Lithium driving...sweet!

[Obin Olson]

HA, stick it on with double tape on the rear glass. How's that for install info? :)

[Obin Olson]

BTW gm-volt.com is the Volt RedUser, I hang out a lot in on that site.

[Obin Olson]

Over 5,000 electric miles. what a car. LOVE IT. saved $1200 in gas....and spent approx $150 in electric for miles driven.

[Mark Toia]

Over 5,000 electric miles. what a car. LOVE IT. saved $1200 in gas....and spent approx $150 in electric for miles driven.

But the car cost 10,000 more than a petrol car of equal build quality..
Will you spend save 10,000 in fuel over how many years to re-coop the extra cost. and how much are new batteries for it each year or two years...

Just curious.

I am a fan buy of electric cars by the way. But the Govt has to stick you up the arse some way to get there tax paid. Hence the extra cost of the car, over the average you now don't spend on fuel.
There is know escape.

[Gavin Greenwalt]

But the car cost 10,000 more than a petrol car of equal build quality..
Will you spend save 10,000 in fuel over how many years to re-coop the extra cost. and how much are new batteries for it each year or two years...

Luckily this is a question math can easily solve.

~$1,000 saved per 5,000 miles.

$10,000/$1,000 = 10x units of driving.

5,000 miles x 10 = 50,000 miles.

Approximately 10,000 miles of driving a year for Obin. That means

50,000 miles / 10,000 miles per year = 5 years.

And that assumes a static price of fuel. Most likely that payback will be shorter as gas prices increase as they have over the last 12 months.

Prius battery packs are lasting more than 200,000 miles on average. So that means he'll need to drive 20 years before needing a replacement and by that time saved $30k. In 20 years replacement battery packs will be nearly free. Even today a prius battery costs $3k. So over 200,000 miles that costs about $150 a year for battery replacement. Gas taxes are about 2c a mile. So that would be an additional $200 a year. So really that 5 years is closer to 6 years @ 10,000 miles per year.

[Obin Olson]

I look at it like this, this car drives FAR better then any car I have ever driven, BMW, AUdi etc...it's nothing like a standard car, truly car 2.0 here guys. (Side note, BMW paid mega bucks to hire away Volt designer and said behind closed doors: "If we let the Americans run with this we will be dead, this is far superior to anything we currently produce")

And Yes, at this point in time the pack will last about 200k and costs $3,000 for a new one, I am saving a ton, for me it's offsetting driving a brand new car that nobody else has wrecked (a real bonus) and not going to nasty gas stations? priceless.

Also, I am about to install a 2.5kw solar system, cost approx 8k, minus 60% gov rebates and 2.5k in electric company rebates.....approx 80% cost of solar system paid for by not having to pay income tax for buying solar. pretty good deal, and a life long dream coming true. I love it

And Ill never need a brake job, the regen takes care of 99% of slowing down for me, capturing 20% or more of the energy and putting it back in the pack.

[Obin Olson]

It cost me 50cents a gallon of "energy" used to drive the same distance in a petrol car. I've done the math.

[AndrewThomas]

wait until peak oil hits (actually it already hit in 2007).

This is literally impossible to say with any certainty. We won't actually know when peak oil occurred for several more decades. Right now we can only try and model it and make policy based on those projections. You actually do a disservice to the cause by saying things that aren't actually confirmed as though they are fact.

[Jorge Cayon Jr.]

I love this car. It's amazing how fast the tech has come, so long as the auto industry decides they should invest in it. Instead of Hummers all those years ago, we could've had this Volt or more, earlier. But quite honestly as a shooter of high end motorsports such as Formula and ALMS, there is no way I can go quiet and replace the sound of my high strung M3 as it hits 8200rpms. I haven't turned on the radio in over two years, nothing like the sound of a finely tuned machine, even if it isn't an uber-exotic Italian V12.

But eventually we will all have to change over, and hopefully someone will have audio mapped the cars to sound like anything ever created, be it a Ferrari, Lamborghini, or god forbid a formula 1 car as you drive the whole foods lot. Haha

[Gavin Greenwalt]

But eventually we will all have to change over, and hopefully someone will have audio mapped the cars to sound like anything ever created, be it a Ferrari, Lamborghini, or god forbid a formula 1 car as you drive the whole foods lot. Haha

Isn't it BMW that's already doing that in the new M3?