RegGuheert said:
GRA said:
None of this tells us what's going to happen with the 2nd gen. battery,...
Nonsense. Volt Gen 2 has been on the road for two years now. If there were a degradation problem, we would have heard about it by now. If you think there is one, just provide the links to the customer complaints.
A company's attitude toward supporting their product is more important than the technology they use.
Actually, both are important, for the customer and the company. For example, Nissan battery design failed the customer owing to both its tech and the company's lack of support. Tesla has had their share of problems with their tech (not the battery), but has had excellent support. GM has done a great job with the tech on the Volt, so customer support hasn't been an issue so far. Given GM's generally poor record in that area over the past three decades or so, that's a good thing.
RegGuheert said:
Honda was the first mover in hybrid cars and demonstrated that they would not support their product. As a result, they lost the market to Toyota. If they want to regain market share, they need to prove that their product works. Chevrolet has already done that in spades.
I agree that the 1st Gen. Volt has held up well, and hope that the 2nd Gen. does as well, but that remains unproven. As it is, probably the most reliable car I've ever owned was the '65 Impala that was passed on to me from my dad (a self-described 'GM man') and which served the family for 23 years and 240k miles before being sold still in good working order, but that doesn't mean that '70s-'80s Impalas (and GM products generally) weren't crap - they were.
RegGuheert said:
Please don't keep trying to turn reality upside down. As a person who has refused to purchase ANY vehicle with a traction battery for nearly two decades of availability, you come here are and malign the products on the market and proclaim that something in the future will best them. Yet your signature reads "The 'best' is the enemy of 'good enough'". You need to take note of what that actually means.
Re my refusing to purchase any PEV (or FCEV) to date, as I've noted many times before, until some manufacturer makes an AFV that meets my requirements at a price I can afford and am willing to pay, with the necessary infrastructure to support it, of course I'm not going to blow tens of thousands of dollars on one. Is that sort of wasteful spending the kind of thing you do?
Where have I ever maligned the Volt's tech (other than its touchscreen HVAC/infotainment controls, which were largely replaced by physical controls in Gen 2)? I've said repeatedly that I thought GM took exactly the right approach when designing the Volt 1's battery pack. My concern is that they are being considerably less conservative with the way they are using the 2nd gen. pack, going for the 'best' instead of the 'good enough'. 'Good enough' with the greater capacity 2nd gen. battery but the same usable SOC range as the 1st gen. would provide 45 miles AER rather than 53.
Maybe they're confident that the new pack (which employs a larger % of NMC to LMO) will hold up as well as the previous pack did despite the less conservative SoC range; I certainly hope it does, as that will provide a cost, weight and volume advantage going forward. After all, the ideal battery would allow use of 100% of its total capacity all the time with no degradation, as is the case with ICEs powered by liquid fossil fuels. But they are taking an approach which is known to result in greater degradation for
existing battery tech, so until we have long-term data to compare to the 1st gen batteries, I have reason to worry that they may throw away the excellent reputation advantage they gained with the 1st gen. battery, for short-term profit. That GM (along with most corporations) has done this repeatedly in the past is incontestable.
[
Edit] Found AVTL's tests for the 2016 Volt battery:
https://avt.inl.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/phev/batteryVolt1377.pdf
https://avt.inl.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/phev/batteryVolt4657.pdf
https://avt.inl.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/phev/batteryVolt4673.pdf
https://avt.inl.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/phev/batteryVolt4913.pdf
There are also tests of the 2015 Accord Hybrid battery out to about 104k miles which show about the same % degradation as the Volts but at about 3 times the range, but as those are HEV batteries they aren't strictly comparable:
https://avt.inl.gov/content/pubs-vehicles