It used to be a pretty simple question. Someone would ask and you'd give them a number. You'd dig you hands in your pockets, rock back on your heels and say "Oh, I figure I get about 20 in the city and 30 or so on the highway."
Miles per Gallon. It was a unit. We all knew what it was because we all knew what a mile was and we all knew what a gallon was. So what do you call it when your fuel comes from a plug rather than a pump?
If you look at your electric bill, you'll see somewhere in the fine print that you are charged by the killowatt-hour (kWh) That is to say, every hour that you spend using a thousand watts of electricity. This could be a 4 hour period during which you ran a 250 watt TV set or the half hour you spent blasting a 2,000 watt sound system. Every appliance in your home makes that disc outside spin a little faster and the number of times it goes around is called a kWh or "klour", as I affectionately call it.
A klour is not equal to a gallon of gas, but it is a handy unit we can wrap our heads around. The Volt has a gas tank that holds about 10 gallons of gas and a battery that holds 10 klours of electricity. Now, instead of comparing apples to oranges, we can at least compare oranges to grapefruit.
The sticker in the window says that a Volt will get 37 miles to the gallon, but it doesn't go that distance in the traditional fashion. It actually runs a gas powered generator, much like one you would run behind your house during a black out. The electricty it generates charges the battery that runs the electric motor that propels the car.
The sticker also says that the estimated range of the Volt on a full charge is 38 miles. So another way of thinking of it is that one gallon of gas will generate 10 klours of electricity. But where you get those 10 klours is going to make all the difference.
The cost of electricity varies from state to state and in some cases hour by hour. The national average is around 12 cents per klour (In Michigan, the juice runs about 11 cents per klour). So when I get those 10 klours from the power company it costs less than a buck and a quarter while getting them from the gas station is over $4.
To take it another step further, we could also say that if I took the $4 I used to spend on gasoline and got my fuel from DTE (the power company), I could drive almost 4 times as far, effectively getting 138 MPG. And that's using GM's estimated range on electricity. When I take my time going down 8 Mile rd. doing 45MPH, I've traveled over 50 miles on that initial charge which would be equal to getting over 180 MPG on gasoline.
And that would be the cost if you got your electricity from a utility that generated it from comodity like coal, gas or oil. What if you got that energy from a renewable resource like wind or solar? Imagine a wind mill in every back yard and solar panels on the roof of every garage. Battery banks inside could hold the energy from them and recharge your car when you got home each night. Picture parking lots covered with solar panels to charge your car while you were working or shopping. Your vehicle would always be charged wherever you went and never need the more expensive gasoline for fuel.
Ah, never mind. That's just crazy talk.
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