Tag Archives: CA

Chevy Bolt. Tesla Killer?

The Chevrolet 2017 Bolt EV

2017 Chevrolet Bolt

From what I’ve seen of the 2017 Chevrolet Bolt it is an impressive car.

A price tag of less than $30k  after tax breaks, 200 plus miles of range. Fold flat seats, lot’s of safety features and a rear view mirror that doubles as a rear view monitor. What’s not to like?

 

But will it kill the elusive not yet produced Tesla 3 as many predict? I doubt it. Contrary to popular belief, range isn’t everything.

What Tesla has that Chevrolet, and every other EV manufacturer doesn’t, are the following:

  • Supercharger Network.
  • Direct Sales
  • Their only cars are EV’s

Why is that important?

You can have a 200 mile range but if you don’t have anyplace to charge the car at a reasonable cost, and in a reasonable amount of time, the only thing that 200 mile range does is let you get farther from home before you have to stop for the night to recharge.

Most franchise dealers either don’t want to or don’t know how to sell an all electric vehicle. If you don’t walk into a car dealer asking to drive or buy an EV they won’t even tell you they have one. Try walking into a dealer some day and tell them you’re looking for something that 99% of the time all you do is drive to work and back and usually less than 70 miles a day and see what they tell you to buy.

What it will do, make Tesla up their game on standard equipment. The Tesla 3 won’t be able to sell less car than Chevrolet. But neither will any other EV manufacturer.

But, that brings me to another question. How many and in what States will Chevrolet actually make the car available? Do they really want to sell this car? Is it just another compliance car?

While California residents will probably buy the majority of Bolts, it will put Nissan on notice. The Nissan Leaf is getting old. Even with the new 110 mile battery it’s still like a 4 year old iPhone for the price of a new one.

The Ford Focus EV is still the best buy in my book and with an improved range of 100 plus miles and DC Charging will make it as useful as the Bolt and if it keeps it’s $30k price tag with all the standard equipment it has now it’s a far better deal than any other EV out there.

My favorite pricy EV’s are still the VW Golf SEL, Kia Soul EV and Mercedes B Class. They are going to have to make the interior of the Bolt really nice to compete in that market. Even VW had to unload a bunch of SL Models for $99 a month for 3 years last December. Stripped down models don’t sell well anymore.  The Leaf S is like buying a flip phone at a smartphone price.

I see some real deals in the near future on other EV’s when the Bolt comes out. If like most people, 80 miles of range works for you, like it does for me.  A similar featured compliance car like the Focus at $20k after Tax Rebate will be the better deal.

The biggest problem GM will have is that EV buyers usually know what they need and know how to do the math. And how many EV buyers “want” a Chevrolet? Lot’s of them want a Tesla. I know I do. They just haven’t made one that makes economic sense for the average person.

What it might do is help them sell more Volts. A car that is similarly priced, has suitable EV range for 99% of the time and can drive cross country once every few years to visit grandma.

 

The 2016 V.W. e-Golf, my opinion.

This weekend my wife wanted to go to Los Angeles for the weekend. While we did the Star Tour and some of the tourist type things, one of the reasons for me to go was to drive a couple of EV’s.

Living in Arizona and not a C.A.R.B. State I can’t just go down to the local dealer and test drive any EV. Even the EV’s like the Focus and Benz really don’t ship many cars to non CARB States.

So here is my take on the e-Golf. It’s a really nice car. It drives like a Golf. Nice tight handling, nice ride and quite. It has a very tight turning radius. There is no torque steer like the Focus or Rav4 EV.

You can find the main differences on the V.W. website but here are the main ones.

SE. Cloth seats, no nav and slow charging (3.6kW) even on level 2 and no DC charging.

None of these things would stop me from buying the $7k cheaper vehicle if the only places I needed to charge was work or home. If you don’t need to add range quickly and the 70-80 miles of range is all you need then go of it.

With one exception, and for me it’s a big exception. It doesn’t have cruise control.  If you want to get the best range out of car then a cruise control is the best way to get it.

A few other things it missing besides the luxury upgrades. There are no steering wheel controls at all. No phone or radio controls at all.

I does interface with Apple Car Play and Google ver nicely. So there really is no need for the onboard navigation or any of the other proprietary radio garbage of most automakers.

If my choice was a Nissan Leaf S or the e-Golf SE I think I would choose the e-Golf. If I could buy a Leaf SV or SL vs the e-Golf SEL, I would buy the e-Golf SEL.

I still think the Ford Focus EV is still the best value out there for what you get but it does have its drawbacks.

