Confirmed: Hybrid and all-electric Corvettes coming soon

Keith Tanner said:

GM has publicly stated that it will stop using gasoline and diesel to power light duty vehicles by 2035 (hydrogen is still on the table but it's unlikely to ever be more than a technology demonstrator or a niche fuel for very specific applications). So unless it's like Ford's statement that they will "stop making cars (except for the Mustang, we'll totally keep making that one)" and the Corvette gets a waiver and the only ICE in the fleet, there is an all-electric Corvette coming.

Any manufacturer claiming anything out past more than a couple of years is pure conjecture.  Peering into the crystal to see 13 years out is about as accurate as any economists' forecasts out that far.  Now, they may very well have a strategy for "full electrification" out that far, but any number of things could change, in a fairly major way, between now and then.  Electric cars amounted to approximately 3% of all new vehicle sales last year.  Clearly the amount of press they are getting far outstrips their actual weight in the marketplace. 

For most peoples' use cases, a hybrid drivetrain seems to give the best balance of range, cost, emissions, and performance.  The Corvette isn't the first supercar to tread into this territory. 

In reply to Tom Suddard :

God, I love you.

volvoclearinghouse said:

Keith Tanner said:

GM has publicly stated that it will stop using gasoline and diesel to power light duty vehicles by 2035 (hydrogen is still on the table but it's unlikely to ever be more than a technology demonstrator or a niche fuel for very specific applications). So unless it's like Ford's statement that they will "stop making cars (except for the Mustang, we'll totally keep making that one)" and the Corvette gets a waiver and the only ICE in the fleet, there is an all-electric Corvette coming.

Any manufacturer claiming anything out past more than a couple of years is pure conjecture.  Peering into the crystal to see 13 years out is about as accurate as any economists' forecasts out that far.  Now, they may very well have a strategy for "full electrification" out that far, but any number of things could change, in a fairly major way, between now and then.  Electric cars amounted to approximately 3% of all new vehicle sales last year.  Clearly the amount of press they are getting far outstrips their actual weight in the marketplace. 

For most peoples' use cases, a hybrid drivetrain seems to give the best balance of range, cost, emissions, and performance.  The Corvette isn't the first supercar to tread into this territory. 

I agree that GM may change its tune, but this is also an industry where you have to make plans a decade out. There's no fast pivot here. So all we have to go on is what GM has publicly stated as a corporate goal.

BEVs aren't available in all segments of the marketplace at the moment, so while their total sales volume is quite small when you count all the light trucks out there they're still making quite an impact in the markets where they are available. Tesla sells a Model Y for every 3 F150s right now, about the same as the Tacoma.

Hybrids are either the best of all worlds or the worst. I think plug-in hybrids are a stopgap, the VCR/DVD combo of automobiles. They try to be full electric but have to carry around a complete secondary drivetrain just in case. Using a hybrid system to supplant an ICE powertrain, however, has some advantages. That's the way the Corvette and the various supercars have gone, using minimal battery capacity for maximum effect.

Keith Tanner said:

volvoclearinghouse said:

Keith Tanner said:

GM has publicly stated that it will stop using gasoline and diesel to power light duty vehicles by 2035 (hydrogen is still on the table but it's unlikely to ever be more than a technology demonstrator or a niche fuel for very specific applications). So unless it's like Ford's statement that they will "stop making cars (except for the Mustang, we'll totally keep making that one)" and the Corvette gets a waiver and the only ICE in the fleet, there is an all-electric Corvette coming.

Any manufacturer claiming anything out past more than a couple of years is pure conjecture.  Peering into the crystal to see 13 years out is about as accurate as any economists' forecasts out that far.  Now, they may very well have a strategy for "full electrification" out that far, but any number of things could change, in a fairly major way, between now and then.  Electric cars amounted to approximately 3% of all new vehicle sales last year.  Clearly the amount of press they are getting far outstrips their actual weight in the marketplace. 

For most peoples' use cases, a hybrid drivetrain seems to give the best balance of range, cost, emissions, and performance.  The Corvette isn't the first supercar to tread into this territory. 

