Today I drove the future.

Today I attended a Volvo freedom event at Rudding Park in Harrogate and drove the new(ish) V60 hybrid.
Wow! Want one.

bargain at £45k

Oh…you had to spoil it by mentioning the price!
Just been googling how much I can sell my childrens kidneys for.

More than I would ever pay for a car (new), but the technology is definately a step forwards from pure diesel/petrol engine.

Drove the new V40 too and was underwhelemed.

Is that the 0-60 in 6 seconds one?
That’s impressive.

You feel disconnected when driving one which seems the way with car design now.

Yes 0-60 in 5.8 seconds in power mode apparently.
I drive a lot and drive many different cars. This was without doubt the best driving car I have driven (have not driven many sports cars). The hybrid characteristics are invisible and rhe braking is just the same as a normal car.
Best bit was the suspension, firm, but supple. Almost like it was adaptive.

Sold on the concept. Just the not small issue of price.

Just mentioned this to the wife and all she asked was “What colour was it?” 🙄

Not sure about the outside, but the passenger seat was brown by the time I brought it back. Hybrid cars should not be this much fun. A real Jeckyl and Hyde car.

the big lexus 4x4schoolrunmumhybrid is like that, amazing things hybrids

I saw a V60 and thought great, perfect car, then I saw the price – its the same money as a Porsche Cayman S. apprecaite it’s a very different comparison but it puts it into perspective. Note alternatively you can have the “base” Cayman plus £8k for a van/estate car.

the same money as a Porsche Cayman S.

But then you’d have a Porsche Cayman… 🙁

Environmental impact of all those batteries isn’t great….

I just took the V60 off my short-list as a replacement for my 320D.

The V60 is a lovely place to be and, ergonomically, as good as any car I’ve driven. The big let down is the boot space. Just not big enough.

Environmental impact of all those batteries isn’t great….

It would be nice if they included the CO2 from the power station needed to provide the electricity to charge the thing when they publish 48 grammes of CO2 per km. Their claims are at best grossly misleading and IMO porky pies.

I think in future car batteries will be part of a smart grid. Storing up wind and solar energy when parked and then selling it back to the grid at the advert break for corronation street, then charging up again overnight.
All controlled from a smartphone so you can tell the car your travel plans to ensure it always has enough charge for your itinery.

My brother just bought an ex demo Chevvy volt as his latest toy

CHB: http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059980248 BMW already trailing it.

at the advert break for corronation street

The future is bleak. 😉

Until we have a smart grid these things are an eco-nightmare. More CO2 to make them than a conventional car, more CO2 to run them than a conventional car in almost every country in Europe except France in the Summer, more CO2 to recycle them than a conventional car. Still more carcinogens than any petrol/petrol hybrid car. Taking the energy consumed over a typical eight-year lifespan they aren’t good and beaten cars you’d never think of being even slightly ecological.

If it’s a hybrid it doesn’t use the grid to charge does it?

It uses the grid to charge it to achieve the published 48 gm CO2/km. They also claim 50km as a “zero emissions” vehicle when charged form the mains.

Now if we assume that car is charged in France or Germany in Winter when marginal electricity is being produced in brown coal power stations and then transmitted over long distances the Volvo will be producing more CO2 per km than almost anything on the road.

Until alternative energy dominates the market and marginal electricity is produced by pump storage hydro the least environmentally unfriendly/least health unfriendly cars are those with efficient petrol engines such as Renault’s 1.2l 115 TCE which produce around 100gm of CO2 per km from petrol.

Now if we assume that car is charged in France or Germany in Winter

That’s one hell of an extension cord.

In the UK you can assume that the car will be charged with electricity generated from gas or coal. That means the same or more CO2 per kw at the point of production as the car engine. Add in electricity transmission losses, charge/discharge losses and electric motor efficiency, and you’d be better off starting the engine.

the same or more CO2 per kw at the point of production as the car engine

based on what? the fact that it’s also produced from burning fossil fuels?

Renault’s 1.2l 115 TCE which produce around 100gm of CO2 per km from petrol.

Your comparison is not valid. You have forgotten to factor in the C02 and energy required to actually get the fuel into the car. All that mining, drilling, extraction, refinement and transportation.

