I listened to Russ Roberts interview Jonathan Rauch about the Chevy Volt. GM is making a grand and highly risky attempt to come to market in 2010 with the Volt, which is supposed to be completely electric. It has a battery with a range of forty miles and if you happen to drive any more than forty miles in one day (most people don't) a gas generator kicks in to provide electricity.
The are a variety of things that could go wrong, and if they do they'll go wrong in the public eye. GM has suffered greatly from the conspiracy theories surrounding the EV1, so they've decided to bring this car from prototype to market more or less publicly rather than in secret. GM is also suffering greatly from unions and a massive amount of overhead paying off all those benefits people have rung out of them over the years, so they are hoping such a high risk venture will pay off.
So the idea of forty miles of battery life with a gas generator got me thinking. What if the thing works exactly as planned? What if I spend most of my days not driving over forty miles, plugging it in at night, etc...? What happens if the one time I actually do go over forty miles is something like three months after I filled the gas tank? Gas has a shelf life, as anyone who has ever had to deal with a lawnmower knows, so I suspect I might end up with a dead car.
I'm sure there are ways to deal with this problem, but it struck me as just the sort of thing nobody thinks about until the calls from irate grandmas stuck on the side of the road start coming in.
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