I agree that GM may change its tune, but this is also an industry where you have to make plans a decade out. There's no fast pivot here. So all we have to go on is what GM has publicly stated as a corporate goal.

BEVs aren't available in all segments of the marketplace at the moment, so while their total sales volume is quite small when you count all the light trucks out there they're still making quite an impact in the markets where they are available. Tesla sells a Model Y for every 3 F150s right now, about the same as the Tacoma.

Hybrids are either the best of all worlds or the worst. I think plug-in hybrids are a stopgap, the VCR/DVD combo of automobiles. They try to be full electric but have to carry around a complete secondary drivetrain just in case. Using a hybrid system to supplant an ICE powertrain, however, has some advantages. That's the way the Corvette and the various supercars have gone, using minimal battery capacity for maximum effect.

From carfigures.com:

How many Model Y did Tesla sell in 2021?

Tesla sold 161,529 Model Y in 2021.

How many F-Series did Ford sell in 2021?

Ford sold 726,004 F-Series in 2021

Granted this may not break out F250/350 sales separately, but it's in the ballpark.  It will be interesting to see what the electric ford pickup sales numbers are.  From what I've seen they've sold out production already.  Likewise with they Maverick, though that's a hybrid.

Agreed that non-plug in hybrids offer the most advantages in that technology. 

For most people, the prospect of a battery-powered car is pretty enticing- lots of real advantages.  The main stumbling block is really the charging infrastructure, particularly for those who can't charge at home - like people who live in apartments with on-street or uncovered, sprawling parking lots.  Currently, there's a huge income gap between folks who own electric cars vs. everyone else, and that's likely to not get significantly better.  So this push towards electrification is going to leave much of the population under the median household income out in the cold. 

I was using a Car and Driver article with 2022 sales figures as of early April.
55k Model Y
140k F150.

Ford has doubled their production plans for the Lightning several times. The most recent plan is 150k/year with 200k reservations currently in place, and they're going for 200k Mach-Es. (source: ford.com). They're definitely having trouble keeping up with demand at the moment.

I know a number of EV owners who can't charge at home. It's a problem for short range compliance vehicles for sure, less of one for modern EVs with 200+ miles of range. One of them recently jumped in the car to get to work and found out he'd only have 3% battery when he got there. So he stopped by a charger to get a few electrons while he grabbed coffee at an attached Starbucks. By the time he'd made it back to the car with a cuppa joe, the car had gone from 15% to 40%. No problem. The charging infrastructure is more complete than you might think, because it's a lot less visible than gas stations with big signs. If you can't charge at home, you make more use of opportunity charging (I can charge my car while at the farmer's market, or when at a concert, or at the mall, or visiting Sam's Club - and that's just thinking of what's in my little rural town off the top of my head) or you ironically treat your EV more like an ICE and make a special trip to a special car feeding place every couple of hundred miles. It's a different way of dealing with a car, but it can be made to work without any real compromises. And it definitely encourages businesses to install chargers.

Another EV owner uses a 120v charger plugged into a normal household outlet, and tops up when required. If you live in an area where outdoor parking spots have block heater outlets, this is a plausible option.

There are a bunch of good EVs available at the price point of the median new car selling price in the US - which means that they're in the meat of the market. What's missing is the lowest strata, the aging fleet of used cars. That's a reflection of what the new car market looked like 5-15 years ago, and eventually there will be more and more affordable used EVs available for the population in the lower income levels. Given that they'll cost less to operate and maintain, it may actually benefit that group. Of course, there will be some models you'll want to stay away from in used form but that's the case for ICE vehicles as well.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

I live in an area with a visible number of EVs; every day I see a handful of them out on the road.  And I do notice the charging infrastructure.  Like you said, there's a few spots at various stores, restaurants, some places of business, too.  And a few gas stations near me have charging areas, too.  So, yes, this works- but again, with only a few percent of the vehicles out there being EVs.  If the EV population goes up significantly, there's going to have to be a proportional increase in those charging areas to accomodate- or there's going to be fights breaking out over who gets to use the 2 charging spots at Target.  Right now corporations seem willing to put in these charging stations as bit of good PR and customer relations.  What happens when it goes from that to a requirement?

