5 ms·

The bolt has best in class range, doesn't seem like a throwaway effort in that regard..

by ip26 8y ago

Theodores 8y ago
How hard can it be though? If a small child manages to wipe his/her own nose then they can be told 'well done!' but it isn't an achievement really. You would not commend a grown adult for keeping their face clean. This GM company has been going for a century and for most of that time their products have shown no effort to be considerate of the environment. Stop-start is not rocket science. Light hybrid vehicles are not rocket science. A small child can see the absurdity of cities gridlocked by slow moving or completely stationary vehicles all of them spewing exhaust for no reason. If not the environment it is a waste of petrol. Stop-start has only came along in the last few years, this could have been marketed to people as the thing to have, who doesn't want a nice quiet car when stuck in traffic? But GM never bothered to do stop-start, something that is a nice engineering challenge, not beyond the realms of impossible. In fairness none of their rivals took this route until the laws made CO2 and other emissions a problem for them. We know from EV cars that going down hills does not mean lots of heavy braking, you can store the energy and save the brakes. It would not have been impossible for GM to implement something similar, even fifty years ago a solution could have been worked out with a mechanical flywheel, maybe using the already present battery as the mass for that. GM - and the others - never even bothered with that. The aerodynamics of a car is another aspect where GM failed. It is not hard and even with no wind tunnel it can be deduced that tucking in the windscreen wipers, door handles and other parts will improve the efficiency. The underside of GM (and other) cars is a joke when it comes to aero. They just never bothered. My background is bicycles where a 4 watt gain is pretty good. A 4 Kg weight saving is epic, the difference between a Tour de France bike and what a mere mortal can afford is 4 Kg. The chrome trim on a GM effort weighs more than my heaviest steel mountain bike. Obviously my heavy mountain bike is actually quicker than any GM product through a congested city and I certainly don't have a V8 motor in my inner core. So where is this Bolt thing really? Are we talking rocket surgery or a kid being applauded because they have wiped their own nose? It is easy to criticise when you haven't built a car yourself, sure the realities of mass manufacturing are hard, but I don't think GM have ever really tried. There may be many jobs and communities dependent on GM but there were many jobs and communities dependent on the predecessor companies that made buggies in the Detroit area. The sooner GM is gone the better able the rest of the automotive trade can get on with providing people with cars more in line with Ford's vision, circa Model T era, before GM came along with their planned obsolescence and before the Dodge brothers shafted Ford as best as they could.
cptskippy 8y ago
What vehicles are they competing against? The Volt and the Leaf? Again compliance cars, these vehicles aren't trying to dominate a market but rather counteract fleet inefficiencies elsewhere. Tesla is the only manufacturer right now that's 100% committed to EVs. Everyone else is either making compliance cars or legally obligated to dabble.
- maxsilver 8y ago
  > Again compliance cars, these vehicles aren't trying to dominate a market but rather counteract fleet inefficiencies elsewhere. That's not really what the term "compliance car" means in general use. A compliance car is a lazy rebadge of some other vehicle, that only exists to meet compliance. The Ford Energi vehicles are compliance cars. The Chevy Spark EV is a compliance car. The Volt and Bolt were mostly unique designs, with state-of-the-art technology, and were generally the best electrics available in the US to date (second only to Tesla). The Volt has the highest customer satisfaction rate of any car sold in the US. https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1080762_chevy-volt-electric-car-has-highest-customer-satisfaction-scores-again https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1080762_chevy-volt-elec... . Yes, these vehicles help Chevy meet compliance (as any efficient car technically does), but they are not "compliance cars" by the normal definition of that phrase.
  - cptskippy 8y ago
    > That's not really what the term "compliance car" means in general use. The term "compliance car" in general use refers to cars produced to be in compliance with a regulation. More specifically the cars you sited were produced to be in compliance with CARB standards. The Volt/Bolt are compliance cars for CAFE, which unlike CARB specifies that fleet is a reference to cars for sale in the United States. As I said in my original post, GM is probably hedging it's bets by developing the technologies that will scale up to it's entire fleet but has no desire to do so. When the Bolt launched, GM said they were going all electric and would be launching 18 EV models by 2023. So far we haven't heard anything about new models and the Bolt is speculated to be losing GM up to $9000 per car. Maybe those 18 models were just re-badges of the Bolt for different markets?

