Re: A Very Light Car

Whereizn yer sermin on the munt splainin how tu bild flywait EVs? Izin dere a rehab for rantoholics dat cant cum up wit reality based argamints?

That's all you got, more made up nonsense. I got tired of convertibles about 2 decades ago. Wind in my hair? Gives me a headache, which is one of the reasons I wear a helmet when riding, whether legally required or not.

Why don't you explain exactly how to do that instead of making s*it up? No, you can't use magic motors or redesign the market. Why don't you start by listing the weight reduction of eliminating computers and airbags. Let's see how close that number is to your target. I expect

Do you know the meaning of the word contradiction? It can't be fundamentally good if it's double the correct weight and triple your price.

If you had a brain in your head then you'd instinctively know that the only way to get serious weight reduction and meet the same goals would be to use expensive materials, which would f*ck up your idea of cutting the price by 2/3. And if any of your ideas were as easy as you say they are, then they'd have been implemented long ago.

I predict that you will NEVER put up an ounce of proof to support your rants, and neither will Bonkers. Well OK Bonkers will probably find some Popular Science covers and pretend the artwork makes his case. In fact I don't understand why he doesn't post a jpg of some money and pretend it's his paycheck.

Why don't you stop being a little bitch, and actually enumerate just WHERE the weights arise from? Then mebbe you can answer yer own Q. Oh, silly me.... but you DON'T know what the weight profile is..... OK, carry on, as usual.

Sure it can. Your brain is just too hormonally out of whack to grok the notion. Low-T AND high-E??

Oh, and you are a car engineer/designer, now? AND and astronaut?? AND a gourmet chef.... wow..... you must drink Dos Equis beer.... stay thirsty, my asshole friend....

YOU have repeatedly claimed that a vehicle that cost a billion to develop by an army of engineers could have been designed at half the weight and one third the price by some quack on Usenet. As if GM for some strange reason forgot to try to make it light. It's YOUR job to make your case, so start quacking! Instead all we've seen is more made up s*it and dodging and weaving. The single slightly feasible thing you've suggested is to leave out 30 pounds of rear seat airbags, which is a pathetically helpless demonstration of how little thought you gave to your 1800 pound number. Obviously you have NOTHING else to support your claims, exactly as I predicted. Oh wait, there's still the promised manifesto! Which I expect to see the day after Moller's skycar flies around the world nonstop.

You wouldn't understand it, anyway, cuz, well, deys numbers involved.... But it's coming, just got Haas problems, is all.

In fact, since YOU are so effing smart, YOU should outline the what-if strategy, for determining, when/where/if/how electrics are more user-economical than gas. Quite a few surprises, if you do it right. A big IF, in your case.

As far as GM goes, cuz GM made it 3800#, it MUST be 3800#, right???? Gee, I guess they didn't include Logic 101 in your GED/Astronaut curriculum, eh?

LOL Your opinion is insanely contradictory, and made entirely worthless anyway by all your stupid evasions.

The fact is that GM went after the middle of the market. They had a lot on the line and could hardly afford reviewers complaining the Volt felt cheap or tinny. So they aimed a little above the Prius in wheel size and heft. Note that the Prius plug-in weighs about 550 pounds less than the Volt, with probably about 200 of that coming from a substantially smaller battery. That leaves about 350 pounds used to make the Volt a little bigger here and there, go three times as far on battery, perform substantially better, and have the quality to support a substantially better warranty. Its customer satisfaction numbers bear out the success of the strategy. Face it, GM knew exactly what it was doing, and you and Bonkers are a couple of empty suits pretending that baseless rants can trump reality.

What's that Lassie? Toyota is stupid too? Yeah right, none of these car companies know anything compared to you two because none of them have an invisible magic weight reduction strategy!

Dude, it appears contradictory to you bec you are the type of asshole that has to watch his feet when he walks. I have stated from the BEGEINNING that I am a fan of the basic volt design, but not its execution. That you find that so hard to grok speaks volumes.

Pruis C: 2500#

NOW you can blow me. Hurry, email me for my address, I'm all excited now.

Oh, and a 5-door, at that -- since the assholeKidding makes such a big fukn deal about doors'n'seat'n's*it....

Why are you "imagining" things that are only available in your mind?

The Volt is a hatchback, as in, 5 doors, quack.

Five year ownership cost $40k,

Prius plug in. Five year ownership cost$38k,

IOW, just what I"d expect from a lying sleazebag. Your link uses a $40K prius hybrid, not the $18K prius c. Good one, jethro.... I'll bet you thought I wouldn't click, eh? You not only have reality problems, you have integrity problems.

Which shows that even at near the same price, the Volt is sig'ly more expensive than the more expensive prius'.

