CMU Says Volt Won’t Be A Consumer Hit

GM can't catch a break. Carnegie Mellon University's latest report, which deems the Volt "Not Cost Effective In Any Scenario" may just replace Ralph Nader's 1965 indictment of the company's Corvair (and the rest of the auto industry), "Unsafe At Any Speed." An analysis of GM's Volt says that the plug-in electric vehicle's 400-lb battery pack guarantees that the car can never be priced for consumer success.

Despite GM's protestations about the desirability of the car's 40-mile all-electric range, the cost to manufacture and replace the Li-ion battery pack will doom the car's commercial success, and relegate it to a collector curiosity. According to the report, smaller cars with smaller battery packs will provide better consumer value than the Volt will. Hybrids with an all-electric range of ten miles or less or improvements to current hybrid design will more likely provide the consumer with the right mix of fuel efficiency, acquisition and operational costs, and charging times.

Jeremy Michalek wrote a professor of engineering at CMU the study, which will be published in a future issue of Energy Policy. The research team constructed computer models of PHEVs that account for the impact of various battery sizes on fuel economy, greenhouse gas emissions and charging cycles.

The study found that for moderate travel, which the group defined as those trips between 20 and 100 miles, PHEVs produced fewer greenhouse gas emissions, but fell short on cost-effectiveness. The models indicated that hybrid electric vehicles were more cost efficient with the study's controls. PHEVs became more attractive from a cost perspective only when the price of fuel was high, the price of batteries was low, the cost of electricity generation was reduced or other costs, like carbon taxes, were added to the model.

Carbon taxes are not currently applied as such, however the automakers do face fines if the combined average fuel economy of their fleet does not meet federal standards. Regulations do not govern the tailpipe emissions of any model in particular, so models with lower fuel efficiency and higher carbon emissions can be offset by sales of higher fuel economy models from the same manufacturer.

Recently, several states won the right to regulate tailpipe emissions, a reversal of a long-standing policy that preserved federal control of vehicle emissions. The change in policy means that states can enact tougher emissions standards than those imposed by the federal government. Even with increased restrictions on emissions, and changes to other study variables, the author concludes that the most effective PHEVs will be small urban vehicles whose drivers have access to regular charging facilities.

Source: Carnegie Mellon University PDF link

Photo Credit: MR38