March 28th, 2011
As the price of automobile fuel increases and attention to alternative method of powering our cars is on the “front burner” that brings up some interesting questions.
Chevrolet is heavily publicizing the new “Volt”, its all-electric vehicle. It appears simple enough – just plug it in to a special electrical outlet at your house and it recharges its trunk-load of heavy and costly “deep-cycle”, specially-made-in-Japan, batteries. However, there ARE a few drawbacks; the range is limited before you need a recharge of the batteries. They perform well; quietly and at good speeds, but normal highway speed consumes energy at a rather high rate. As with high speed driving in gas-powered cars, efficiency and economy drops rapidly.
