Why does the Chevy Volt only travel 40 miles on a full charge, while as early as 1999, GM had the EV-1, which could travel up to 140 miles between charges?

Possibly, but I think it depends on how you look at it. The technology exists to have an electric vehicle that will go for 140 Miles or more on a single charge, but would it be practical? Eventually it will, but there has to be a transition in technology and prices.

I frankly don’t see another sustainable way of Technology Development and Distribution. The Volt has a new take on Hybrid drive systems that can offer an affordable way for consumers to use an electric vehicle, which will improve the technology and provide more funding and interest from the companies. The quality and performance will increase while the cost and prices will decrease over time.

I’m sure you already know that the Volt can go much farther than 40 miles and that the gasoline engine can run at a constant RPM allowing for much more efficient fuel consumption

Yes, it is. We should all know by now that if it doesn’t make a huge profit, it doesn’t need to exist. There isn’t enough money to be made in electric cars so we’re probably never going to see a decent one until we’ve totally depleted our fossil fuels.

I thought I saw something regarding the volt about 240mpg or per charge. Can anyone clarify that or explain. Cause I was excited to hear it could travel that far.

@willbrawn The number you are thinking about is 230 Miles Per Gallon (of Gas/Petrol). The Chevy Volt is driven by its Electric Engine which is primarily charged by plugging it in. It can travel 40 miles on a full charge. When the charge gets low, the Gasoline engine turns on and charges the batteries for the Electric Engine thus allowing it to have a much greater range.

One benefit of this setup is the Gasoline Engine can run a set Revolutions Per Minute (RPM) that the engine is most efficient at. I’m sure you’ve noticed the difference when driving really fast or accelerating fast you use more gas than if you are going a constant speed.

So the 230 MPG is debatable whether it is an accurate figure since the Volt is different than other Hybrids. If all you drive is 40 miles per day or less and charge the Volt every night you will use no gasoline.

We can go to or back to purely electric cars. Getting over 100 miles to a charge. At some where equating to 88 cents a gallon.
But, we go with hybrids because it keeps the manufacturing of motors, transmissions, spark plugs and such still in the loop.
Let’s not forget oil and gas.

The EV-1 was killed because too many people would be out of work and would be loosing money. Our echonomy is not ready for such an echonomic shift.
I cant understand why they did not see that while the EV cars were still in concept phase. I would guess they were blinded by ignorance. They felt people would just not go for a vehicle that did not get the mileage that a petroleum car would get. And there by end any discussion of going in an electric direction.
Turned out everyone like it, so they had no choice, not only pull them but destroy the evidence. They would not even let the people that leased them buy them.

Hydrogen is also a fools folly. It will cost more to make fuel, and the infrastructure needed to support it is so out there, and when completed would just add more to the cost of fuel.
Including the cost of the cars. A hydrogen powered car is very expensive to build.

Electric cars are the way to go. They will actually pay for themselves over the life of the car.

@ChazMaz
When petrol powered cars were introduced, petrol stations were not exactly plenty either.
In all cases, distribuution infrastructure has to be built, be it Hydrogen or electrical.
The problem with electric cars right now is that they take ages to recharge. What if you run out of energy in the middle of the way from you home to your holiday place? You NEED filling stations for electric vehicles too, and I am not talking about the standard 250 volt sockets that are already present. You will not be alone at the filling stations, there will be many others wanting to charge their cars too, meaning every filling station would have to get a high voltage connection, and a hotel to let you sleep while your car recharges.
The other method is changing the set of batteries, but that too would require special automated machinery to do it and it also would need the high voltage connection to charge the battery sets that are not in use.

And where do you think the electric enery would come from? It too would have to be produced by current energy sources (which you know are being depleted with every second). Having millions of electric cars all sucking on the grid would inevitably let the prices for electric energy skyrocket.

On the other end, Hydrogen is not more difficult to produce than petrol or diesel.
To gain Petrol or Diesel, you have to expensively search for new deposits of oil, then you have to build oil rigs to drill for it, then you have to transport the oil thousands of kilometres to each consuming country in huge expensive supertankers, then you have to expensively refine the oil into what you want to have. Is that easy or cheap? No, it certainly isn’t.

To get Hydrogen you build a collection facility in the sea, preferrably powered by wind, solar energy, or hydroelectrically (or by fusion when it becomes available) and extract the hydrogen with electrolysis. Then you can ship the hydrogen directly to the filling stations where the consumers can directly fill the hydrogen into their cars just as fast as with today’s petrol powered cars and don’t have to wait a night for recharge. It is actually a lot easier than making petrol or diesel and less expensive once the infrastructure has been developed.
For me, hydrogen power is the future, because for the consumer its use is identical to today’s petrol.

Watch the documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car. You can probably find it on YouTube. Some parts are a tad boring, but stick it out because your question is pretty much the whole theme behind making the movie.

Here’s a link to the web site if you don’t want to watch the whole movie: http://www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar/electric.html