2016 Chevrolet Volt Is The Just Right Electric Vehicle: Video
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Range anxiety is a real issue when it comes to selecting deciding on making the switch from traditional internal combustion to an electric powertrain.
But the engineers at Chevrolet realized this with the first-generation Chevrolet Volt, offering a PHEV to calm the fears of “running out of juice.”
How does the 2016 Chevrolet Volt hold up, though? Pretty well in our experience, but the PHEV stopped by AutoGuide for a review. Echoing our sentiments, it also performed quite well.
Where the 2016 Volt fell short was in a few minor areas such as its front bucket seats. The biggest downfall was the price to pay to enter the PHEV arena. The as-tested price for this particular 2016 Volt was a tick under $40,000. There are quite a few very good vehicles on the market that will ring in lower than a fully-loaded Chevrolet Volt.
Have a look at the review fr yourself right up above.
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The video says the 2016 Chevrolet Volt gets 42 mpg using the naturally aspirated 1.5L DOHC-4v 4-cyl engine; it makes you wonder whether a Volt with even just a mild hybrid could get over 50 mpg mileage.
That MPG is only when you use the gas engine as a range extender. If you only used electricity you have infinite MPG.
You don’t get it, do you?
I’ve had my Volt for 4.5 years and i have an over 200mpg lifetime average. Why on earth would you want to make it a mild hybrid only good for 50mpg????
The ICE in the Volt is a baby step towards full electric with enough cells to kill range anxiety. The Bolt is proof we are getting closer to that day.
The ICE age is almost over. You can hop on the electric train now, or wait a few years til you feel comfortable with the idea of moving electrons to propel your car instead of using… explosions!
I garantee you that once you make the switch, you will feel silly to not have done it sooner.
Even Toyota is thinking about ditching the regular Prius in favor of the Prius Prime!
Hop on, you’ll never look back…
Both of my Saturn cars get almost 50 miles to a gallon of fuel. Chevy Volt is a good idea but needs slow high compression cast iron engine to run the generators to get good fuel mileage. Aluminum engines run too fast to get good efficiency as fuel is wasted before it has time to propagate across cylinders. If you slow it down aluminum melts. Todays engineers are not allowed to think because of false bottom line constraints that force them to make compromised decisions. I wrote a book about building better cars called “A Tinker’s Dream”
Robert, test drive a Volt, as Driverguy01 suggests, and you will ditch those old Saturns for a new Volt or Bolt EV. It is much more than just high MPG. You get instant torque (no Saturn can do that!) and spend much less in fuel and maintenance.
The engine does not know what material the block and heads are made of. Operating RPM ranges is much more a function of bore and stroke along with camshaft and engine control system designs.
An engine is a machine, man made. Saying bore and stroke and camshaft is like young hot rod kids that brag about ported and relieved engines yet do not even know what the terms mean. Aluminum is softer and melts at a lower temperature than cast iron. Since it is softer it is much easier to machine and that makes the parts more economical to produce. However if you put aluminum in severe service it will fail much sooner than a cast iron part of the same dimensions. Aluminum engines therefore depend on moving much more air through the engine to cool them and typically an aluminum engine will be run at more than 2000 revolutions per minute where an equal size engine made of iron could produce the same power at seven or eight hundred revolutions per minute. The lower speed allows more time for flame propagation thereby getting more energy out of the same quantity of fuel and the exhaust contains fully burnt hydrocarbons. An efficient engine would produce cold exhaust even pulling a load. Bore and stroke sets parameters of the engine and varying the cam sets aspiration as adding a turbocharger does, but it will not compensate for aluminum just being not able to do the job. It is simple strength of materials, a subject I studied in high school in 1960 but has taken a lifetime to understand. The dramatic fall of the twin towers shocked me as it was exactly the way my old high school teacher described how it would work.
Thanks for the comment, best of luck Edward
PS I’d swap my Saturn for a volt in a second if I could afford it