Incog-nit, you ask a question that needs some clarification, "What's so great about this GM hybrid car?"

The answer is there is nothing great about a "GM" hybrid car, other than the fact that it would be an American made car made by Americans, supplied by American machine shops, fabricators, chemical companies, steel mills, electronics manufactures, etc. with the salaries of all those millions of well paid workers going to power the US economy... but I digress. Its the "series hybrid" that is the big deal.

A series hybrid like the one we are talking about is essentially an electric plug-in hybrid that only uses energy from the electrical grid, you recharge it at night. Its electric only range is set by the battery capacity. Currently the range of GM's batteries in its proposed Volt gives about 40 miles of range. If you need to travel 41 miles or 400 miles one day, no problem, there is small backup generator that is driven by a small, efficient IC gasoline powered engine that acts as a back-up power supply. Very roughly about 70% of all trips made in cars by Americans is less than 40 miles. Therefore 70% of time a series hybrid car will use no gasoline.... nada, zip. Think of the IC gas engine and generator set as an emergency backup so you never get left on the road or you can still travel cross county. A Prius is a "parallel hybrid". It uses an electrical drive and an IC motor to drive the wheels. It cannot charge its batteries from the grid. It is strictly powered by gasoline and therefore (even though it is well engineered) from an efficiency and gasoline use point of view it is vastly inferior to a series hybrid car.

Battery technology only needs to improve a little bit and the 70% figure will go up considerably. It is quite possible that with a series hybrid many people will only have the gasoline engine start-up a few times a year. You could easily use only 20 gallons (or none depending on driving habits and how far you live from your work) a year of gasoline unless you needed to travel to Florida to visit grandma or something like that.

Its hard to compare the "mileage" of an electric car to a gasoline one because it doesn't burn gas, but based on cost, it has been estimated that it will cost you the same to operate a series hybrid as filling up a Honda civic with 60 cent a gallon gasoline (not my estimate, but it is in the right ballpark).

The other thing about the series hybrid is that it is ready now. The Chevy Volt is viable and should be ready for production about 2011. The only thing that worries me is GM's senior management's infinite capacity to screw things up (see buying Hummer, denying that there is an energy crisis, claiming the Prius is pure folly by Toyota, or anything their idiot CEO says).

You mention that the Volt is slated to sell at $40K. You are right, and that's a lot. I think I might have implied in my earlier post that all this would happen automatically, it won't. Its going to take government involvement to provide incentives to buy the first generation of these cars. After volume ramps up and everyone is making them you will see the price fall and level off at a lower price than the old IC engine only cars... why? because electrics are easier and cheaper to build. Currently the IC engine only cars are cheaper because they are the ones that we are tooled up for and are currently mass producing, electrics will eventually be less expensive to buy, own and operate.

The government will also need to regulate gas prices. When demand starts to drop for gas, so will gas prices. In order to prevent the vicious downward cycle of "re-addiction" to gas long enough to scrap a better car, then see gas prices shoot up even higher than before.

The series hybrid is not enough by itself, but with wind, solar, coal, nuclear, natural gas powering big vehicles etc we absolutely can achieve energy independence. It is not the science that we need to develop, its the balls to actually do it.