General Motors says the Chevrolet Volt, its first foray into electric vehicles, will use the energy equivalent of 2.5 litres/100km of petrol in combined city and highway driving while powered by its batteries.
It says the Volt, which can travel 60km on battery power before a petrol engine kicks in to generate electricity, will use about 6.4 litres/100km running on the generator alone, and 3.9 in a driving cycle that combines battery and generator power. The Volt's total range on a tank of petrol is 600km, it says, including the distance travelled on battery power.
The figures, all estimates from the US Environmental Protection Agency, will appear on the Volt's window sticker when the car goes on sale sometime in December. It's the EPA's best effort to come up with a realistic measure of energy consumption for electric cars just as GM and Nissan introduce them to the masses.
In 2009 GM said the Volt would achieve the equivalent of one litre/100km in city driving under draft EPA guidelines for calculating battery-car energy consumption but GM's vehicle line executive for Volt, Doug Parks, said on Wednesday that calculation was based on an early set of assumptions that tried to equate the energy used to recharge the car with fossil fuel consumption.
Under the final calculation, the EPA determined the energy consumption for the Volt when running on battery power by coming up with a energy consumption equivalent for the amount of electricity it takes to recharge the car, based on a formula that equates 8.9 kilowatt-hours to the use of one litre of petrol.
It takes 12.9 kilowatt-hours of electricity to recharge the car at 220 volts.
Parks said actual fuel consumption on the volt would vary dramatically depending on how much a driver used the petrol generator. The further the car was driven, the closer it would get to 6.4 litres/100km, he said, but if it was driven less than 55-65km a day and recharged at night, it should use essentially no petrol at all.
GM has been building Volts at a factory in Hamtramck, near Detroit, Michigan, but hasn't been able to put them on sale without the EPA energy-consumption sticker. Parks would not say how many had been produced, but said he expected sales to start in December.
The Volt will do battle with Nissan's battery-powered Leaf for the hearts of environmentally conscious drivers. Nissan said earlier in the week that the EPA estimate for its car would be 2.2 litres/100km in city driving and 2.5 on the highway.
The EPA estimates the Leaf's range at 117km on a fully charged battery but Nissan claims it will travel 160km on a full charge, based on tests used by California regulators. - Sapa-AP