nerys said:
For my personal set of circumstances the volt is quite literally one of the most expensive options available.
10 year Real cost is roughly $98,000 NOT counting repairs after the warranty expires 3 years in (100,000 miles) and not counting the 2 very expensive batteries would have to buy in that 10 year span. It is as expensive as a tesla over a 10 year span.
I could buy 3 new leafs 1 every 3 years for that much cash and still have money left over.
The volt is quite literally a non starter. It is not even an option in the equation.
The prius is not far behind it at $78,000 over 10 years
The leaf is $42,000 including 2 batteries plus any maintenance it will need after 3 years.
It is not even a vaguely close comparison.
Hell. When you include maintenance the leaf is comparable in ownership cost to a freaking geo metro. A used one. Which would require $36,000 in fuel alone in that 10 year span.
So yeah. I am willing to goto great lengths to surpass its limitations and make it work for my commute needs.
There are a ton of misconceptions in your calcs, but I'm just going to cover the one concerning the Volt. How on earth do you figure that you're going to need to buy 2 replacement batteries for the Volt in 10 years? So far, unless things have changed recently (I only read gm-volt.com occasionally) no one has noticed any degradation from a Volt battery in four years. That's not saying there isn't any, as there undoubtedly is. But GM took the very conservative and IMO very wise step of withholding a lot of capacity from use initially, using it to replace capacity lost as the battery degrades. For example, the 2011 Volt had 10.3 kWh usable out of 16.5 kWh total (about 62.4%) [
Edit: I think I goofed, and that should be 16.0 kWh total (64.4% usable) for the 2011-2012 Volts. IIRR it went up to 10.8/16.5/65.5% with the 2013), and then 17.1 kWh total for the 2014 or maybe 2015 MY], where a car like the LEAF allows a much larger % of the total capacity to be used from the start. Then the Volt gradually allows a greater % of the total capacity to be used as the total capacity degrades, keeping 10.3 kWh usable. Thus, to the customer there is no detectable degradation for years. That means that the battery pack is larger, heavier and more expensive than it could be if the car allowed more of the pack to be used from the start, but as far as the customer is concerned its performance remains the same.
GM took two other steps that make its battery far longer lasting than a LEAF's, despite using the same basic, heat-sensitive chemistry. First, they limited the usable SoC range to about the middle 65% instead of including either the top or bottom end of the range, so that the battery could be neither over or under-discharged by the customer. It's been established that Li-ion batteries last longest when they are kept in this middle range instead of at very low or very high SoC.
Second, they gave the car an active, liquid-cooled and heated Thermal Management System (TMS) and insulated the battery pack, so whenever the car is in use or plugged in, the TMS keeps the battery from permanent rapid degradation due to high temps, and also from temporary cold temperature capacity loss. The insulation and large thermal mass of the pack means that its temp changes fairly slowly, so it takes a long time for the pack to gain or lose enough temperature for the TMS to kick in. The LEAF, virtually alone among first gen BEVs, lacks any kind of battery TMS, active or passive, air or liquid-cooled, and that's why it has suffered such rapid degradation anywhere except a cool, temperate climate like the Pacific Northwest, where it never gets too hot or too cold.
And , of course, once the Volt does show some degradation, it just means that you use more gas than you used to but can still make your trip with no worries.
