Chevy has announced that for city driving, the Volt will get gas mileage of 230 miles per gallon.
That’s nonsense. Pure, utter rubbish.
The trick is that they’re playing with the definition of mileage. In city driving, the Volt is primary an electric car: it’s powered by its batteries which you must recharge every night, not by gasoline. On average, you can drive it for about 40 miles on a full charge before it needs to start using any gasoline.
The “mileage” figure, as it’s presented, is really meaningless - because it’s being presented for a situation in which the gasoline engine almost never runs at all.
They compute it by basically saying: “If I fully charge the car battery every night, how far will I drive the car in typical city commuting conditions before it’s consumed a gallon of gas”.
What if you drive your volt around the city all day? Your mileage will drop to around 50 miles per gallon once you’ve driven more than 40 miles. If you drive your car 100 miles in a day, you’ll consume a bit over a gallon of gas. That’s very impressive. But it’s absolutely not what you’d expect after being told that it gets 230 miles per gallon.
Farhad Manjoo's page on the Internet
The Chevy Volt Gets 230 mpg? Only if you use bad math.