The bolt has best in class range, doesn't seem like a throwaway effort in that regard..

by ip26 8y ago

The bolt has best in class range, doesn't seem like a throwaway effort in that regard..

How hard can it be though? If a small child manages to wipe his/her own nose then they can be told 'well done!' but it isn't an achievement really. You would not commend a grown adult for keeping their face clean. This GM company has been going for a century and for most of that time their products have shown no effort to be considerate of the environment. Stop-start is not rocket science. Light hybrid vehicles are not rocket science. A small child can see the absurdity of cities gridlocked by slow moving or completely stationary vehicles all of them spewing exhaust for no reason. If not the environment it is a waste of petrol. Stop-start has only came along in the last few years, this could have been marketed to people as the thing to have, who doesn't want a nice quiet car when stuck in traffic? But GM never bothered to do stop-start, something that is a nice engineering challenge, not beyond the realms of impossible. In fairness none of their rivals took this route until the laws made CO2 and other emissions a problem for them. We know from EV cars that going down hills does not mean lots of heavy braking, you can store the energy and save the brakes. It would not have been impossible for GM to implement something similar, even fifty years ago a solution could have been worked out with a mechanical flywheel, maybe using the already present battery as the mass for that. GM - and the others - never even bothered with that. The aerodynamics of a car is another aspect where GM failed. It is not hard and even with no wind tunnel it can be deduced that tucking in the windscreen wipers, door handles and other parts will improve the efficiency. The underside of GM (and other) cars is a joke when it comes to aero. They just never bothered. My background is bicycles where a 4 watt gain is pretty good. A 4 Kg weight saving is epic, the difference between a Tour de France bike and what a mere mortal can afford is 4 Kg. The chrome trim on a GM effort weighs more than my heaviest steel mountain bike. Obviously my heavy mountain bike is actually quicker than any GM product through a congested city and I certainly don't have a V8 motor in my inner core. So where is this Bolt thing really? Are we talking rocket surgery or a kid being applauded because they have wiped their own nose? It is easy to criticise when you haven't built a car yourself, sure the realities of mass manufacturing are hard, but I don't think GM have ever really tried. There may be many jobs and communities dependent on GM but there were many jobs and communities dependent on the predecessor companies that made buggies in the Detroit area. The sooner GM is gone the better able the rest of the automotive trade can get on with providing people with cars more in line with Ford's vision, circa Model T era, before GM came along with their planned obsolescence and before the Dodge brothers shafted Ford as best as they could.

cptskippy 8y ago

What vehicles are they competing against? The Volt and the Leaf? Again compliance cars, these vehicles aren't trying to dominate a market but rather counteract fleet inefficiencies elsewhere. Tesla is the only manufacturer right now that's 100% committed to EVs. Everyone else is either making compliance cars or legally obligated to dabble.

maxsilver 8y ago
> Again compliance cars, these vehicles aren't trying to dominate a market but rather counteract fleet inefficiencies elsewhere. That's not really what the term "compliance car" means in general use. A compliance car is a lazy rebadge of some other vehicle, that only exists to meet compliance. The Ford Energi vehicles are compliance cars. The Chevy Spark EV is a compliance car. The Volt and Bolt were mostly unique designs, with state-of-the-art technology, and were generally the best electrics available in the US to date (second only to Tesla). The Volt has the highest customer satisfaction rate of any car sold in the US. https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1080762_chevy-volt-electric-car-has-highest-customer-satisfaction-scores-again https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1080762_chevy-volt-elec... . Yes, these vehicles help Chevy meet compliance (as any efficient car technically does), but they are not "compliance cars" by the normal definition of that phrase.
- cptskippy 8y ago
  > That's not really what the term "compliance car" means in general use. The term "compliance car" in general use refers to cars produced to be in compliance with a regulation. More specifically the cars you sited were produced to be in compliance with CARB standards. The Volt/Bolt are compliance cars for CAFE, which unlike CARB specifies that fleet is a reference to cars for sale in the United States. As I said in my original post, GM is probably hedging it's bets by developing the technologies that will scale up to it's entire fleet but has no desire to do so. When the Bolt launched, GM said they were going all electric and would be launching 18 EV models by 2023. So far we haven't heard anything about new models and the Bolt is speculated to be losing GM up to $9000 per car. Maybe those 18 models were just re-badges of the Bolt for different markets?