Plus, you don't even know how these bullshit sites calc the stuff out. But it don't matter, since you can't even get the models straight.

Here it is again: Pruis C: 2500# Hmmmm 1300# diff.

Get it, now? Proly not.

That's because you imagined it including a Volt drivetrain, quack. The C isn't a plug in at all, and the 500 pound heavier plugin version only has a third the range of the Volt. But weightwise, it, or anything that can do the Volt's job and compete with its price will end up being in the same weight range. Saying you want a Volt drivetrain, and then putting up a vehicle that doesn't have it, is stupid. Which you're apparently satisfied to continue rather than admit the obvious.

I put it there so that you or anyone could click on it and see that reality bites and there's no free lunch no matter how much you rant.

The Volt is a better car, and its longer range makes it more capable of matching more drivers' needs. 35 miles on battery vs 13 for the Prius plugin. The difference can have a huge effect on the owner's ability to keep his EV percentage up, which I thought is what you wanted. Now it seems all you really want is a hybrid, not an EV at all. So what's the problem? THOSE have been on the market for a decade already!

I only assumed they use the same criteria for each vehicle. The mileage part is barely relevant anyway because exactly how each would come out is highly variable depending on the driver's use. One guy could be 100% EV with the Prius plugin, while another could be 99% ICE. If you're one of the latter, then you don't really need a hybrid at all. Buy a goddamned Beetle and quit whining about how everybody is too stupid to build what you want.

LOL All the promises about numbers and yet you're reduced to endless bafflegab.

What I got is that all you can do is offer your imaginary vehicles against the reality of physics and the market. You're happy to pretend that apples are oranges, and so low on rhetorical ammo that you need little Bonkers to back you up with his usual brand of non sequiturs. You might as well cut to the chase and tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about because I don't have a Linkedin group! I KNEW that your promised manifesto would either never appear or be a sack of dumb rants that you've already drizzled out. Your excuse about not having time to produce all those "debate ending" numbers is a joke given that you have time to keep piling the s*it higher.

You rant like a hysterical woman.

Dude, you spent $45 grand on a 3,800# car that gets negligibly better gas mileage (and in only certain driving patterns) than an $18K 2500# hybrid. I dgaf whether the comparison is hybrid to hybrid, plug-in to hybrid, whatever.

Your breakeven ROI on that dumb deal will occur in, what, 350,000 miles???? Yeah, dat was a wise use of capital....

Yeah, the Volt is a great car.... mebbe.... but a dopey use of capital, if the goal is economy.

Oh, yeah, the prius c has a D-size battery of 1 kWhr.... so what?? In most driving scenarios it's more economical than your volt, and in the cases where it's not, well, you'll have to wait about 18 years to get yer money back.

Good one, Kidding.... Hey, why don't you manage MY portfolio, while yer pissing yours away??

No, I didn't. Why are you trying to sell 45 when I've already given you independent sources estimating a five year cost of 40? Because your balls have yet to descend, and therefore you need to make up your arguments to avoid admitting that you can't rant your way into an alternate reality.

The max mpg of any hybrid is limited by its ICE mileage. The max mileage of an EV is limited by its owners driving profile, with some achieving the equivalent of hundreds of mpg AFTER counting the cost of the electricity.

Look at you. Started off declaring that you could design a 2000 pound, $18k EV. Now you're reduced to touting a hybrid-only that already weighs 2600, and imagining adding a Volt powertrain to it, even though you just said it doesn't need it. Well, let's do that anyway... second electric motor, 400 pound battery, and about 200 pounds of extra structure. Assuming it's even possible to squeeze everything into a Yaris-sized envelope, now the thing is about 3300 pounds, and easily $10k more. That's the reality of what it takes to make an EV that can leave gas stations behind entirely, AND not be limited to EV range. THAT is what you originally said you liked about the Volt.

No, I estimate about 6 years at about 10 -15k miles per year, well within the warranty. I can't say for sure partly because I don't know exactly what my EV percentage will be. It's sometimes been under 50% for weeks, then 90% for other periods. My most frequent routine trip is only 8 miles return. Next most frequent is 30 miles return. I've had some stuff on the go recently that's taken me farther afield, but that will settle down eventually and my EV percentage will stay up. But basically, I can't go wrong, it's only a matter of how far I'll come out ahead.

The other big variable is fuel prices. The higher they go the more the Volt pays off. I'm betting they'll keep going up, but then I don't have your kind of wisdom to imagine a low price carbon fiber EV on the horizon.

