“Planned obsolescence” is a term applied to products designed to break easily or to quickly go out of style. GM has taken the concept to new highs (or lows.)
Green Autoblog reveals the Volt’s unplanned obsolesence:
CNN Money recently had the audacity to call the Volt’s technology “obsolete.”
CNN’s reasoning employs something called “math”: the Prius Plug-in goes 13 miles in electric mode, then swithces to hybird mode for 51 mpg highway and 48 mpg city. The Volt goes 35 miles in electric mode but on gas only 36 mpg highway and 32 mpg city. The raaaacists conclude:
On trips of 13 miles or less, the Prius plug-in and Volt deliver the same all-electric mpg: zero. On trips between 13 miles and 35 miles in length, the Volt beats the Prius. But after 35 miles, the Prius handily outscores the Volt.
Cost is the deciding factor:
…with a base price of $41,000, the Volt ain’t cheap. Pricing for the Prius Plug-In … is expected to start at approximately $28,000, meaning that it will likely undercut the Volt’s MSRP by more than $10,000. Yes, rebates alter that number, but CNN finds it difficult to justify the hefty premium for what amounts to less than 30 miles of added electric-only range.
Just try getting a “rebate.” It’s easier snatching a tamale from Michelle.
The car in which Obama “invested” so much of our tax money and so much his rapidly vanishing credibility is a metaphor for his presidency: A waste of time and money. Obsolete, just like all his other “ideas.”
– Written by Bonfire of the Absurdities
Source: Green Auto
This post was last modified on March 21, 2021
View Comments (44)
I believe it was obsolete before it came off the line. Bad idea for the purpose it was designed for.
But I have a "NEAT" idea that is totally green . When we were younger we had these rubber band toys that were nifty. Just hook up say 5,000 rubber band motors to a car , wind them up real tight , hop in and GO , GO , GO !!!!
Another idea was from scouts . It was called Box car derby. What we need to do is build a hill on every block and glide down each hill. Lose lots of weight with your spify green car.
Green technology was here years ago. Still works the same . Crappy concept == crappy results. THE DOLT !!!!!
The Volt was obsolete the minute it was introduced. There's absolutely no reason it should be called clean or green since they mostly run on power produced by natural gas, coal, and nuclear power. I'd really like to see how much charging the car would add to the electric bills of people who are dumb enough to buy it too.
That drives me nuts: our power company pesters us about the light bulbs we can buy, and accuses us ( in public service ads) of wasting power as we cook, wash our clothes and come in out of the darkness. But when the politically correct, fanciful world of electric cars care is mentioned, they say "No problem! We have lots of power to accommodate them!" Make up your bloody minds, and think of your customers for once.
"That drives me nuts: our power company pesters us about the light bulbs we can buy, and accuses us ( in public service ads) of wasting power as we cook, wash our clothes and come in out of the darkness."
My power company recently started sending out a monthly "Home Energy Report"...or, as I like to call it...Nasty Grams.
It breaks down the last 2 months of "Efficient Neighbors" (yay!) "All Neighbors" (yay!) and...."YOU" in big bold letters.
Then it goes on to blather about those 100 fantabulous neighbors who have a similar sized house and use natural gas heat and what a swell job THEY are doing in saving energy, but I used 27% MORE (big bold letters).
What the Nasty Gram doesn't reveal is: Is the home occupied during the day? How high are the ceilings? Do you have bare floors? What is the R-value of the insulation? Which direction does the house face? Is it in shade or full sun? And so on...
Dolts.
Don't forget -- all is forgiven if you buy a heat pump -- although where I live, that means that your house gets heated with the electric toaster element during the times you need heat the most.
Don't I know that! The way the winters have been the past 3 years, even here in Florida, heat pumps have been running on emergency heat (heat coils). At least we have the Obama promiseof "energy costs will necessarily skyrocket" to look forward to! Everyone is pinning their hopes for the future on electricity, but the infrastructure to support everything being run on electric isn't in existance! Anyone that lives in California can tell you about the rolling blackouts the past few years. That was with only a few thousand electric cars on the road. Can you imagine the disaster it would be if electric cars were the only thing on the road?
Oh, they'll expect their employer to provide charging stations, free of charge.
Never once ever in my mind ever, did I think to suggest to RHG how to word a comment, EVER. So I must ask, these charging stations furnished by these employers, they have no charge?
