IBM

IBM's new Smarter Traveler initiative enlists your smartphone to collect data that could ease your commute by predicting traffic snarls and suggesting alternative routes.

All commuters have a personal bag of tricks to skirt traffic. Now, a new smartphone app under development promises to learn your tricks and let you know when to use them.

The opt-in system combines information on your typical driving patterns collected by your smartphone with mountains of historical traffic data collected by sensors at toll booths, in roads, bridges, and intersections to predict traffic snarls and ways to avoid them before you leave home.

This is a step up from the traffic report on local news radio or a real-time traffic map on the Internet. It's a prediction of what a driver's personal commute is likely to look like in 30 to 45 minutes, John Day, program manager for the IBM Smarter Traveler initiative, explained to me today.

"The idea is to get that information delivered to you before you leave," he said. "And you don't have to take an overt action to get that info, especially given how busy we all are."

California collaboration
IBM is developing the smartphone application in collaboration with the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) and the California Center for Innovative Transportation at the University of California at Berkeley for deployment in the San Francisco Bay Area. A global rollout is on the horizon.

"The traffic problems can be very different in other parts of the world and we built it with that in mind," Day said. "It is a matter of partnering with the various agencies who are responsible" for managing transportation.

Key to the collaboration is IBM's Traffic Prediction Tool, which continuously analyzes congestion data, commuter locations and expected travel start times throughout a metropolitan region.

"It has a very high rate of accuracy in terms of predicting these issues once you have a good historical database," Day said. "As it happens, UC and CalTrans have done a real nice job of not only building this sensor network, but keeping the data for a long period of time."

The prediction tool is automatically updated every five minutes and produces a new model of what traffic will look like in 30 to 45 minutes. The new initiative blends in your own travel habits for a level of personalization.

People who opt-in to the program will be able to logon to a website where they can review traffic data, as well as specify things such as favorite alternatives and when they want alerts sent.

Future versions
Plans for the future include incorporation of real-time data on public transportation networks such as whether buses and trains are running on time and availability of parking at stations.

"When there is a major traffic issue, we can offer an alternative, maybe drive halfway, jump off (the freeway) and get BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)," Day said.

This could help persuade people to get out of their cars and onto public transportation, a step that may be necessary as cities continue to grow and roadways become more clogged.

Currently, commuters across the U.S. spend an average of nearly a week's worth of time, 28 gallons of gas, and $808 a year stuck in traffic congestion, according to a 2009 study from Texas A&M University. 

More about traffic tech:

• Where do commuters hurt the most?
• Most dangerous season for driving? Right now
• Red Tape: Bad news about drivers who text
• Auto to climb Pikes Peak without a driver
• Apps for the auto are on the way
• How's my driving? Ask my car

Mark Blinch / Reuters file

Plug-in electric cars like the Chevy Volt are among the frontrunners to replace traditional automobiles, but other energy technologies are also in the race.

Will electric cars take over America's roads? How about natural gas, or biofuels? Or will gasoline still be the automotive fuel of choice, despite concerns about imported oil and greenhouse-gas emissions? The nation's long-term energy future is still up for grabs, but a spate of recent reports suggest that big changes are on the way.

The first mass-market, highway-ready plug-in electric vehicles are already making their way to drivers' garages, although the production pipeline for Chevrolet Volts and Nissan Leafs may not be moving as fast as would-be buyers hoped. Toyota's plug-in Prius, the Ford Focus Electric and other electric entrants are due to join the Volt and the Leaf by the end of the year. But it's not yet clear whether electric vehicles, or EVs, will win out in the marketplace.

The big issue is batteries. As long as the cost of onboard electric power is high, compared to the cost of gasoline, buying an EV will never make sense based on fuel savings alone. A couple of years ago, the National Research Council estimated that providing enough battery power for 10 miles of electric driving would cost $3,300, and a 40-mile all-battery range (such as the Volt's) would add $14,000 to the cost of a car. Today, the battery pack for 200 miles of driving would add $20,000, says Kristin Persson, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Scientists are focusing on making batteries work "longer, safer, cheaper," Persson said at last weekend's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington. But she doesn't expect the revolution to come anytime soon: Lithium-ion will be the battery technology of choice for the next 10 to 15 years, she said.