My statement about missing the lower end of the income spectrum was not directed at the price of the vehicles themselves, but at the availability of charging.  Lower income equating to more likely to rent vs own, which means less likely to have a charging spot where the car is parked 90% of the time.  It also means less likely to work for an employer who's likely to provide a charging station.

In reply to volvoclearinghouse :

As demand increases, I'd expect to see things like paid parking lots with 2 price tiers for "charging" or "non-charging" spaces. 

The infrastructure is growing at the pace of EV growth. It's never going to be an immediate changeover - even if no more ICE vehicles were sold starting today, it takes years (decades, really) for the fleet to turn over. The good thing is the electrical grid is fairly mature, so charging stations are mostly a matter of end points. We've got time to do it, and the concern about infrastructure has been present since EVs first started selling in any real numbers but we're keeping up because we've got time. I've been paying fairly close attention over the past couple of years for some weird reason, and the growth in charging availability in my area over that time has been dramatic.

Businesses will start wanting chargers not for good PR, but to actually attract customers. If you have the choice of Target with no charger or WalMart with a charger and you need to charge, you'll go to WalMart.

Those people without the ability to charge at home can charge elsewhere, as noted. While shopping, while playing in the park, whenever the vehicle is being used for a short trip. It's certainly possible - in my sample of friends with EVs that don't charge at home (or that have very slow charging at home), they don't have access to charging at work either. But even charging at home can be done off a normal outlet (slowly). And like I said, the worst case scenario is basically exactly the same as an ICE, you go to a charging station and charge the car when it needs to be charged. It might take a bit longer than filling up with gas, but not enough to completely derail the possibility. 

I just checked the charging map for my town, and there's at least one set of chargers attached to an apartment building. Thinking about it, that's a fairly major new complex of buildings so it was planned from the start. I expect we'll see that become more common, especially as it not only makes the apartments more desirable but it's also a potential income stream for the landlord. The library has them, the state park camping has them, Popeyes has them, the skate park has them, medical offices have them, at least two grocery stores have them, there are a bunch downtown. These are all places that people go to for other reasons, so why not charge the car while you're there? I think the trick with this sort of use is to constantly sip instead of running the battery empty and then filling up all the way like you do with an ICE. It would take a change in thinking to adapt to it.

In reply to rslifkin :

I agree, there's solutions to all these problems.  I'm not taking a stance pro or con, nor am I throwing my hands in the air, saying "it can't be done!".  But there is going to have to be a lot of very big, very expensive infrastructure to support this.  For Target (just to pick on them) to install a couple of chargers in their lots, they probably already had sufficient excess electrical supply to the store to handle that.  But if they want to drop in a row of 30 chargers, that's going to require a pretty sizable service upgrade.  So, yes, to your point, free charging's going to go away, which is fine- customers should pay for the service they're getting. 

Interesting anecdote, we're looking at getting another solar system installed on our property (we have two meters, one of which has a current system) and just got a notice from the power company that our transformer was near capacity, which was going to limit the size of the system we could put in.  I suspect this will become more and more of a problem.  They did say that we could pay them to upgrade the transformer, though the cost of doing so would pretty much make it unfeasible. 

This is relevant to the discussion of charging because I'm sure at some point, the infrastructure isn't going to handle any more "plug ins", which means investments in transformers, lines, etc are going to have to be made. 

No argument with any of that. It's not really a technical problem, it's just a matter of doing it. If Target decides it's worth upgrading their service to offer 30 chargers, all that needs to be done is write a check. 

We ran into the same thing with the transformer upgrade in our area with solar. Luckily it wasn't necessary but they had to check. The cost to upgrade it was going to be about $1k, which wasn't significant given the size of our system. I'm very happy with our the math is working on our solar setup even before you take the EV and $4/gallon gasoline into account.

Gearheadotaku (Forum Supporter) said:

why aren't manufacturers and citizens pushing back against these EV mandates?

The EV mandates don't happen in a vacuum. They work with the automakers to see what is possible, and what is probable, and how to navigate a best course of action.

