Electric cars will continue to be failures, companies have been trying to build them for over a century with disastrous results. Batteries are unreliable, unpredictable and on a large scale dangerous. Chevy Volt (yes lets talk about a more reasonable priced car) has yet to even give an official price to what a battery replacement will cost after warranty runs out, best case 3,000 worst case 9,000 (if you bought one today case and cell modules). So as of now we have a 49,000 dollar car that runs (in perfect conditions 50 miles on a 8 hour charge) and after the generator kicks in you get (35 mpg city/40 mpg highway). You can find a ton of cars from 12k to 25k that get that kind of mileage and you don't have to jack with cost of premium only fuel or plugging shit it in the rain, snow or worry about it blowing up in a flood. The volt is the top selling plug in electric car in the US and it still takes a loss for every unit sold. We haven't even brushed the subject this is a soccer mom vehicle if you're not a desk jockey and actually need to use a vehicle for hauling, towing or basic blue collar scenarios this car is a bad fucking joke without a punch line.
By definition, GM considers the 16-kilowtt-hour Volt/Ampera battery to be at the end of its usable life cycle when it has around 70-percent charge-holding capacity. When exactly that threshold is reached could vary widely depending on climate, and how the vehicle is used – but what it also means is the battery is not useless after its “usable life.”
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Newer Volt owners have reported range varying from around 25 miles in cold weather to just over 50 miles with gentle driving in perfect weather – batteries function best and "like" the same moderate weather humans do, and the Volt's battery thermal management helps keep it closer to its ideal zone.[/h]
As one potential scenario, if someone normally gets, say, 38 miles electric range on an average day, and the battery became 75-percent worn out, the car might get only 28.5 miles electric range compared to when brand new. So no doubt, owners will see usable electric range drop over the years.