Don’t forget to add the CO2 needed to post the adjusted CO2 values on the Internet

All that mining, drilling, extraction, refinement and transportation.

Fuel for the power station also requires all of those though for gas stations the transport is clearly lower than for car fuels. Coal mining and transport is energy intensive.

We’ve already done the debate about the efficiency of power stations compared with the internal combustion engines in cars on STW. The conclusion was that power stations are in a range from 30-50% efficient and that internal combustion engines are in the same range. The most efficient being gas fired power stations at 50% and turbo diesels also at 50%.

You must include the losses incurred by the national grid on efficiency. Also 50% is far to high for a power stations %. When will you all learn, Clive Sinclair had it right years ago. 🙂

There are lots of studies online about the CO2 equivalent of electric cars. The last one I saw suggested a pure electric car in the UK would produce effectively something like 60-70g/km I think. Not bad, but not out of the question for a n internal combustion car in the future.

One problem is that the official govt tests are completely useless for any car you plug in. That Volvo is probably pretty efficient in normal use because of the energy recovery, but the extra plug in capacity is really useful in certain situations. Iirc you can choose to save your full battery charge for later, which means that you could drive normally and efficiently until you get to a rush hour city, where you could do the whole city section on electric only power thus greatly improving efficiency and also local air quality.

Anyway.. I also like driving hybrids. Feels odd at first but after a while you go back to a normal car and marvel at all those stupid gear changes going on…

Oh yeah and a 1.2 petrol clio will be absolutely nowhere near the govt figures either. I struggled to get 45mpg from my hired one, and I was trying, and I am good at economy driving.

I’m talking about the latest 1.2l turbo TCE Renault engine Molgrips, Google it. A claimed 25% improvement in economy compared with the old engine in the Megane. You don’t get the economy the manufacturer claims, I usually do, it’s down to driving style and the same applies to electrics and hybrids. British journalists flattened the Fluence batteries in half the distance the French journalists did.

The electric cars that have an equivalence of 60-70g/km are tiny things like the Twingo that manage 100gm/km with not particularly efficient engines. I have nothing against electric cars which don’t have an internal combustion engine to lug around, I’m not keen on big, heavy hybrids that claim to be more ecological than they really are.

Today I drove the future.

they said that about this too 😉

Remarkably, given its pace, the Clio also proved to be the most frugal model on our test. It recorded 41.8mpg, which left all of its rivals in the shade. This is down to the torquey nature of the engine, as we didn’t need to work it as hard to keep pace with the other cars.

Read more: http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-reviews/40195/renault-clio-12-tce-dynamique#ixzz2TlPwE8Ax

and how much CO2 are 6.5 billion human beings pumping out?

Not much compared with what all their toys are pumping out.

You don’t get the economy the manufacturer claims, I usually do, it’s down to driving style and the same applies to electrics and hybrids.

Haha.. I can’t believe what an insufferable smar-arse you always are Edukator. For your information, I can achieve the govt test figures in my Prius, and beat them by miles in my Passat.

The reason I didn’t get good mpg from my hired Clio (which was not the verison you are talking about in any case, I mis-understood) was that I was driving around Dublin on their motorway ring-road. The car was so slow it had to be driven quite hard to get up to 60mph to merge onto the motorway.

So you are capable of getting good economy but drove the hire Clio “hard” (were you paying for the fuel yourself?) and then complained the car was responsible rather than your “hard” driving. 45mpg in Dublin and on the M50 from the old Clio seems reasonable to me – Renault claim 6.6l/km for the combined cycle.

As for my Internet persona, it works for me on this forum.

So you are capable of getting good economy but drove the hire Clio “hard”

I didn’t have much choice. Merging on motorways requires a certain speed be attained. I don’t know what spec the car was but it was labelled Eco 2 or some such and had a 3cyl engine. Now I don’t mind slow cars, but it was ridiculous.

45mpg doens’t seem reasonable to me from a small very slow car, when both my cars are much bigger and faster, and get much better economy.

Fwiw I don’t think these hybrid things are the future, they’re just a half arsed stopgap that just shove the dirtyness further down the line from the end user, the future is hydrogen or full circle back to the horse and cart when things are fubar..