YES!!!!!!!!!
In-wheel motors are the way to go. I really hope they can bring this to market. I would much rather buy a car from Volvo than GM.
Congrats to PML Flightlink for getting a great new customer.

As being swedish I feel a bit proud and sense a hope for the future.
However I have a few questions:
-Can this car be driven or is it just a model?
-Which battery supplier, specs?
-Do they think they have a market for this vehicle in 2015? I mean that is 8 years from now...
That is too late, if Chevy can have production for customers in 2010 they gotta speed it up. By 2015 every carmaker will have specs like this.

Emissions may be even lower if most of the electricity in intended markets comes from CO2-friendly sources such as biogas, hydropower and nuclear power.

Uh, solar? Wind?

I really like the news that are coming out at the moment. First the plug-in Fisker car and now plug-in Volvo.

Clett this battery issue was my first thought as well. You are probably right and if you are that would mean it would be a while before we see a plug-in Volvo at the auto dealer. You simply can’t roll out 100 of thousands of cars with an instable battery. Tesla can use the cobalt lithium battery because they will only sell a few thousands cars so the likelihood of accidents is smaller. Fisker uses E-one moli LiMn2O4 and that has been used successfully in power tools for a year longer than A123 batteries. The rough environment of power tools is a good indication that they may also stand the tough environment for car use. To my knowledge no one has used cobalt batteries for power tools.

What surprises me is the high fuel consumption for a series hybrid driving on fuel alone, especially with wheel motors. 5.5 liters/100 km (43 mpg) is too high. Il should be less than 3 liters/100 km (over 75 mpg). The Peugeot 308 Hybrid HDi is not a plug-in, neither a series hybrid and its consumption is 3.4 liters/100 km (68 mpg)!?

Viva la plug in hybrid. Great work. Now get it to market in half the estimated time. Please.

So, that 150km is really 100km on grid electricity plus 50km on 2.8L of gasoline. So how does that stack up against a regular drivetrain?

1. First off, it is IMHO *completely* misleading of Volvo to claim fuel economy of 1.9L/100km. Grid electricity needs to be generated, which in the *real* world produces CO2 emissions and/or radioactive waste. It also costs money.

True, the end-user price per km driven is much lower on gird electricity than it is on gasoline or diesel. For reference:

One liter of gasoline contains approx. 8.75 kWh of chemical energy, of which perhaps ~20% (1.75 kWh) actually makes it to the wheels. Note that this is an average over the whole duty cycle, because LDV engines are rarely operated anywhere near their lowest SFC. In e.g. Germany, gasoline costs ~EUR 1.25/liter, so that works out to ~0.70 EUR/kWh where the rubber meets the road.

For diesel, the numbers are: ~9.9 kWh/liter, of which ~25% (2.48 kWh) makes it to the wheels thanks to the inherently better thermodynamics. Fuel cost is ~EUR 1.10/liter, ergo ~0.44 EUR/kWh at the tread.

By contrast, 4000kWh of conventionally generated electricity will cost ~EUR 750 in e.g. Berlin. For each kWh, only ~60% would make it to the wheels of an EV, so that works out to ~0.31 EUR/kWh at the tread.

The numbers will no doubt vary substantially, depending on how you actually drive, where you live and, how your contract with your utility is stuctured. In particular, operating PHEV will mean you purchase a lot more electricity and most of it at night. This should give you some leverage to bring down the unit price. Still, Germany has some of the highest prices for both fuel and electricity in the world, so you should redo the calculation using data relevant to your personal situation.

Of course, if people were to switch to PHEVs/EVs in droves to take advantage of the differential, Europe's finance ministers would surely cook up a new tax to plug the resulting revenue hole in their budgets.

2. Second, that 100km range on a single grid charge is suspiciously high, even if based on the notoriously optimistic NEDC. Either the battery pack is gargantuan and therefore unaffordable or, the claim is based on a full battery pack that is deep discharged. Needless to say, that would compromise battery life expectancy. If you actually operated your battery pack that way on a regular basis, you could face a very expensive repair bill after just a few years on the road. This will overcompensate for any additional savings you've made because of the high range on grid electrcity per recharge event.

Ergo, if you want to minimize total cost of ownership, i.e. maximize total distance driven on grid electricity on the *original* battery pack, you have to mollycoddle it by maintaining its SOC between say, 30% and 80% of nominal capacity at all times. In other words, you may be down to just 50km on grid electricity alone before you have to hook the vehicle back up.

Now, if you could really drive the first 50km each day on grid electricity alone in a car you could actually afford, that would still be enough to do the school run, commute to work and run some errands in many metropolitan areas. Gasoline becomes a luxury for the weekend and vacation trips.

Note, however, that a regular European household circuit is rated at 220V and 16amps and can deliver ~3.5kWh per hour. When running on gasoline, this Volvo uses 2.8L for 50km. Based on the above assumptions, that translates to ~5kWh at the tread. Using grid electricity, you would need to ingest ~8.3kWh at the outlet for the same driving performance. Therefore, a charge time of ~2.5h will be required. I reckon Volvo's claim of a 1h recharge for 50km on grid electricity would require an industrial three-phase drop rated at 400V @ ~22 amps.

Unlike Toyota, Volvo sensibly put the socket in the front bumper so car parks could position their outlets at the end of each stall. In northern Scandinavia, regular 220V outlets are sometimes provided by car park operators to power on-board block heaters in winter. These keep engines and interiors warm and diesel fuel liquid enough to start the vehicle back up again. It is possible that these facilities already provide a dedicated circuit per outlet, not becuase of the power draw but to prevent a malfunction in any given vehicle from affecting any other.

Rafael,

How do you get 60% electrical efficiency? Li-ion charges at >99% efficiency. Discharges at about 93%. The motor on average should be in the low 90s. So that's about 85% efficiency.

Maybe I should have used 43 mpg for the Volvo. That would be 2.80 / 43 mpg = 6.5 cents per mile.

So do you want to buy oil and pollute the air or do you want to by wind power and keep the air clean and save money?

Electtrica is now available in UK for between 9000-12000 pounds.

http://www.futurevehicles.co.uk/elintro.aspx

Oh wait never mind its series hybrid, for the picture it looked like there was a transmission for the ICE.

Looks like the Plug-in vehicle market is starting to get more interesting...Cool!

Interesting link Dave. However, their web site looks like a scam. They give no contact information other than an e-mail and it is impossible to read anything about the firm. If it is not a scam they should do something ASAP about these issues.