Are eco cars about image as well as efficiency?

My comment above focuses on only one of the criticisms (poor battery life) of eco-cars. Obviously there are others.

Running an engine for short periods like you have mentioned could well result in premature failure. Do check the manual and I think you will find advice to let the engine to run at normal working temperature on a fairly regular basis.

I have read the manual.
The Volt and Ampera have a pretty sophisticated engine management system. The 0.7 miles was a completely automated maintenance cycle: when I started the car it told me that it wanted to run a maintenance cycle and gave me the option to accept it or delay it for up to 24 hours. The actual running of the engine was then outside my control (other than by turning off the car). That cycle happens about once every 6 weeks if there hasn’t been enough other engine use. There is also a longer maintenance cycle that runs when the petrol is over a year old but keeps going until it has burned most of it or you put in some fresh.

The 0.1 miles was just bad luck, I really was hoping to get home before the battery ran out, but as an occasional thing shouldn’t matter.

Even under normal driving once the the Volt’s engine kicks in then except at high speeds it runs for a minute or two and then turns off again to run on battery for a bit.

There is no way that running for a couple of minutes is going to allow an engine to reach the correct operating temperature, so water and combustion products will condense and contaminate the oil.

A regional service manager once told me to ignore the advice in the handbook and use common sense when I queried the long service intervals recommended for my car.

There is bound to be a forum for owners of these cars.

It takes 15 – 20 miles to bring a petrol/diesel car up to full operational temperature (depending on the weather and driving conditions).

I don’t think you quite understand just how different the Volt and Ampera are from traditional cars. I don’t decide when to run the maintenance cycle; the car does (though I can delay it if inconvenient). I don’t decide how long to run the engine for; the car does. It says the cycle can take up to 10 minutes, but in this particular case it decided that a shorter cycle was sufficient. It may well take 15 minutes for a conventional car to fully warm up, especially if I’m in stop/start traffic, but in the Volt the speed of the engine is unrelated to the road speed; once again it is the car that decides how fast to run the engine.

With the UK model I could actually force the engine to run if I wanted, but until last month the only way to run the engine on the US Volts was to run out of battery. Trying to second guess the engine management really isn’t a viable option.

When it comes down to it, I have much more faith in GM (who I assume won’t want warranty claims) to have worked out the appropriate service intervals than a service manager who may have a vested interest in doing as much servicing as possible. The Volt calculates oil life based on how much the engine is used, but the service schedule requires it to be changed every two years anyway. Brake pads obviously need changing when worn, but the expected life is 100,000 miles (and the regenerative braking also makes it a lot easier to clean the front wheels).

It is your car, so you do what you want. I am merely mentioning what is fairly common knowledge about engines, and Terry has supported the fact that they take a while to warm up fully, which will remove condensation and volatile combustion products.

My recently purchased car came with a verbal warning and an insert for the instruction manual to make me aware that the automatic cleaning of the diesel particulate filter might need me to change how I used the car periodically to avoid an expensive bill. The manufacturer had realised that their computer-controlled automatic system was not up to the job.

Incidentally, the service manager I mentioned knew that I did all my own maintenance, so he was not trying to generate business. His job was to authorise goodwill payments for major out of warranty breakdowns. I was given a new engine because of a manufacturing defect in the engine of a three year old car.

4 rather than 5 seats is definitely going to rule out the Volt/Ampera for many people. On the other hand my previous car was an MX5…

I think you may have misunderstood the warranties: the Volt and Ampera both come with an 8 year battery warranty separate from the warranty on the rest of the car. The Ampera warranty is better than the Volt, and probably explains part of the price difference, but the ‘lifetime’ part only applies to the first owner.

I fold my driver mirror before putting the car in the garage: it does fit without doing that, but so tight it’s scary. Leaving it outside isn’t an option either: at least in my case it has to be in the garage for the charge cable to reach the socket.

SatNav on my Volt comes courtesy of Tomtom and cost £120. There’s even a handy power socket on top of the Volt’s dashboard so the wires don’t get in the way. I totally agree the £1,745 is ridiculous: on the forums at evchat.co.uk there’s a lot of dissatisfaction from people who did pay the extra only to find it can only take postcode sectors, not full postcodes. The SatNav option does come with some other features: Bose sound system, 30GB hard disc, and lines on the reversing camera screen to show where you’re going (my cheaper model just gets yellow and red icons).