Battery evolution, not revolution
Actually, battery technology is in the midst of evolution rather than revolution. For example, during the AAAS meeting, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reported on the use of chemical-laden microspheres that give worn-out batteries the chance to "heal" themselves — extending their lifetime and cutting down on the risk of battery fires.

Another research group has developed an advanced lithium-ion battery that can store more power and operate efficiently over a wider range of temperatures. "To our knowledge, a lithium-ion battery having this unique electrode combination has so far never been reported," the researchers said this month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. "On the basis of the performance demonstrated here, this battery is a top candidate for powering sustainable vehicles."

Better batteries are the biggest challenge for electric vehicles, but a retooling of America's energy distribution infrastructure is another, as was pointed out last year at an MIT symposium. If the auto industry meets the Obama administration's optimistic target of putting a million advanced-technology cars on the road by 2015, that could put more of a drain on the nation's electrical grid and accelerate the rise of smart-grid technology. (In the wake of last month's State of the Union Address, the administration rolled out a fresh set of initiatives aimed at meeting that 2015 goal.)

At the AAAS meeting, the U.S. Department of Energy's Imre Gyuk pointed out that hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on technologies that can help even out the load on the grid — ranging from frequency regulation and ramping to the use of flywheels, compressed air and pumped hydro to store the energy generated by intermittent power sources such as solar and wind.

'Fracking' for energy freedom?
But even with all this effort, will electric vehicles prevail? After all, the biggest winner in last year's $10 million Automotive X Prize competition was not an electric car, but Edison 2's ethanol-powered Very Light Car — which scored 102 mpg in large part because it was made from ultra-light materials, with an ultra-efficient aerodynamic design. And in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, John Deutch, a former CIA director who is now a professor at MIT, claims that the global energy landscape could well be transformed by the rapid rise of shale gas as a domestic energy source.

Vehicles powered by compressed natural gas could become more prevalent, as could gas-fired electric plants. Shale gas production comes with its own problems, of course — ranging from the environmental impact of "fracking," to the issues associated with continued greenhouse-gas emissions, to the infrastructure shifts that would be required to let drivers fuel up with natural gas instead of gasoline. But the "good news about gas" demonstrates that electric isn't the only energy technology generating buzz.

What do you think? Will your next car be a plug-in, or will you be waiting to see whether another technology wins the race to replace gasoline? Feel free to register your opinion as a comment below.

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."  

Volkswagen

Volkwagen's Touareg hybrid illustrates how even luxury SUVs are getting into the alternative-energy game.

Future cars may well mix and match alternative-fuel options … flexfuel and biofuel, diesel and hybrid, plug-in plus gas or all-battery. The exercise is aimed at changing America's energy economy to favor renewable resources and reduce the need for imported oil.

A prime example of the mix-and-match strategy comes in the form of Volkswagen's line of Touareg sport-utility vehicles. The German automaker is coming out with three flavors of the car: gas-powered, diesel-powered and gas-electric hybrid.

The Touareg hybrid's drivetrain is designed in such a way that the gasoline engine can be disengaged and turned off at speeds of up to 32 mph on a level road, or up to 75 mph rolling downhill. Regenerative braking recovers electric power during deceleration.

 The price isn't cheap: a little more than $60,500 for the hybrid's base price, compared with about $44,450 for the gas-powered version, and $47,950 for the diesel. The highway-fuel economy figure for the hybrid is 25 miles per gallon, which is a tad lower than the diesel version's 28 mpg and just a little higher than the gas-powered version's 23 mpg.

 Although the Touareg's fuel economy may not match that of a Toyota Prius, VW's triple choice shows that even in the luxury SUV class, there's a place for energy options.

Kai Philipp, a VW engineer who focuses on hybrid drive technology, explained that the hybrid version was being offered as an alternative for potential buyers who put a premium on fuel efficiency but just don't want a diesel, for whatever reason.

"For both groups of customers, we wanted to provide an option," Philipp said.

Philipp said VW "took a good look at diesel-hybrid" and its potential to maximize fuel savings, but ultimately decided combining the technologies would just be too expensive. "Hybrid technology doesn't come for free," he said.