Yes, they are free of charge. I mean, there's no charge. I mean, it if you need to be charged,.........um,..........never mind. And I'm not even going to get into whether you can use your charge card there.
I wonder just how dangerous this "thing" (remember the VW thing?) is in an accident? Brings first responders into a whole new area of exploding batteries and toxic smoke...I mean burn a lithium battery and see what happens, first the BOOM, then you need to be upwind or your going to have a fancy funeral. I guess Obama knows autos about as well as he knows the economy...Which if we let Obungles stay the economy will do the same thing as a lithium battery....Perhaps Obungles should be forced to drive one as the presidential Limo...
Having had some experience with Lithium batteries in Remote Control Aircraft, I'm surprised I never thought about this aspect of these cars. Now, if I ever do see one on the freeway, I'm getting my 1-ton diesel truck as far from it as I can. These things are poisonous bombs, waiting to go off.
There's another reason the Volt technology is obsolete. I told people this years ago: batteries are going away. Once they discovered how to make capacitors out of carbon nanotubes, the whole concept of storing power in chemical batteries was a dead technology. We're still a few years away from capacitors large enough to power a car, but they're already replacing batteries in high-end cellphones and other small electronic devices. Capacitors don't wear out, can be charged instantly, and can release their stored electricity instantly. And oh yeah, they weigh almost nothing. With capacitors, an electric car might actually make sense.
I certainly hope they manage to figure a way to multiplex the capacitors, because since they discharge instantly, you would need a bank of them to be alternately charging and discharging in order to produce a constant voltage to run a motor. True that they weigh nothing and are also much more compact than a battery. BTW, they do wear out, I have had to change many dead start capacitors when I was an A/C tech.
M.I.T. ftw!!
"Once they discovered how to make capacitors out of carbon nanotubes, the whole concept of storing power in chemical batteries was a dead technology."
OMG, I said EXACTLY the same thing!
Kidding.
Haven't a clue what it means, but it sounds brilliant and I wish I had said it first.
Hey, if you're trying to lure me into making a pontificating ass of myself... well, it'll probably work. In fact:
A chemical battery stores energy by utilizing chemical reactions. To get the energy back out you have to wait for the chemical reactions to reverse themselves. It's heavy and cumbersome and slow. That's what all batteries do, from your car battery to your flashlight battery.
A capacitor stores electrical energy directly, no chemical reactions needed, therefore it can release it immediately, because no conversion is needed. Engineers have various ways of creating capacitors, for when they need lots of stored electricty all at once. A few years ago, somebody discovered that you can create long skinny carbon nanotubes and store electricty in them and use them as capacitors. They were tiny, but the concept was almost ulimited, so it's just a matter of time before they learn how to make the tubes big enough and engineer the methods for storing the electricity and accessing it. At that point, I suspect we will all start driving electric cars.
In other words, if the government had just stayed out of the way, this would have happened naturally. Now, idiotice cars like the Volt are going to give electric cars a bad name.
Maybe if we take some of those nana tubes and stick em in a tater? How many miles per tater do you think we'd get? Lame humor. Beer buzz. Not my fault.
The Volt's spontaneous combustion feature is not a big selling point, either.
"The Volt’s spontaneous combustion feature is not a big selling point, either."
Kinda brings back fond memories of the Pinto, doesn't it?
Hey, I owned a Pinto for a while in the early 70's. You had to let someone hit you in the ass really, really hard before it'd blow up, so yeah, it had it's problems, but I don't recall one just blowing up because it could!
We rate thumbs down for this. Must be a chevy.
"Kinda brings back fond memories of the Pinto, doesn’t it?"
Ah, yes, the warm fuzzies!
Speaking of flaming autos, years ago I saw a documentary(?) on the early '60's Mustangs and the defective gas tank design. They showed four dummies in the car and then it gets rear-ended and holy crap! The gasoline (or liquid to imitate gas) comes out of nowhere from the head/neck area in the back seat and like a tidal wave, it covers them. Un-freakin' real!
And to think I used to ride around in one of those Mustangs as a kid....yikes.
Mustangs in the 60s you say? Wow! I was 10 when my parents got the first '65 'stang of the 7 that my brothers and I owned over the years. Never heard anything about them being that dangerous due to the fuel tank. I did get smashed in the rear (intentionally!) in one of the 65s. Now though, thinking about how the tank was positioned and mounted I don't doubt there may well have been a major problem.