If you are in the market for an EV and live in a State or near a State where the e-Golf is sold it’s definitely worth checking one out. I think you will like it.

It has plenty of room for a 6 footer in the front seats. A couple of kids in the back or an adult or two for a short ride to get lunch.

If you also want a peppy little car to zip around in that fits in some tight spaces and can cram a bunch of cargo in the back with the seats down this car might be for you.

What a difference 3 years can make.

One of the great things about the web is it’s really easy to find media reports from years gone by. That is unless it was you doing something in the past you want to forget about or worse want to deny so you can get elected to public office.

In this case I’m talking about a couple of episodes of AutolineNetwork (Click here to watch it) on youtube. This one from 2012 is trying to explain why the Chevy Volt is such a big disappointment. One guy is from the Wall Street Journal, another from a Conservative Think Tank and another who was an engineer on the EV-1 project now turned auto journalist.

Two of the guys are totally dissing the Volt. The other two have driven it and say how much they love it. Their only real issue they have with it is the price.

The WSJ guy and the Think Tank Guy have nothing good to say because all they see are political reasons to not like it. They don’t believe that the government has any business giving rebates and subsidies to help it along. They don’t believe it would exist without CAFE rules or CARB regulations. And while I might agree with the latter the former is reasons are just plain selective amnesia.

How many things do we have today because the Government took an interest in something. The internet didn’t just pop up in the mind of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. The Interstate Highway System wasn’t the brain child of Ford or GM. The Cellular Network and even the TV Broadcasting Networks were only built because the Government gave certain Companies assurances of exclusive license to build those networks.

We have seat belts and more crashworthy cars because of Government intervention or that hated word regulation. Something that all of the guest somehow like. Maybe it’s not popular anymore to say your against saving lives. Yet they still rail against CAFE standards and CARB rules. It’s not popular to tell people they should drive cars that get good gas milage. Why?

There is another episode with Csaba Csere, the former Editor-in-Chief of Car & Driver magazine and Jim Hall of 2953 Analytics. In this episode they once again talk about how great the Volt is and the Tesla. When you boil it down their only objection is price. Yet by listening to them you would think GM and Tesla had adopted a Marxist Ideology doomed to fail only to fall to the one true economy. The really high horsepower ICE engine that gets 20MPG instead of 12MPG.

Now fast forward to just a couple of months ago. On this episode they have on one of the main engineers of the Gen 2 Chevy Volt. They don’t have a single bad thing to say about the car. You would think GM hit a home run. It has yet to sell but now the car guys are coming around. I have no doubts if they invite back the WSJ guy his only dislike will be the $7500 tax credit.

I have said it once before. The EV is going to follow the path of the cellphone. And oddly enough the company that invented the EV-1 only to scrap it back when we as a Country also scrapped solar panels (bad move) will be the company that actually made the car that starts mass adoption of Electric powered vehicles. Not Nissan or Tesla. Especially not Ford.

While Nissan has sold the most EV’s of any car maker it is still a niche player. You really have to accept some major limitations to drive a Leaf. Think Apple Watch Sport.

Tesla proved that if you spend enough money and make something nice enough you can find enough buyers to spark interest. Think Apple Watch Edition.

The Gen 2 Volt on the other hand can get 50 miles on a charge. That covers 90% of most suburban Americans. The car gan go 400 miles on a tank of regular gas. That cover the other 10%. The only obstacle is the car is a Chevy. One body style. One company with a past of making bad decisions. The Volt is not one of them.

Ford may get caught sleeping on this one. While they have several Hybrids and a couple of plugins they don’t really seem to be taking the market that seriously.

Even if you don’t buy an EV or a Range Extended Hybrid like the Volt there is something you can do to reduce our dependence on oil.

It’s something else that has been around since the 1970’s but the auto press and automakers  has taken this long to finally accept the reality and benefits. Synthetic Motor Oil. Go back over the years and you will find hundreds or articles on why synthetic oil was a waste or even detrimental to your cars health. Today with automakers having to get better gas milage and people owning cars longer and expecting more reliability from their cars those same automakers are putting synthetics in their higher priced cars at the factory.

They have finally been dragged into accepting reality. When you use synthetic motor oil your car gets better fuel economy, runs cooler, last longer and is actually cheaper since you can run it for up to a year in most cars.

Amsoil Signature Series Motor oil can be run for 25,000 miles or one year in many cars. To learn more about extended drain intervals and Amsoil click here.

Speak not of what you know not.

Originally posted by a naysayer when debating the merits of a new Corvette to a new Tesla S.

