Recent content by Rusty

I may be mis-remembering from back in the day when Dr. Lyle picked up his Volt. But my recall is that his Volt was a lease...

Adding to that you should ignore the suggestion to just swap the 30A breaker out for a 40A one, unless you are absolutely certain the gauge wire you have in the circuit is correct for 40 amps. Otherwise you're a fire waiting for a place to happen, and one for which your insurance will say "Oh...

I always like to play "complete the sentence" when offered statements like the above."We don't have a battery problem," he says, "our customers have a battery problem." And, reading their warranty, he's probably right. Whether that's a good business decision or not I think will ultimately be...

The Prius has a great deal of legitimately earned customer loyalty. The product line has provided the best example of a car optimized for a certain set of priorities, and it has done so for years and years. So I'm not the least bit surprised that a goodly cadre of Prius owners who want the...

I'm not sure I follow you justification that RVs must be 2-phase. My understanding is that with 3-phase power, each of the phases is still 120V referenced to neutral. But with a 120° offset between the phases (instead of the 180° offset of 2-phase) that yields 208V potential between each of the...

Somebody may, but I don't. Any of the times I'm burning gas I'm usually going some place far away, and the thought of doing so at speeds less than 70 MPH are foreign to me. And to produce any reliable flat land steady speed driving tests I have to go quite a distance just to get to a test site...

Only time I've seen sustained MPG like that was in Mountain Mode, bringing the SOC back up. Otherwise, unless you just ran a short distance (as Herm suggests) I've never seen a number that low. The first mile or two gets sucky MPGage, so going *just* beyond the AER bodes poorly.

An interesting side issue. The MY '13 Volt is 16.5 kWh, but prior Volts are still 16 kWh. Should the chart only reflect the latest model, or should it include model year differentiations?

Taking a wild guess on what's likely to be in it, I would suspect the Cadillac ELR power train would fit a CUV better... But we'll have to see if they pony up the ELR compared to the Volt.

It doesn't work that way in the marketing world... But in the electronics world the difference between 16 amps and 32 amps on the input side isn't trivial either.

and I'm then again curious. If it's not comms (not that I can think of any problems with HF modulated over a DC signal), what's the problem with sharing the AC pins with DC L1?

OK, I guess you can color me confused on the SAE proposal. I see five different charge levels, and two (three?) different connectors. Right? The charge levels are (please forgive the table formatting, it's probably wrong): Level name Voltage Current kWattage Supply AC Level 1...

My Volt kicks in to reduced power mode at 15% SOC. So that's ~7% of total SOC, or slightly over 1kW.

Quote probably but it depends on what the goal of the test was. If the goal was "I wonder what happens if we abuse the battery this way" then it appears they found out. It would have been an absolute fail if somebody had died. But maybe they'll be able to just chalk this one up to a spectacular...

I was really excited about the Volt concept's 12.3G tank and 50 MPG CS range of > 600 miles. That's usually the most I like to do in a day (though I've done more). The 350-400 mile CS range of the Volt means I have to stop to get gas in the middle of a day's drive. But I have to stop for food...