Yes, it was. Making well informed decisions is why I HAVE the capital and didn't need to become a lender's bitch. Know anybody who does stuff like that? Let me tell you about two friends in my group who are still actively manufacturing. One keeps succumbing to the swan song of "sign here" so he can have the latest and greatest. He has a huge shop full of formerly state of the art stuff that made great money at times but never got him very far ahead overall. His current albatross is an older laser that's probably paid for but that he can't find profitable work for. The other friend waits until the overpriced equipment purchased by people like you comes up for auction for the second or third time, and then he pays cash. He's going gangbusters, partly because he doesn't need to charge a ransom for run time, and partly because he can afford to keep individual pieces idle during slowdowns. He has more equipment than staff, can afford to update as required, and keeps everybody busy. He could have retired years ago but he seems to like the drama of being profitably creative.

The Volt is a really nice car that need not be rationalized any more than a boat or a vacation or new underwear. The fact that it can be justified is merely icing on the cake.

Then why have you been wasting so much of your time whining about wanting an EV, and making wild and stupid exaggerations to do it? Why are you talking about the Prius instead of driving one? The only things you've convinced me of are that you're not nearly as smart as I used to think you were, and that you actually believe your rants.

My portfolio is doing well, which is why I've been retired for quite a while. Many people like you who need help to get where I am hire people like me. Their profit goes up but after fees they can be even worse off. At least they know they need help, which is a step up from wasting their time pushing a bad position or refusing to admit when they're wrong.

In message , whoyakidding's ghost writes

You're implying that it is selling, one of our car mags claims that the Nissan Leaf EV outsells it 2 to 1, is it?

But I can rant my way into elementary division. You paid *more than double* what the prius c would have cost you. With tax credits applied to both, mebbe 3x the prius.

Hundreds??? HundredSSS??? You're fullashit. The Nisan Leaf, 100-112 mpge, under the VERY best of ideal conditions The VW TDI engine can get over 55 mpg. The prius c up to 70. The minute your plaid-suited ass runs out of battery, you will be sub-70, way sub-70.

Well, the Volt does NOT leave gas stations behind entirely, unless you live

I can see how you are well off, and your clients are broke. Do the math. You paid $20K more than for a prius c. Do the math at $4/gal. You'll be lucky to break even in 10 years, and by then you'll proly have to buy another Volt.

Because you don't know chemistry.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.......... HUH??? Whuh???? Where am I????????? Oh s*it, I'm still in that Volt thread......

It makes no economic sense when the cars I have are barely out of warranty. Do the math. When the time comes, I WILL get a prius c.... or whatever.

I can't imagine the wife is too pleased..... if she wadn't working before, I'll bet she's working now....

Many people like you who need help to get where I am hire

I'd slit my wrists first.

Their profit goes up but after fees they can be even

The issue was not whether the Volt is a good car. I politely disagreed with jb on that point from the VERY gitgo -- at least design/intent-wise. The issue became, from my musings on electric costs, Does the Volt make economic sense? And the answer is, *generally* no. In some instances, mebbe.

You keep harping on your biased sources, saying what a profoundly low cost-to-own the Volt is, when that's patently impossible compared to a prius c. Or even compared to a Honda Fit.

You also haven't read, apparently, how hard EV owners get banged for repairs, out of warranty..... talk about proctological violations.....

And yeah, that analysis is coming. Pity you keep harping on delivery time, cuz if you were so smart, you'd provide the analysis, as it's pretty basic. Basic, but revealing. Spreadsheeting helps..

So dude, you paid double/triple for a car that in most scenarios will give equal or worse economy than a prius c. Sell DAT to yer clients.

Here is more ugly truth about the Chevy Volt that KiddingNoOne can't deal with:

"GM's basic problem is that "the Volt is over-engineered and over-priced," said Dennis Virag, president of the Michigan-based Automotive Consulting Group"

Which is exactly what fuknKidding can't grok, cuz he's so proud of hisself for buying one.

Inneresting article, tho. $250/mo leases seem tempting. But let's see if even that justifies a Volt. Electric only driving would be about 12,000 mi/year, at about 20+ kWhrs/day of juice, at 10c/kWhr, is about a grand a year.

A Honder Fit can be BOUGHT for about $16,000. At 40 mpg, that's about $1200/yr in gas.

So in 6 years (3 lease cycles), the leased volt will be $24,000. In 6 years, the Fit will be $16,000 + $7200 in gas, or about $23,000.

So even in a sweet sweet lease deal, over 6 years, the s***ty Honder Fit wins, over Chevy's big-dick plugin -- and that's a BEST CASE scenario of ONLY electric driving, no bullshit hidden fees/lease add-ons, batteries that don't age, etc. AND it assumes 10c electricity. And of course, you now OWN the Fit, you don't own s*it with the Volt -- heh, which may be just as well.

Six years is about the breakeven point between the two, in a lease deal. The Volt is actually cheaper per year under 6 years, but gets steadily more expensive after 6 years.

