Chevy Volt
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The 2011 Chevrolet Volt is a remarkable achievement for General Motors, but it does have a few features and behaviors that make us scratch our heads. After living with the car for five days and more than 700 miles, here are five questions we'd love to get answers to. (GM PR: You know where we live ... drop a line.) (1) Why isn't the charging cord in a spring-loaded self-retracting housing? The 120-Volt charging cord stores neatly in a compartment under the Volt's load space floor. But using it is a mess: The caddy is just large enough to be cumbersome, and the standardized plug mechanism that...
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2011 Chevrolet Volt Drive Review: Five Things We Like
We're going to have a lot of 2011 Chevrolet Volt coverage this week, as we round up our impressions on the five days and hundreds of miles we've racked up on GM's first extended-range electric vehicle. We'll do a full drive report later on, but first, a few quick hits about the things we like in...
John Voelcker -
Barrier To Buying Green: Electric Cars And Hybrids Confusing
Think car buyers understand what a hybrid is, or a plug-in electric car? Think again. A new survey conducted by research firm Synovate finds that many of almost 1,900 new-car "buyers and intenders" don't understand how hybrid vehicles work. Worse, most of them don't seem to understand how...
John Voelcker -
Chevy Volt Production May Rise; It's Not As Simple As You Think
It all started when General Motors CEO Dan Akerson said the company wanted to "double" production of the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, its range-extended electric car. Various media outlets reported the news with varying degrees of accuracy. So far, GM has not officially said it will make more Volts...
John Voelcker -
CA: Where Small Green Cars Matter & Why Detroit Has To Care
Detroit pride is back. Domestic brands are winning quality awards, and matching or beating import labels on consumer satisfaction indices. If you watch television, you've likely seen the spinoffs of the widely discussed, utterly illogical feel-good Chrysler 200 ad featuring Eminem with the...
John Voelcker -
Electric Car Startups To Square Off Against Big Auto Competition
Competition is heating up in the electric car sector, and the next few years will be a challenging testing ground for startups looking to gain a foothold among consumers as more and more major automakers launch electric and hybrid cars. Some startups have lofty ambitions. Electric car startup Coda...
VentureBeat's GreenBeat -
Chevrolet's Volt has only been on sale for a short while but sales are respectable and Chevrolet have pulled out all the stops to build a quality product and bridge the technology gap between the vehicles that everyone is used to and the new generation of electric cars. In Europe, General Motors' brand Opel is planning to do essentially the same thing with essentially the same vehicle, and Chevrolet will be selling the Volt alongside it. The 2012 Opel Ampera is a Volt by any other name, but don't be fooled into thinking the two cars are identical. AllCarsElectric was able to compare the...
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Electric-Car Wars: Chevy Volt Still Outselling Nissan Leaf
Battle of the Titans it ain't. But for the third month in a row, Chevrolet sold more Volt range-extended electric cars than Nissan delivered Leaf plug-ins. During February, Nissan delivered 67 Leaf battery electric hatchbacks, bringing its two-month total to 154. Adding in the 19 delivered in...
John Voelcker -
Consumer Reports Pans 2011 Chevy Volt, But Misses the Point
If Consumer Reports didn't exist, someone would have to invent it. It may be the most trusted brand in evaluating cars, and it offered reliability ratings well before J.D. Power became a household name. A bad rating can send auto execs crawling to its doors to learn what they need to change to get...
John Voelcker -
2011 Chevrolet Volt Takes Center Stage at Global Green USA Pre-Oscar® Party
Last Thursday, found celebrities, environmental activists and the 2011 Chevrolet Volt at the 8th Annual Global Green USA Pre-Oscar Party. The Volt has been named North American Car of the Year and Green Car Journal’s Green Car of the Year, so it seems fitting that it would take center stage...
Jonathan McGrew -
Could Chevy Volt Plug-In Displace Prius Hybrid On Red Carpets?
It all started with Leonardo DiCaprio, who showed up at the foot of the red carpet in his very own Toyota Prius. Within a couple of years, alighting from a Prius hybrid--or any other hybrid, including the hulking Cadillac Escalade Hybrid luxury full-size sport-utility vehicle--was de rigeur for any...
John Voelcker -
Has Your Electric Car Stopped Working? Flatbed It, Don't Tow
Fabulous creations that electric cars are, they're still machines designed by mere mortals and as a result, they may occasionally go wrong. As they're operated by mere mortals too, you may find one time that you're unable to reach your destination on a charge thanks to a miscalculation, or you've...