The company's next goal is to come out with a Jetta hybrid. Down the line, there may be all-electric VWs as well, although Philipp acknowledges that the move toward electric driving may not be coming "as fast as some customers expect it to."

Electrification as a national goal
Philipp said customer preferences aren't the only reason behind the move toward hybrids and electric vehicles. "The national goal is going to regeneration, and going to electrification," he said.

President Barack Obama has set a goal of putting 1 million plug-in hybrid electric vehicles on America's roads by 2015, and Philipp noted that other countries have voiced similar aspirations. Last month, for example, Chinese officials were quoted as saying they want their nation's output of electric vehicles to reach 1 million cars by 2020.

Urban centers may well enact their own limitations on carbon emissions: London, for example, is already phasing in a "Low Emission Zone" that would charge drivers an extra fee of their cars exceed emission standards.

The move toward electrification will require dramatic upgrades in the infrastructure for electric vehicles: The $230 million public-private EV Project aims to put nearly 15,000 charging stations in six states (Arizona, California, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington) plus the District of Columbia over the coming year.

But that's just a start: A Pike Research report on EV infrastructure predicted that almost 1 million charging points would be set up in the United States by 2015. When you add in the energy requirements for at-home charging, automotive electrification may require a remake of the nation's electricity distribution network — with an increased emphasis on smart-grid technologies.

Cars to watch
There's a chicken-and-egg problem surrounding electric vehicles: Automakers are reluctant to go too far down the road to electrification due to concerns about the lack of infrastructure, and the companies that can provide that infrastructure — utilities, for example — are still trying to assess where the market is headed.

Will the coming crop of plug-in vehicles finally crack open the market? That's a multibillion-dollar question to be answered in the next two or three years. For Kurt Lutterman, a Seattle-area resident who put down a $99 reservation fee for an all-electric Nissan Leaf, the answer is definitely "yes."

Lutterman gave the Leaf a thumbs-up after his first test drive, which he took as part of Nissan's nationwide "Drive Electric Tour."

"We want to be very supportive of electric cars," he said. "We would have bought one years ago if it were available."

Over the past few weeks, we've driven through some real-world tests with the Nissan Leaf as well as the Chevy Volt, an electric car that's powered by batteries plus a gasoline-fueled engine. But there are other players in the hybrid/electric vehicle market, as a recent visit to the Seattle Auto Show demonstrated. Virtually every major automaker is offering (or promising) a hybrid vehicle.

Here are just a few of the cars to watch for:

• Toyota Prius PHV, a plug-in hybrid that's due to make its debut in the 2012 model year. The advance word is that the car will have about 13 miles of electric-only range, and that the batteries can be recharged in three hours on 110-volt power, and 90 minutes on a 220-volt circuit. Rumored price is around $27,550.
• Ford Focus Electric, which is expected to go on sale in late 2011. The all-electric car's driving range is projected at 100 miles. A full charge would take more than 12 hours at 110 volts, or six to eight hours at 240 volts. The price has not been disclosed, but it's expected to be competitive with the $32,780 pre-incentive cost of the Nissan Leaf.
• Mitsubishi I-MiEV, which is coming to the U.S. market in the 2011-2012 time frame. The four-seater is expected to be priced at around $30,000. No specific range has been announced, but the charging times are said to be 16 hours at 110 volts, or 8 hours at 220 volts. That would suggest a range similar to the Nissan Leaf's 100 miles.
• Coda EV, which is said to be coming to America in 2011. The battery-powered sedan is expected to sell for just less than $45,000. Its all-electric range is said to be around 100 miles. Last month the venture got a P.R. boost when Enterprise Rent-A-Car said it would introduce up to 100 Codas to car rental locations next year. But it also suffered a setback with this month's resignation of CEO Kevin Czinger.

To learn more about energy innovations that are transforming the automotive industry, check in regularly with Dan Carney's MotorHead columns and "The Driver's Seat" by Paul Eisenstein, as well as the rest of msnbc.com's automotive coverage and the "Green Machines" special report in the Environment section.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This posting, which is part of Cosmic Log's "Electric Road Trip" series, originally appeared in msnbc.com's Future of Energy section on Nov. 19, 2010, under the headline "Automakers Mix and Match Energy Alternatives."

