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Holy mpg, Batman!

Word on the street is that General Motors’ new Chevy Volt will get a sweet 230 mpg tooling around your local urban area, possibly forever changing the relationship between Americans and their cars.

And while the EPA isn’t quite ready to verify those claims just yet, it does make the Obama administration’s decision to give the automaker a second chance look a lot smarter.

You see, the Volt employs a whole new kind of technology, totally different from that of a typical hybrid. While the gasoline engine in a standard hybrid, say a Prius, kicks in for acceleration and when you’re going more than, say, 40 mph, the gas engine in the Volt exists solely to recharge the batteries that power the electric motor, allowing you to travel much farther than the 40 miles or so a single charge from a nickel hydride or lithium ion battery would normally get you, while still producing zero emissions from your totally electric vehicle—unless, of course, you count the emissions produced by the coal-fired power plants that, unfortunately, still generate at least half of our country’s electricity.

Totally new concept, and a genius stroke from GM’s engineers.

The one mistake the administration may have made in reorganizing the company, though, might have been not putting these guys in charge of the whole thing.

August 14, 2009 at 11:30 am

--Tammy Alonso

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