Car guys/gals like us will kep ICE cars as toys for decades to come. I mean look how we fall all over ourselves for ancient air-cooled Porsches. We love old, loud, greasy and arguably inferior tech because it gives us all the good feels, and that's totally okay, even if from an all out performance perspective electric is hard to beat. You'll still see ICE cars at vintage track days, car shows, club events, etc. That said, 99% of people just need a daily appliance and frankly I can't wait until those are all electric. 

I'm thinking GM is offering 3 versions of the corvette as a sales test to decide how to develop the c9.  I'm sure both the hybrid & BEV versions will be faster than the ICE version but the corvette has a following of it being a v8 car with the noises that brings with it.

Electrics are better when designed from the ground up as electrics so like the f150 lightning I think they are watching the market responce with an adapted design that's quicker & cheaper to put together.

volvoclearinghouse said:

Keith Tanner said:

GM has publicly stated that it will stop using gasoline and diesel to power light duty vehicles by 2035 (hydrogen is still on the table but it's unlikely to ever be more than a technology demonstrator or a niche fuel for very specific applications). So unless it's like Ford's statement that they will "stop making cars (except for the Mustang, we'll totally keep making that one)" and the Corvette gets a waiver and the only ICE in the fleet, there is an all-electric Corvette coming.

Any manufacturer claiming anything out past more than a couple of years is pure conjecture.  Peering into the crystal to see 13 years out is about as accurate as any economists' forecasts out that far.  Now, they may very well have a strategy for "full electrification" out that far, but any number of things could change, in a fairly major way, between now and then.  Electric cars amounted to approximately 3% of all new vehicle sales last year.  Clearly the amount of press they are getting far outstrips their actual weight in the marketplace. 

For most peoples' use cases, a hybrid drivetrain seems to give the best balance of range, cost, emissions, and performance.  The Corvette isn't the first supercar to tread into this territory. 

That's a pretty broad and simplistic assumption. OEMs most definitely make plans more than "2 years" out. It takes several years just to produce a vehicle program, it would be practically impossible to develop a vehicle without planning well ahead of this. There are a multitude of factors: regulatory standards, production tooling, plant operations, vehicle development time, etc.

Today, A 2+ model year vehicle would be a 2024 or 2025 model year prototype, and yes those vehicles exist and are testing right now.  How can one produce a product that is destined for release in several years without some amount of forecasting?

In reply to engiekev :

I had been told that a lot of the reason they are forecasting that X% will be EV by 2035 is that they are currently starting development on the vehicles that will be released in 2035, and that is simply the target they aimed their arrows at given how rapidly people are adopting EVs.

volvoclearinghouse said:

Interesting anecdote, we're looking at getting another solar system installed on our property (we have two meters, one of which has a current system) and just got a notice from the power company that our transformer was near capacity, which was going to limit the size of the system we could put in.  I suspect this will become more and more of a problem.  They did say that we could pay them to upgrade the transformer, though the cost of doing so would pretty much make it unfeasible.

How odd. If anything, you're reducing the amount of power the transformer needs to transform. If you have a 200 amp single phase service, your max power usage would be 48kW (your main breaker would probably trip if you did more than about 38kW for any length if time). Every kW of solar you add is at least a kW the utility does not have to generate and transform. 

The only way their statement makes sense to me is if you're upgrading from 200 amps to 400, and their rules about sizing service requires them to ignore solar. Or if you and everyone else on the transformer are massive power exporters. 

In reply to BAMF :

In my case, the concern was that we have a lot of solar in the neighborhood already. Pretty much every house is a producer.  On days like today when the load is low (it's not AC season yet and it's a weekend) and production is strong, we're probably pushing something like 10-12 kW into the grid and will be doing so continuously for hours. 

We also have a problem on-site. The array is on my shop, which has a service rated at 100A and has a buried cable up to the house. The installer did the math and decided the cable was okay to feed power from the 16.4 kW array back to the house if we derated the circuit to 70A. Well, it's not. The array hits about 10-12 kW, voltage increases at the shop because the cable can't take the load and micro inverters start dropping offline. Again, this is a circuit that was originally designed to meet the requirements for a 100W supply. We'll be doing some digging to upgrade that puppy. Anyhow, I can see the same thing happening with a transformer. Rating for occasional peak usage isn't the same as continuous supply. 