“It’s great until you run out of charge on your way to grandma’s house carrying five people and lots of stuff.

Teslas are great second cars to run about town. But then again I reckon the Corvette would be a second car too.”

A reply from a verified Tesla owner.

 

Speak not of what you know not.

I have a plain vanilla Model S 85 kWh hour battery version, that I got in December 2014. It’s my only car; the daily driver. It has 95% of the cargo space of my wife’s Highlander SUV. It does 0-60 in about 5.0 seconds, the Tesla that is.

This is THE BEST car I’ve ever owned, and that includes a BMW 535, and a Saab 900T, both of which were very fun to drive.

I drive the Tesla (license plate [redacted]) regularly between Tucson and Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (110 miles one way), Tucson and our place in Flagstaff (240 miles one way, Flagstaff and Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (153 miles one way). Range and charging is never an issue, with the ability to charge easily at home, and then use Tesla Superchargers at either Casa Grande or Cordes Junction.

For example, the drive from Tucson to Flagstaff is 240 miles, but the real issue is the net 6000 elevation gain from the Phoenix area to Flagstaff. A Model S cannot make it non-stop in that direction even driving as economically possible. But I leave Tucson with 265 miles of rated range, and then drive the 160 miles at 80 MPH (that’s faster than max range speed) to the Supercharger at Cordes Junction. I get to Cordes with about 50 rated miles left. I do a 20 minute pee-break and sandwich stop. In that 20 minutes the Supercharger adds 120 miles of rated range to bring the rated range up to 175. The distance to Flagstaff is 85, and that much range lets me go up the big hill coming out of the Verde Valley at 80, and get to the Flagstaff place with 35 or so miles left.

Coming back from Flag to Tucson, I can make it non-stop at 65 MPH, but I usually drive 80, and then stop for a 10-15 pee break at the Casa Grande Supercharger. 10-15 minutes of fast charge adds enough range to let me drive the remaining 65 miles at 80 and get home with plenty of margin.

I’ve been to San Diego and Los Angeles, and with the Supercharger network (that’s -no cost- fast charging) the drive is a no-brainer.

Now, if you’re the kind of person who has to drive 4 hours at a stretch, 10 minute pee break then another 4 hours of driving, the Model S is not for you. But I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t mind a 20 minute stop every 200-220 miles or so.

This is a totally practical car for most people with average driving needs.

I hate CNBC

Ok, it’s not just CNBC but pretty much all so called news outlets They don’t report news as much as sell you something.

I was on Yahoo.com doing some financial research on Tesla. While I’m looking at the research there is a video from CNBC with some talking heads and a so called expert from Garage Monkey  or some crazy name telling people that we will never give up our loud sounding big horsepower muscle cars. Or at least he won’t. We love the sound and the smell. Just look at how many classics are still around.

Well, yeah, there are lots of classics still around. In garages and museums. Unless you count the thousands that are rusted out and decaying in the barns and backyards of America. About the only place people still drive Classics everyday, Cuba. And I doubt that’s because they want to.

I remember the days of my youth riding in my fathers ’67 (maybe ’68) Dodge Charger. I remember what a cool car it was at the time. It was also a real piece of crap. It always had trouble starting and it didn’t have air conditioning . The sad part is I was to young to drive it. Had I drove it I surely would have never look at a classic ever.

In the late 70’s and early 80’s I got to drive classics like the Chevette, Chrysler K car, and Nova. There are more as I drove a lot of real junk back then. They sure didn’t make them any better. I can’t or don’t want to remember all those really bad cars of the day.

But like many folks in their late 40’s and feeling flush with cash after the market boom of the early 2000’s I went out and bought not just one but 2 classic cars. A 1967 Chevy Chevelle SS. Wow, what a cool car. Well not really. It would make a lot of noise and sounded really neat but it really drove like crap. It’s amazing people drove those things more than 10 miles a day even when they were new.

But being a glutton for punishment I bought a more luxurious classic car. A 1964 Chevy Impala. Also the SS version. This was a boat. I should have driven it before I bought but I got it sight unseen off eBay.

What these cars did most of the time was sit in my warehouse. I had to move them every time I got a delivery. After the market crashed in 2008 I decided they were just to much trouble to keep moving. They were so crappy that I never wanted to drive them. They were pretty to look at though. If I want to do that there are plenty of people who have them in garages all around me. My best friend has a 1964 Corvette sitting in his garage. He’s not a big fan of driving it either. He’s afraid that if he leaves it parked to get something to eat that someone might steal it or crash into it. It’s around 64k of wasted potential. While it keeps going up every year if he had taken the 22k he paid for it ten years ago and bought almost any decent stock it would be worth twice what it is now. And instead of parking his Kia Soul in the driveway he could fit it in the garage. That’s right, he’s driving a Kia Soul. At least when he doesn’t need his big Dodge Diesel for moving motorcycles everyday. He buys and sells them.

