EVcast #67: "My EV Can Beat Up Your Vaporware!"

What?  No blog entries yet?  Well, let me get the ball rolling!

First- good job going solo Ryan!

Next- the Michigan Messenger article with the disgruntled Volt worker?  This is one of the side-effects of Internet-based News gathering- stories from large, well-established papers look and arrive via RSS feeds with the same weight as articles from smaller, less-known sources.  This is both the great strength of the Internet and its great weakness.  What is needed is a variation of ‘Caveat Emptor,’ that will translate to “let the READER beware:-0”

The article seemed a bit inaccurate, inconsistent, incomplete- and exaggerated!  The author’s ‘Auto experts’ amounted to two, and one of those was an anonymous GM worker speaking opinion, not fact.  I found it odd that the bulk of the article centered on this one, anonymous speaker.  And the University expert?  He does not seem to have done not much homework on the subject- he can’t tell what kind of progress is being made?  Besides the GM-Volt site by Lyle Dennis, there are also Youtube videos of test drives of the Volt system via Mules.  GM, if anything, has been significantly more open about the Volt development than any car in the past!  And the comment on ‘no battery technology breakthrough?’  This is the whole point of the Volt- there has been enough battery development, well-documented on Li-Ion and its variations, to more than describe its newer capabilities- and the Volt’s onboard ICE generator is what will make up the Li-Ion short-comings.

And the unsubstantiated 48-hour charge time?  Where in the world did the author come up with that!  The article certainly does not cite a source, showing more shoddy reporting (maybe they confused it with the PV roof of the SunMotor's car;-).

I am glad the Internet gives equal time to many inputs- it allows someone with minimal resources to get their product or their message out- but when such poor work is disguised as news, and too much credence is lent to it, I begin to worry!  Of course, on the flip side, there are excellent sites like the EVCast;-)

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There is nothing in the article that is really damaging or untruthful to the Volt.    If anything it just points out GMs ideology, why they would take the EV-1 off the road, make owners pay for scratches, and then crush them when many people would buy them as-is.  Basically it is a watch out for GM and not a watch out for the Volt.

These are the articles that make the internet so powerful, you don't have to go through the dozen men that own all the newspapers.

IMHO, unsubscribe from your newspaper.

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Bill,
   I think you are being a little harsh on GM.
   I agree that making people pay for scratches and then crushing the cars seems totally mean spirted.  But I don't think beaucratic organizations plan these things out, they just happen.
   Went you create a lease agreement, paying for scratches is normal and reasonable.  Every company does that and GM did as well.
   Crushing cars that have a questionable future service record is also normal in the car industry.  Other companies do this as well in connection with their insurance companies.  Those EV1's were a liability to GM and someone made the call to crush them.  In all probability, it was a bad call, but it is is not as strange as it might sound.

   As for employees with a negative opinion of a product under development... welcome to the real world.  As a design engineer for 20 years, I can tell you that it is very normal to have people on the team that have serious doubts about the product under development.  They may be right, they may be wrong, but they are always there.  I would not be too worried about it. The engineering process usually prevents terrible products from making it too far down the road.

Later
John C. Briggs

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