But if you BOUGHT the volt, you'd be s*it out of luck from day 1, even with FREE electricity, compared to a lowly gas-only Fit.. 'tis what 'tis.

Good articles, too bad they will likely exceed Kidding's reading grade level. CdA indeed roolz .

Kidding's specious, strident arguments, that finally ended up with, Oh, the Prius weighs just as much as the Volt, THEREFORE the Volt is properly designed are borderline gibberish.

I can go him even one better: The fuknTesla, the Model S, ANOTHER fukn rupoff, weighs in at 4500#!!!!! That's EQUAL to my 4WD crew-cabbed pickup truck, with 6 foot bed, and gonzo fukn tires.

But Kidding's IMPLICIT point is valid: As long as there are materialistic assholes out there (like Kidding) to whom the industry feels they MUST pander, then, yeah, over-designed, over-priced 4,000# behemoths is just what we're going to get.

And yeah, if you read between the lines of those articles, yeah, RCMers COULD build a viable electric car -- it just wouldn't have 150 cupholders and 15 air bags.

Safety, btw, is way over-rated. Fagits like Kidding want a fukn Life Guarantee for EVER"YTHING they do. Kidding would sue his toilet manufacturer, if, after his usual week's constipation, the bowl water splashed him in the ass. For mental anquish'n's*it....

You drive a car, accept the fukn risk. We are now reduced to this:

What good is division if you start with made up numbers like the 45 one above?

I didn't want a Prius of any flavor, especially the C. It is NOT as nice a car, it's sort of an econobox aimed at city drivers, and it can't be powered by PV. I'm working toward a net zero home and transportation. If I can get enough of a refund from the power company each year, it will pay for the non-EV driving of the Volt. Overall the payoff will be long, but I'm fine with that.

Do you really think that you can convince me of yet another made up number, or are you trying to coax Bonkers' lips a little closer?

A couple weeks ago I got 41 miles of battery range from my 2012. That's more than double the one-way number you just made up. EV mileage varies depending on a lot of things, but it's rated at 35, 38 for the 2013. Unlike EV-onlys like the Leaf, you can get every last foot of the available range because you don't have to worry about being stranded. You can't help but know the Volts's battery range, and any sensible reader knows that you know.

You either don't know what you're talking about, or are making up more s*it. Here are the details in case there might be any normal readers who care.

No, it shouldn't, which is WHY it isn't, and why the Prius plugin is

Idiot.

I suppose that in rantland, cupholders weight quite a bit. But here in reality though, not so much. The Volt has 4 cupholders, one for each passenger. No suspension sag has resulted, and I would guess the weight gain of having such an obscene luxury at perhaps 2 pounds. But get this, the Volt has umbrella holders built into the doors! The weight of the pockets themselves may be on par with donut holes, but what about the umbrellas that some drivers have been tempted to put in there! You need to look into that.

I don't have any clients. I don't need any because I'm retired. I have never been a financial adviser. I do get asked for financial advice occasionally, but I rarely give it, and when I have I didn't charge anything.

Well then, instead of ranting about how carbon fiber would reduce the price of the Volt, why not enlighten everyone about exactly why nobody has clued in to the secret. Answer: because you're full of s*it.

You're in the thread where you quoted what Volt payments would be for you, and pretended to give financial lessons to someone who moved beyond the need to make payments on anything about 30 years ago. Based on your idiotic rants, your need to make crazy rationalizations, and your refusal to admit where you're dead wrong, I would be very surprised if you ever match my level of success.

I don't believe you. ANYBODY who takes you at your word for anything needs their head read.

What, that the Volt is bogus investment? I guess numbers are irrational, eh?

Anything you can't understand is idiocy. You are raving about the economy of the Volt. It's economy is middling. It's ROI is virtually non-existent. Hooray, YOU like the car. That's about the sole crux of your bogus arguments.

And you got, and you are paying for it. But yer too stupid to realize how much you are paying for it.

Correct, from a gas station pov.

Yeah, when you factor in NYCers who take subways, unemployed, farmers, handicapped, babies, and everyone else who doesn't drive. More bullshit statistics. As reflected in Volt sales. Apparently the momentum is building up only in the Asshole Community.

Most of the people I know have 50 mile commutes, one way....

More over-priced over-engineering. For Diesel locomotives, the concept is properly done. For you assholes, they stick in planetary gears, and send you the bill. Go figger.

If they do that then

Why don't you just go blow a GM exec?

I'd slit my wrists if I wound up a bitch like you.

Look for

Just countering your bogus arguments. I spend hours a day on G-code, these are my breaks. I type fast. Let me know if you have a bad back, I'll send you one of my designs, gratis. Well, almost gratis... you'll have to SMD first. But then, you need the brainfood, anyway.

Oh, "sign here" machinery?? No downpayment???? R U fukn kidding me??? In