So as long as we are giving opinions, here are some of mine.

Just like people hated answering machines when they first came out or cellphones (the people who didn’t have one yet). The technology and price of the electric car gets more attractive every few years. It might take 10-20 years to get to the point where that’s what people want or can afford but there is no question that the technology is here and if automakers actually build them and sell them in every market people will buy them. As more people get them, more people will want what everybody else has. Just like the Navy Converted from Coal and Wood to Oil back in the day.

Used cars will hit the market as well. Just like some people wait for last years iPhone before they buy it there will be people buying 5-8 year old electric cars and loving them.

No buying gas. No oil changes. No filters to change. The scheduled maintenance is pretty much rotate the tires every 10,000 miles.

I have about 2000 miles on my Ford Focus Electric and there has only been one day where I was afraid to take it on the trip I had planned. If I had known I was going to be where I was for as long as I was it wouldn’t have been a problem. They had a charger there and in 2 hours I would have been good to go. I was there all night.

While todays ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) cars are really pretty good, O.K. really good they still burn gas. A product that we fight wars for. A product that we have no control over the pricing or production since most of it is imported. We use almost 80-90% more than we produce. And while people still debate if fossil fuels cause global warming there is no debate that they cause pollution. Oil spills cause catastrophic losses to wildlife and livelihoods.

Do we want to go back to the days where air pollution was so thick in many cities you couldn’t see more than a couple miles. Do we want Los Angeles or Chicago to look like Mexico City or Shanghai. Should we go back to the days where Lake Erie is dead and the rivers of Ohio burn when you light a match?

The price of gas in Phoenix is over $2.70 a gallon again. Up more than a dollar a gallon in less than 4 months. The cost of my electricity is down. At least between midnight and 5 AM. The electric company wants me to charge my car at night. They need people to use all that excess capacity that’s available at night when people are sleeping and the temps are cooler so the AC doesn’t run as much.

Another thing is there are no refineries in Phoenix using a ton of electricity to turn all that crude oil into gas. Yeah, it takes a lot of electricity to make a gallon of gas. Then it takes a lot of diesel to truck it to the gas station. Then it takes more electricity to pump it into your car.

Almost everybody in the U.S. now days has electricity already coming to their house. It doesn’t take any more modification to get it to your car than it does to hook up an RV.

The only reason I go to a gas station now is to buy a snack and use the washroom.

Boy was I wrong says the USA Today

The other day I posted about how Americans wont be fooled again, buying gas guzzling SUV’s because fuel prices are at a relative historic low, as are wages.

But instead of being proven right I read an article just days later that we are not buying hybrids or high gas milage vehicles but once again the sales of SUV’s are on the rise in the  April 22 USA Today “Earth Day or not, hybrids take a hit”.

The article states that many electric or hybrid owners are less likely to trade their current vehicles in for another hybrid but would get an SUV instead.

The article goes on to say that “For better or worse, it looks like many hybrid and EV owners are driven more by financial motives rather than a responsibility to the environment,” says edmunds.com Director of Industry Analysis.

Although the impact on the environment does have a cost though we choose not to quantify it. It’s an unaccounted for externality that makes the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) Vehicles look cheaper than they actually are.

I question who the sample size or who these vehicle owners are.  Just a look around the streets and highways of Phoenix, Arizona (where I live) you will see lots of hybrids. And many of those are older cars from the first generation Prius as well.

From the looks of things, hybrid owners don’t replace their cars that often. In the last year, as well, I have seen many new model (2014+) hybrids on the road. My mother just bought one, a 2015 Prius V. So in my opinion, any car company that forgoes hybrids and BEV’s or PHEV’s and builds lots of SUV’s is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past that allowed Japanese car makers to take much of the US market share that they retain to this day.

As long as car makers let fuel prices decide what they build instead of sound long term strategies the shortsighted idea of current fuel prices staying low forever will lead car makers off the cliff of bankruptcy over and over.

Efficient cars should lead fuel prices lower instead of low fuel prices leading to cars that consume more fuel which has historically lead to higher fuel prices.

Innovation leads to success. Henry Ford was an auto industry innovator. Maybe the last one. Why? Because many of the innovations of the auto industry in the last 50 years were forced on them by regulation. Seat Belts, MPG requirements just to name a couple biggies. For the most part the auto industry is like your grand parents. Dragged into the next century kicking and screaming if they don’t die first.

