biodiesel for the remainder of the drive. And if your trip is very long, while the engine is running on gasoline, your battery is being recharged and once recharged, will kick over and once again run the vehicle emission-free. At night, you can plug your vehicle into a standard 110-volt outlet to re"fuel". Ok, so my gut reaction after reading this is, electricity probably costs more than gasoline. Well, Chevy approximates that a relative "gallon's worth of electricity" costs only $0.60. Wow, very impressive, even for living in Illinois under the price uncertainty of our current monopolistic electrical company. Two questions that go unanswered, however, are, "how much is the car?" and "how fast can i accelerate and top out at" when running on electricity? But, if the answer to the former is even close to the current prices for hybrids, we may have a future winner in our sights.
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