Antony Ingram -
It's the sign of a successful car launch: Dealers add blatant markups to the sticker price, charging thousands of dollars extra because buyer demand exceeds supply, and dealers have the only supply. Now it's happening to the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, the range-extended electric car that went on sale in December and has generated huge public interest. Reports of dealer markups are caroming around Volt forums and other online venues. Supply and demand, or 'gouging'? Meanwhile, at least one party in Sylmar, California, put a brand-new 2011 Chevy Volt on eBay with the MSRP (sticker price) shown as...
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Is One Million Electric Cars By 2015 Too Ambitious?
In a renewed push for clean energy, President Obama called for one million electric cars to be on American roads by 2015 last month. But is that goal realistic? The government released a report this week saying that by its “conservative” estimates for 2015, the electric car supply in...
VentureBeat's GreenBeat -
Oil Exec Says Electric-Car Batteries 'Not Ready for Primetime'
It's always good to hear the arguments against electric cars. Some are valid, some are idiotic, and some simply betray a lack of knowledge about how the auto industry really works. Into that last category may go some comments by one William M. Colton, ExxonMobil’s vice president for corporate...
John Voelcker -
What You Need To Know About Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt Servicing
A few months ago we asked the question, what exactly do you have to service on a 2011 Nissan LEAF? After all, the LEAF doesn't even contain many of the items that require regular attention on a regular car, such as oil changes, spark plugs, filters, transmission fluid and muffler parts. Brakes...
Antony Ingram -
Testing A Plug-In Prius Or Volt Gets Easier For Civilians
With cars like the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf already on sale, plus a handful of startups either selling or building battery-powered cars on U.S. soil, it’s safe to say that the electric car revolution is truly upon us. Sadly, the cost of entry to be a part of this revolution is still...
Viknesh Vijayenthiran -
Which Is Selling Better: 2011 Chevy Volt Or 2011 Nissan Leaf?
The first business day of every month is when automakers release sales data for the previous month. Today, we got January's sales figures, which are an improvement over last January's. But the question that we keep hearing is: Which sells better, the 2011 Nissan Leaf or the 2011 Chevrolet Volt?...
John Voelcker -
Another in our irregular series of answering questions from readers, this one from John Q of Eugene, Oregon: Question: I was wondering how an electric car provides heat and defrosting. Using batteries to generate the heat will drain them pretty fast. Maybe with the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, the internal combustion engine is run for heat? But what about the battery-only 2011 Nissan Leaf? Answer: In brief, cabin warmth on cold days is provided via resistance heating, which--as you note--uses a lot of current. However, the Chevy Volt offers heated driver and front passenger seats.And the Cold Climate...
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Battery Wars: General Motors Licenses American Argonne Tech
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... Actually, no--fairly recently and not so far from home, the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory patented a battery technology known as nickel manganese cobalt (NMC). Discovering and patenting new battery technology in an era so...
Antony Ingram -
2011 Chevrolet Volt Electric: North American Car of the Year
It's been quite a year for the 2011 Chevy Volt, GM's range-extended electric car that went on sale last month. It garnered a slew of awards from various car magazines and other auto media, and now it's capped the year by winning the prestigious North American Car of the Year award. Voted on by...
John Voelcker -
GM To Use Argonne National Lab Advances In Next-Gen Volt Battery
General Motors announced today that it has licensed lithium-ion battery technology developed at Argonne National Laboratories, the research institution that's funded largely by the U.S. Department of Energy. The agreement allows GM to use the technology throughout its supply chain, and covers a...
Bengt Halvorson -
2011 Chevrolet Volt: What Do Owners Think, A Few Weeks In?
Much of 2010 was spent learning more and more details about Chevrolet's exciting new range-extended electric car, the Volt. Towards the end of the year our colleagues at GreenCarReports finally got to drive the vehicle, and more recently the first owners have taken delivery. So what do owners...
Antony Ingram -
GM Leads Nissan In December Electric Car Sales As Supply Trickles In
Chevy’s electric hybrid vehicle, the Volt, beat out the cheaper Nissan Leaf in electric car sales in the last month of 2010 as each manufacturer struggled to keep up with demand for their newest rides, the Associated Press reported today. The Volt went into production in mid-November and hit...
VentureBeat's GreenBeat