The car with the "Hit here for conflagration" button on the rear was the Pinto. Like - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcNeorjXMrE
excerpted from http://motherjones.com/transition/inter10.php?dest=http://motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness
"A woman, whom for legal reasons we will call Sandra Gillespie, pulled onto a Minneapolis highway in her new Ford Pinto. Riding with her was a young boy, whom we'll call Robbie Carlton. As she entered a merge lane, Sandra Gillespie's car stalled. Another car rear-ended hers at an impact speed of 28 miles per hour. The Pinto's gas tank ruptured. Vapors from it mixed quickly with the air in the passenger compartment. A spark ignited the mixture and the car exploded in a ball of fire. Sandra died in agony a few hours later in an emergency hospital. Her passenger, 13-year-old Robbie Carlton, is still alive; he has just come home from another futile operation aimed at grafting a new ear and nose from skin on the few unscarred portions of his badly burned body. (This accident is real; the details are from police reports.)
Why did Sandra Gillespie's Ford Pinto catch fire so easily, seven years after Ford's Arjay Miller made his apparently sincere pronouncements—the same seven years that brought more safety improvements to cars than any other period in automotive history? An extensive investigation by Mother Jones over the past six months has found these answers:
Fighting strong competition from Volkswagen for the lucrative small-car market, the Ford Motor Company rushed the Pinto into production in much less than the usual time.
Ford engineers discovered in pre-production crash tests that rear-end collisions would rupture the Pinto's fuel system extremely easily.
Because assembly-line machinery was already tooled when engineers found this defect, top Ford officials decided to manufacture the car anyway—exploding gas tank and all—even though Ford owned the patent on a much safer gas tank.
For more than eight years afterwards, Ford successfully lobbied, with extraordinary vigor and some blatant lies, against a key government safety standard that would have forced the company to change the Pinto's fire-prone gas tank.
By conservative estimates Pinto crashes have caused 500 burn deaths to people who would not have been seriously injured if the car had not burst into flames. The figure could be as high as 900. Burning Pintos have become such an embarrassment to Ford that its advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson, dropped a line from the end of a radio spot that read "Pinto leaves you with that warm feeling."
Ford knows the Pinto is a firetrap, yet it has paid out millions to settle damage suits out of court, and it is prepared to spend millions more lobbying against safety standards. With a half million cars rolling off the assembly lines each year, Pinto is the biggest-selling subcompact in America, and the company's operating profit on the car is fantastic. Finally, in 1977, new Pinto models have incorporated a few minor alterations necessary to meet that federal standard Ford managed to hold off for eight years. Why did the company delay so long in making these minimal, inexpensive improvements?"
I'd never heard anything about the Mustang problem until now! One brother still has a 65 fastback. The others all got junked except one 67 that I sold. Junked. 25 to 50 bucks each. In 1980 we lacked the foresight to imagine the values these cars would attain, even with looming disaster in the design.
It was on a show like 60 Minutes or something like that...I can't remember exactly. It was sometime around the late 1980's that I saw the program, because at the time, my 16 year old next door neighbor was begging her dad to get her an early model Mustang.
If I remember correctly, I think the issue was the placement of the tank and if it had a full tank of gas upon a high speed impact. Maybe they changed it after a year and only affected a smaller number of Mustangs, but it was definitely the early years of the Mustangs.
But oh, you'd freak if you saw that gas gushing over the dummies in the back.
"The Volt’s spontaneous combustion feature is not a big selling point, either."
Yeah, but what I wanna know is, does it have the same Sudden Acceleration Package that the Toyota's have?
But of course, Toyota's problem was the person behind the wheel, just like Audi 25 years ago. http://www.caranddriver.com/features/11q2/it_s_all_your_fault_the_dot_renders_its_verdict_on_toyota_s_unintended-acceleration_scare-feature
I heard (and read) bits about the the drivers being at fault, but the one incident that still bugs me is the 20 year CHP veteran that was driving the Lexus when it accelerated at high speeds for miles (I think) and went airborne and killed the 4 people in it. Never heard what happened in that instance, but I believe that the foot pedal/car mat was at issue.
I had an Audi 25 years ago and never had a problem, although I had a Jeep in the late 80's that several times accelerated like you would not believe. After a couple of scary incidents, I figured out what was causing it....the cruise control button was on the end of the turn signal lever and the few times it did happen, was when I must have very lightly brushed my finger against the button (that was meant to be pressed in to activate the CC). But it accelerated faster than I could ever stomp on the pedal....quite scary.
