Monday, October 15, 2007

Calculating the efficiency of an Electric Car

A comment on the GM-Volt site (from Darren - Comment #45 on this post) included a link to this Electic Car Efficiency Calcuator. Darren ends his comment with: "My electricity would have to cost more than $0.225 CAD/kWh to make the volt more expensive to drive than a car getting 50MPG. However, it was mentioned before and I agree that they payback isn’t what’s going back into my wallet. The payback is the reduction of my carbon footprint and dependence on foreign oil while driving a car that doesn’t look like a suppository."

Site: GM-Volt Site
Page/Post: What will it cost to drive a Chevy Volt
Spreadsheet: Electric Car Efficiency Calculator

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

BIG, BIG mistake : the calc sheet claims that the VOLT travels 65 km
using 16 kwhrs. WRONG!!! The battery pack contains 16 kwhrs of capacity, but the VOLT only uses current from DOD of 70% to 20%, or 50%, or 8 kilowatt hours. All your calculations are wrong. A galon of gasoline can recharge the VOLT battery pack with 10 kilowatt hours and the VOLT gets 5 miles per kilowatt hour. If gas is $3.00 per gallon, you are paying 30 cents per gas generated kilowatt hour, if $2.50, you are paying 25 cents for gas generated kilowatt hour. National averag is 8.5 cents per kwhr from the grid,
residential rate. Commercial rates usually 1 to 1.5 cents less than residential. Ah, the perils of ignorance in new technologies.