The article also states that GM has temporarily halted production of the Volt. Well, considering they announced that next year they will have the Volt 2.0 that’s going to be significantly better, who’s going to pay full price for last years technology. They might as well keep dropping the price till the last buyer wants it so cheap it makes more sense to donate them to a charity for the tax break.

People who can pay full price for an iPhone don’t go running out once the timeframe for the new iPhone is near. Which is why Steve Jobs kept the next big thing a big secret till it was ready for sale.

And while car dealers give rebates and incentives on last years model all the time cars like the Volt will be much more sensitive to new model announcements. Many of the people buying these cars want the latest and greatest tech. This will also become more common on all cars as things like blind spot monitoring, adaptive cruise control and a host of many other technologies become more prevalent in cars of all trim levels.

The USA Today article also talks about dismal sales of Plug in Toyota hybrids being down 61%. That might have something to do with the fact that it’s hard to find one on a dealers lot if you don’t live in a CARB State.

Toyota only sold their Rav4 EV in California. Yet I personally know 3 people who bought one and brought it back to Arizona. They love that SUV. Even though it’s sort of a bastardized RAV4.

Honda only sold their Fit EV in AZ for a very short time and then only leased them. And then discontinued making then shortly there after.

I’m not sure car dealers like EV’s much, especially BEV’s as they require so little maintenance. A large profit center for dealers.

When I was car shopping with my mother earlier this year their were no plug in Prius’s to be found in Arizona. How can someone buy one when dealers don’t have them to sell?

And when I went shopping for my Ford Focus Electric (FFE), you couldn’t find any of those in Arizona either. At least  The dealers sold them all 20 minutes after they hit the lot. I had to go to California to buy mine. And the economics made sense. And they still make sense as gas prices are actually 15% higher than the day I bought it. The price of gas would have to go to 70 cents a gallon to equal the price of electricity per mile. And since most of the electricity produced at night is from nuclear the amount of carbon per mile is much lower.

The tags in AZ for the equivalent Ford Focus are $500 for the first year. The cost of the tags for my Focus, $60 for 5 years. Access to the HOV lane. I would say you can’t put a price on that but you actually can. There are people who can no longer get a HOV access plate with a new hybrid car who are leasing plates from prior Prius owners for $1000 per year.

If people are buying SUV’s and trading in their hybrids it has nothing to do with the economics. It has more to do with the emotions.

Hybrids for the most part are pretty boring and very utilitarian. The Toyota Prius does make a great Taxicab though. It has a very large back seat with lots of legroom.

The fact that hybrids are so boring is why Tesla is so successful. Their cars, while quite expensive are actually fun to drive. They don’t handle like a box truck. They aren’t the bottom of the line trim levels. But the VW Golf E, The Kia Soul E and Ford Focus E are actually very nice cars as well and at the top trim levels can be had for less than 30k after the tax credit.

Had Ford not dropped the price of the FFE to 32k and the dealer not also dropped another 2k off the price I would have probably bought a Volkswagen Golf Electric. Another car maker who chose to go top of the line trim instead of bottom of the line trim. Just like the FFE. That’s what swayed me away from the Leaf. In order to have the price make sense the only Leaf would have been the S or bottom trim level.

One other thing car makers need to do, not just in their EV vehicles but all vehicles is stop selling expensive Nav packages with old useless tech. Almost everybody today has a smartphone. All they need to do is put the necessary interfaces for people to use their smartphones. At least Tesla chose to make their tech an improvement on current display tech vs using 3 or 4 year old tech in the average new car.

Like 15 or 20 years ago nobody new they wanted let alone needed a smartphone and that they would become as ubiquitous as watches were just 20-70 years ago. In 10-20 years the Electric Vehicle that primarily drives itself, will be the new iPhone. All it takes is some leadership and vision from an industry that has a dismal track record of predicting the future.

Elon Musk will be seen as the next Steve Jobs but just like Apple it took companies like Google, Samsung and LG to join in on the road to the future we now know. Maybe it’s time those companies take their huge stockpiles of cash and start building cars while the current car companies fade into the sunset and stop perpetuating the myth that bring hydrocarbons is good for the planet.

While GM got it’s bailout, like Chrysler before it, this will probably not be the last time we see a big automaker in need of a financial lifeline. It’s time they stopped being pretending to be experts. The last thing they need to do is build the next Hummer. If they can’t lead they need to follow or just get the hell out of the way.

This time if we support innovators with the bailout money instead we can transform our society into the future sooner rather than later.