The Nissan Leaf takes on an uphill road in mountains east of Seattle. Ups and downs can affect the car's estimated range.

"Your mileage may vary" ... That old phrase is even more relevant for the newfangled Nissan Leaf electric vehicle, which has an advertised range of 100 miles on a charge. In fact, the mileage depends quite a bit on your driving style, and the numbers can go up and down in the course of a drive. Yes, it's possible to get 100 miles or more from the Leaf. But if you're the kind of guy who keeps the car on the road even if the needle is near the "E" mark, you might have to change your ways.

The "needle" on the Leaf isn't a physical needle, but a readout that appears right in front of the driver on the dashboard, as well as on the energy-monitoring displays you can bring up on the center console's touchscreen. You can even bring up a map with two concentric circles, estimating how far you can go in normal mode (in which the Leaf acts pretty much like a normal car) and in eco-mode (which tweaks the car's response to optimize the power savings).

To arrive at those estimates, the Leaf's electronic brain factors in how you've been driving the car up to that point, as well as the load that's being put on the electric motor at that moment. When you're coasting downhill, you can actually add to your range.

Luxury in a Leaf
Let's take today's drive as an example. The first seven miles were so effortless that the range went up from 96 to 103 miles in eco-mode. But that was the day's high mark: As multimedia editor Jim Seida and I drove up through Western Washington's Issaquah Alps, the numbers were driven down. At the 19-mile mark, when we passed by Snoqualmie Falls (where the TV show "Twin Peaks" was filmed), the Leaf's screens told us we had only 45 miles of driving left.

Those numbers quickly crept up again during our descent from the mountains -- back to a range of 60 miles. But we lived a little too luxuriously on the way back: Turning on the heater and the fan ate into our electrical reserve, and by the time we returned to Redmond, we had an estimated 24 miles left in the batteries. A 47-mile trip took away 72 miles of my original estimated range. Good thing we didn't go all the way to Snoqualmie Pass (which would have been a 100-mile round trip).

If we were true hypermilers, we would have been able to get by with less electricity -- but instead, we drove the Leaf like a normal car. The bottom line is that Leaf drivers will have to think about their driving strategy: If a visit to the neighborhood grocery store is your only stop of the day, there's nothing to worry about. If you have a 25-mile commute to work, and you have to stop back at home before going out to an evening engagement that's 5 miles away, you just might be thinking about charging up while you're at work and using the eco-mode setting.

Guilty as charged?
Speaking of charged up, I received some sharp comments about the fact that I topped off the Leaf's batteries on Monday by plugging into an outlet at the office parking garage. "The main problem is you are stealing someone else's electricity," one commenter wrote. Another writer was critical of the whole electric-vehicle concept: "When that big 4x4 is blocking you in, it will be me. The hand waving you forward will have an extended middle finger. Just for you EV elites."

Such responses show that the move toward "electrification" of the automotive industry could run into a few culture clashes along the way. What principles will find their way into electric-car etiquette, or corporate and governmental policies?

I'd like to think that places like the Oregon city of Hillsboro (where Intel is the largest employer) are leading the way in the creation of charging-station havens. I'd like to think that the EV Project, which is due to install 15,000 charging stations over the next year with $115 million in support from the U.S. Department of Energy, is on the right track. But for some people, having taxpayers foot the bill for the installation of charging stations would be going too far.

The way I see it, the success of the Leaf will depend on the spread of those charging stations -- not so much because they're necessary, but because that will reassure folks like me that there's a backup plan just in case the Leaf sometimes doesn't go as far as you expect it to. I may find out about that firsthand tonight, when I take my loaner Leaf on a final 19-mile drive to turn it in. Stay tuned for the next chapter. ...

Click here for the next chapter: 'I Was Nagged by My Electric Car'

You can try the Leaf out for yourself during the "Drive Electric Tour," sponsored by Nissan. The next stop is in San Francisco. Keep checking our Green Innovation section for more about electric cars and our "Electric Road Trip."