The other difference is that if I’d ordered the satnav version I’d have got it two months before the non-satnav version: I think GM prioritised the model with the higher profit margin.

Yes, the lack of dealers is an issue and I do hope it improves. There are more Ampera dealers, but still not nearly enough. I believe that Vauxhall promise to do collect and return for Ampera servicing wherever you are in the country. I don’t think Chevrolet have been explicit about that but Cambridge Chevrolet where I bought mine have said they’ll collect mine for service (I’m 95 miles from them).

A couple of VERY IMPORTANT CORRECTIONS regarding WARRANTY.
The Ampera and Volt in fact both have an 8 year battery warranty like the Prius.
The Volt does in fact have the Vauxhall original-owner “lifetime” 100,000 miles warranty – the Chevrolet has 3 years / 60,000 miles in comparison (and Prius 5 years).

Regarding the limited BATTERY RANGE ON THE PRIUS I should have said real life range 11 to 13 miles (probably a lot less in the winter).

Using the windscreen demister knocks a mile off the battery range on the Prius (ie. driving along with an indicator saying 7.7 miles left, windscreen mists up so switch on demister and range quickly reduces to an indicated 6.6 miles).

Hi wavechange, I can only speak about my experiences with the Volt, and of course we haven’t had any really cold weather yet, but GM do realise that turning on the heating will significantly reduce range (for that charge only which is what I think you meant, obviously it doesn’t impact the overall battery life). The car supports an option to ‘pre-start’ it from the remote control: that means, provided I remember to push the buttons 10 or 15 minutes before I leave for work in the morning it will have warmed up the cabin to an acceptable temperature using mains electricity (or in summer cooled it down) and also (possibly more importantly) warmed up the battery temperature management system; keeping the batteries at their optimal temperature is an important part of their strategy to maximise life.

That only helps when the car is plugged in of course (or rather I can prestart when it isn’t plugged in but that would just drain the batteries), so not much use when I’m leaving work.

The other thing is they recommend using the heated seats where possible rather than the main heater: I’m not so sure about that myself, it’s a bit like sitting on a hotplate.

Of course, if the worst comes to the worst and the battery drains from running the heating then all that happens is that I’ll start using petrol, so no big deal.

I don’t know much about the Prius plug-in, but I believe that when you put the heating on it simply starts the petrol engine (or sometimes does, or mostly does, not sure).

As to honesty of the consumption figures: there is so much variation depending on your pattern or use that it’s unlikely anyone will get the published figures. For the Volt the official figure is 235.4 mpg (1.2 litres per 100km), but my actual figure in practice is massively better (a fraction of a litre per 100km) because my pattern of use is more electric/less petrol than the official tests assume. The electric range likewise varies: I was getting 46-48 miles estimated range in the mornings (which seemed pretty accurate in practice) but in the last week as I’ve had the heating on that has dropped to 43-44 miles. All that seems in accordance with the claimed ’25-50 miles’ and it will be interesting to see just how low it drops mid winter.

duncanb

You have one of these cars and I haven’t. It’s good to know that the manufacturers have given some thought to practical matters, even if the website does not focus on such things. Warming up the car when plugged in makes sense and it’s common practice to plug in engine heaters in conventional cars in countries that suffer from cold winters.

I am not opposed to electric cars, apart from the fact that none of the current offerings are affordable for many people. I believe that manufacturers should focus on cheap, low specification city cars with a top speed of 40 or 50 mpg. That would be of real environmental benefit and put much less demand on the batteries.

Best of luck with the fuel economy figures over winter. It will be interesting to know how you and others get on.

In terms of producing a ranking, isn’t it more useful to have a standard based on a basic vehicle with one occupant driving on an even road and not using heaters, air conditioning or headlights? The unladen weight would be another useful statistic. After that the variations are too difficult to standardise for comparative purposes and are largely under the user’s control. The choice of route could make a significant difference to power consumption so a road test should follow the same route in both directions in order to average the gradients. Battery efficiency is almost certain to differ between different manufacturers as well and that would show up in a well-conducted miles-per-recharge assessment.