First Volt owner has driven 12K miles in 2 years, burned 26 gallons of gas

It does because instead of directly burning said fossil fuel, you are indirectly burning it. This abstraction if you will allows change or improvement to the source of the electricity in a way that you cannot do with gasoline.

Actually not too long ago Elon Musk mentionned this point, the fact that ultimately electricity does come from fossil fuels in many cases. And of course this is not good.

However, he made some good points: * Fossile fuel electricity generators (utilities power plants) are often times more efficient than burning the same amount in your car

* Also, all the electric infrastructure needed to distribute electricity is much 'greener' than the system needed to distribute fossile fuels to your local gas station.

So even though the power is from coal, it's production/transport/consumption makes it more efficient than simply using your 'gasoline' powered car.

As much as these are interesting points, I have not broken down the real impacts Elon mentionned, but I thought they made a lot of sense.

Power-grid energy is tremendously cleaner than a car's combustion engine.

Maybe it doesn't matter in the ecology department but it very much makes a difference in the geopolitics one.

See http://www.teslamotors.com/goelectric#electricity

(Thanks to hatberet further down)

Shows the electricity production by state; nowhere does using an electric produce more CO2 than a gas car.

It does matter. Even if we're generating energy by burning fossil fuels, the turbines at the plant are so much more efficient than the car engines.

>if the energy to power that car is being generated by dirtier or more costly ways... it doesn't really matter.

Maybe theoretically, but if you do the math then even 100% coal isn't dirty enough – the Tesla Model S gets 24 MPGe in that case, compared to just 17 MPG for the BMW M5. Energy cost compares favorably as well – charging in Hawaii (37¢ per kWh!) would only cost 14¢/mi, compared to 20¢/mi for the M5 (@$3.50).

The question has never been, "which is the cheapest/cleanest to operate?" Batteries have been the clear winner for some time. The challenge that faces EVs is, "does the high initial price of batteries negate the lifetime savings?" We're not there yet for family cars, but for full-size luxury sedans it seems to have arrived.

Not necessarily true. One could put a coal power plant in the middle of a desert where it presumably doesn't affect the environment & population as much as it would have otherwise.

If we relied more on electricity than fossil fuels, you know renewable energy would continue to grow even more than it already is. This is not something to just write off for no reason.

Also, not everyone lives in America. 100% of electricity in my country comes from renewable resources.

Also compared to a 2012 Honda Civic which has 39 miles/gallon.

The volt had 459 miles/gallon.

Assuming 2460 kwh/ton of coal, and 36kwh per 100 miles of driving this driver burned 1.7561 tons of coal.

Assuming he drove a gas powered Honda civic instead he would have burned 375 gallons of gasoline (12000 / 32 combined MPG).

One ton of coal releases 2.86 tons of C02. One gallon of gasoline releases 19.64 pounds of C02.

Driving the electric vechile released 5.022 tons of C02.

Driving the gas civic would have released 3.68 tons of C02.

All numbers shamelessly cribbed from whatever google result seemed nice.

While I wouldn't exactly phrase it like that, it is an important question to ask: Where did he do most of his charging and how does the electric utility in that area produce their electricity?

Shh, we have to ignore all environmental externalities other than CO2 emissions caused by burning petroleum products. Otherwise we would have to face the fact that our lifestyles are directly at odds with the health of the planet we live on.

Industrial civilization is engaged in a war against entropy which it is destined to lose.

I've recently switched to having all of my energy come from renewable resources, it isn't all that difficult to do at this point.

Well, if you care about the green house impact of his use of his car, it's pretty good.

Driving a regular car 12k miles will net you about 4.6 tons of CO2.

His 36 gallons of gas, plus his electricity consumption if we assume that he uses about 36 kwh/100 miles and that he lives in New Jersey (as per http://media.gm.com/media/intl/en/chevrolet/news.detail.html...), which does not just burn coal for electricity production, we can expect him to have emanated ~1/3 ton of CO2 with his Chevy Volt over that period.

So a good 15 times better.

According to the DOT, a male 55-64 averages 15,859 miles per year. The average for the US, all ages, both sexes, is 13,476. I can't find a distribution for those numbers to say how much of an outlier you are.

Anyway, if you had read the article you would see that he also drive his wife's car for long distances and as a retired airline pilot he gets free air travel. He was picked not for being representative but because he was the first.

A Volt is not a Prius.

It'll automatically try to burn gas when it gets too old.

http://ask.cars.com/2011/07/will-the-volts-gasoline-stay-fre...

You could use a fuel stabilizer, like STA-BIL[1]. They are commonly used when storing gasoline for long periods.

[1] http://www.goldeagle.com/brands/stabil/

Eh, people worry about this but in my experience with storing vehicles is that it's really not that much of a problem. I put a motorcycle away for 1 year with zero prep. Next year, fired it up, ran the gas through (it seemed a little sluggish but nothing that can't be attributed to placebo), and filled it up fresh. And that's on a carburetor motorcycle with transistorized ignition, which is going to be much more finicky than a modern fuel-injected car with computer-controlled ignition.