Spontaneous combustion? Are we totally sure it's not simply a case of the car glowing because it's so much like Obama?
If that were the case it would run on hot air.
The richest person in the history of the planet will be the person who figures out how to power a car on human waste.
All kidding aside, I remember Beck talking about a hydrogen car he drove for a week. Back in the day when he had a sponsership deal with GM(before he canceled it). Here is a look from his CNN days in a prototype...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oATE4PTcWEk
...while it is a 10 min clip, it's worth a look. It also makes you wonder why this is'nt being pushed instead of sh!t like the Volt or the Leaf?
Because there's nowhere to fillup on f*cking hydrogen?
Because engery must be spent to seperate H2 from water or extract it from the atmosphere? Because everyone would be driving around on a pressurized tank of combustible gas?
Liquid fuels are here to stay for a while folks. Even if one ignores the electrical energy storge issues there is still a chineese monopoly on the neodymium needed for the motors and the prices have gone exponential
http://www.metal-pages.com/metalprices/neodymium/
We're all gonna be hurtin' because of our own gov'ts policies towards oil.
Because it's a real bitch driving your Chevy Hindenburg around. H2 doesn't like to stay in containers. It likes to blow up real good.
Yes, every car maker has had a go at hydrogen power, but it takes more energy than it makes so far.
Does in spontaneously combust too, OMG, how hilarious is that?
Gosh you would never know that Obama has the fewest private sector experienced people in his regime (10%) than any other presiden..er king. He has lots of scholar...er teachers in his regime.
Those that can, do.
Those that can't, teach.
Those that teach then try to do and fail miserably, are top level advisers in the most incompetent presidents regime.....then they go back to failing at teaching.
Those who cant teach, administrate.
"Those who can't teach, administrate."
Don't forget legislate and dominate!
Hey! That was my line!
I like the new Nissan Leaf commercials. They ask, "what if everything ran on gas?" They do not say in the commercials, how electricity is produced.
Unicorn burps?
"They do not say in the commercials, how electricity is produced.
Unicorn burps?"
No, popcorn farts!
EXACTLY! I remember a moment in 2008, I was in Chicago in June, it's hotter then hell out, about 92* & humid, & I'm standing in Allstate Arena for a concert. This was before the show, & I was looking at the statge, & everything that goes into that. All of the energy that is needed to power what goes into the production, & air conditioning the arena. I just thought to myself, "Thank God for coal fire power plants & nuke plants." Then that got me to think what it takes for everyone there to get there, both the band with their crew & the fans. We all got there by driving, flying, & in some cases, both. Then I thought about the roads, tires & the materials that went into the cars & planes, in that case, BIG OIL. Since I drove in from suburban St.Paul, MN to Chicago, all of that included me.
That night was great, but it was made possible by BIG ENERGY, & God bless them. Most people don't get or think about the fact that when you turn on a light switch, or plug something in, & there is power, why it works & how it gets there. Which brings me to these electric cars...WE DON'T HAVE THE GRID CAPACITY to handle everybody going to these street legal golf carts. Also, because the people who are pimping these turds also oppose the building of new nuke plants & they are more then 100% against coal, so talk of the Volt & the Leaf are meaningless as far as I'm concerned. Considering the sales numbers, I'm not alone.
Recent studies show that due to the complexity of lithium mining, producing, recycling, discarding toxic waste of the unrecyclable parts of the batteries, and producing the power needed to recharge the batteries; the electric car produces a larger carbon footprint and more CO2 over it's useful life span than a traditional gas powered car.
Additionally, it does nothing for energy independence because the US produces almost no lithium needed for the batteries. But guess who does? Right, China.
That means electric cars are almost totally dependent on sources of lithium mined by foreign countries.
Like Ethanol, electric cars do nothing for the environment, nothing to reduce CO2, and nothing for energy independence. But both are more expensive.
Ever wonder why everything goes to c**p, becomes more expensive, is less productive, and ultimately fails when the government injects itself into the free market?
Everything you wrote is correct but the Volt was conceived by Bob Lutz, GM's pre b/k "Product Tsar". The Volt was well into development when GM finally went b/k in 2009. This car is an example of GM's inability to build what people want to drive and government's intrusion (tax credits to manipulate behavior) into the market to support what it likes at any particular time (green tech).
...for any job you want done poorly, there's a tsar for it. What's the Obama administration czar count at these days, anyway?