Just going to throw this in here because it's relevant to recent conversations: turns out Tesla has a 72 kW charger out there that's aimed at urban use. It's about 10x faster than a level 2, but less than 1/3 the speed of the newer Superchargers. Turns out it's a really good for restaurants according to my friends. The faster chargers finish too fast and then you have to go move your car or pay idle fees. The urban charger takes long enough that you can get more done :)

engiekev said:

volvoclearinghouse said:

Keith Tanner said:

GM has publicly stated that it will stop using gasoline and diesel to power light duty vehicles by 2035 (hydrogen is still on the table but it's unlikely to ever be more than a technology demonstrator or a niche fuel for very specific applications). So unless it's like Ford's statement that they will "stop making cars (except for the Mustang, we'll totally keep making that one)" and the Corvette gets a waiver and the only ICE in the fleet, there is an all-electric Corvette coming.

Any manufacturer claiming anything out past more than a couple of years is pure conjecture.  Peering into the crystal to see 13 years out is about as accurate as any economists' forecasts out that far.  Now, they may very well have a strategy for "full electrification" out that far, but any number of things could change, in a fairly major way, between now and then.  Electric cars amounted to approximately 3% of all new vehicle sales last year.  Clearly the amount of press they are getting far outstrips their actual weight in the marketplace. 

For most peoples' use cases, a hybrid drivetrain seems to give the best balance of range, cost, emissions, and performance.  The Corvette isn't the first supercar to tread into this territory. 

That's a pretty broad and simplistic assumption. OEMs most definitely make plans more than "2 years" out. It takes several years just to produce a vehicle program, it would be practically impossible to develop a vehicle without planning well ahead of this. There are a multitude of factors: regulatory standards, production tooling, plant operations, vehicle development time, etc.

Today, A 2+ model year vehicle would be a 2024 or 2025 model year prototype, and yes those vehicles exist and are testing right now.  How can one produce a product that is destined for release in several years without some amount of forecasting?

 

I didn't say that the automakers weren't planning out that far. In fact, I said specifically that they probably do have a strategy.  My point was that any number of things can and likely will change in the intervening decade. How many times has a car builder dropped a new product to market at the exact worst time- like, say, a new full size SUV just as gas prices surge?  

To put it another way, you can plan for the future, but you cannot predict it. 

BAMF said:

volvoclearinghouse said:

Interesting anecdote, we're looking at getting another solar system installed on our property (we have two meters, one of which has a current system) and just got a notice from the power company that our transformer was near capacity, which was going to limit the size of the system we could put in.  I suspect this will become more and more of a problem.  They did say that we could pay them to upgrade the transformer, though the cost of doing so would pretty much make it unfeasible.

How odd. If anything, you're reducing the amount of power the transformer needs to transform. If you have a 200 amp single phase service, your max power usage would be 48kW (your main breaker would probably trip if you did more than about 38kW for any length if time). Every kW of solar you add is at least a kW the utility does not have to generate and transform. 

The only way their statement makes sense to me is if you're upgrading from 200 amps to 400, and their rules about sizing service requires them to ignore solar. Or if you and everyone else on the transformer are massive power exporters. 

Keith Tanner made some good points about this. With a grid tie solar system, power flows both ways. The transformer has to be sized to run both ways. And in my specific case, we already have one solar array on a building, and our neighbor has a sizable ground array.  

In reply to volvoclearinghouse :

That is exactly it - they aimed their arrow in that direction, and the lead times are long enough that they couldn't just undo it.

That was a lot of the rationale behind the GM bailout in '08 or whenever that was.  They had some really good things they had been investing in for a long time, like the Volt, and they needed a push to see it through.

As excited as I am for EV sports cars at the moment I don't feel like I can get full enjoyment as my favorite roads aren't exactly a high priority for charging infrastructure. Hopefully that'll change sooner than later.