Recently, GM announced a new hybrid car called the Chevy Volt. Immediately, I found my my feed reader filled with two expert opinions on this announcement:
- Cy Chan, hybrid-automobile-blogger extraordinaire, weighs in with a positive review in "A GM I would actually buy...".
- Scott Adams, Dilbert creator and master of wacky ideas, is less impressed in his take, "Concept Car".
How could such similar authorities differ so greatly on this issue? I'm baffled.
Adams makes two main points:
1) The Volt relies on a non-existent battery - I think this is less of a problem than Adams does, probably because I have more faith in battery research than he does. That GM is designing a car without waiting for the battery to be ready is, IMO, commendable and shows foresight.
2) Cost - complicated and obfuscated issue. There have been studies that argued that hybrids use more lifetime energy than large trucks with old engines, but they include research and development costs per unit in the measurement. Doing so is absurd because using that kind of metric, the best thing to do is to never do any research and keep building whatever has already been engineered. Under the assumption that investment cost is amortized over lots of units, electric vehicles win out hands-down due to their low operation costs.