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Msnbc.com's Alan Boyle looks for a parking space near a plug-in for his all-electric Nissan Leaf.

Someday, millions of electric cars will be on America's roads, gulping down the juice from tens of thousands of charging stations scattered around the country. But "someday" isn't here just yet -- which is why I'm so happy I found a space in the parking garage next to an electrical outlet for my Nissan Leaf.

Over the next couple of days, we'll be putting the all-electric Leaf to a real-world test here in the Seattle area, thanks to Nissan's nationwide "Drive Electric Tour." The folks at Nissan were kind enough to lend us a car for a couple of days in between their Seattle and San Francisco stops.

It's one thing to drive the Leaf around on a two-hour test drive, as CNBC's Phil LeBeau did in July, but quite another to work it into your day-to-day driving routine. Fortunately, my routine is a perfect fit for the Leaf: I have a commute of as little as 7 miles to work at msnbc.com's mothership in Redmond, Wash. Because the Leaf has an estimated range of 80 to 100 miles per charge-up, I could easily bring the car back to Nissan on Tuesday without ever plugging it in.

But where's the fun in that?

This was an opportunity to take the neighbors for a ride, deal with the issues that early-adopting Leaf drivers will face and test my tolerance for "range anxiety" -- the worries about having enough electricity to go where you need (or want) to go. Nissan says 20,000 customers have already ordered the all-electric subcompact, with deliveries due to begin next month. So there'll be lots of car owners going through a similar reality check.

The Leaf's basics
First, the basics: The Leaf is a hatchback that can seat five (we proved that on Sunday night with the neighbors) and still leave a good amount of cargo room in the back. Its styling is similar to that of the Nissan Versa, but with a swoopier tail end. The list price is $32,780, but that figure can be reduced by a federal tax credit (up to $7,500) plus state and local incentives. The car can also be leased for as little as $349 a month.

The Leaf is powered by an 80-kilowatt electric motor, and it runs totally on electricity that's drawn from a plug and stored in a 600-pound battery pack under the floor. Because the Leaf lacks a gasoline engine, it's quiet -- so quiet that Nissan has built in a faint synthetic whine that comes on when the Leaf is traveling at 18 mph or less, just to let pedestrians know the car is coming their way. At higher speeds, the noises of the tires and the motor are enough to do the trick.

This is no glorified golf cart: Even though there's no vroom-vroom sound, the Leaf offers plenty of get-up-and-go.

The common refrain you hear about the Leaf as well as the Chevy Volt, the battery-plus-gasoline-powered electric car we drove last month, is that they drive "just like a regular car." In normal mode, the Leaf does drive like a regular car, or perhaps a regular hybrid -- a verdict that was seconded by my Prius-driving neighbors. But if you want to find out what driving a not-quite-regular car feels like, you can use the Leaf's "palm shift" drive selector to toggle the drive train from normal mode to "eco-mode."

In eco-mode, the accelerator seems a bit less responsive, and the brakes grab a bit more aggressively. Those tweaks help the Leaf hold onto more of its electric power and recover more electricity from the regenerative braking system. The payoff comes in the form of a 10 percent increase in the car's range.

You can also increase your range by going without the heater on a cool, misty Seattle morning. At one point, I could fiddle with the Leaf's controls to show a variety of readings for how many miles I had left: 55 miles (normal mode with climate control), 59 miles (normal without climate control), 60 miles (eco-mode with climate control) or 65 miles (eco-mode without climate control).

Looking for a charge
I have to admit I was fixated on the routine for recharging the Leaf, since that's likely to be a key sticking point for potential buyers. Nissan says it can take as long as 20 hours to charge up the car using a standard 120-volt circuit. If you hook up to a 240-volt Level 2 charging station -- which can be installed in your home for the estimated cost of $2,200 -- you can cut that time down to eight hours for a full charge. A 480-volt Level 3 charging station can bring the Leaf's lithium-ion batteries to full power in 30 minutes or less. Once you're fully charged, you're good to go for another 100 miles or so.

Chevrolet went with a different strategy for the $41,000 Volt. Its all-battery range is lower (25 to 50 miles), but it takes just 10 hours to charge up from a 120-volt outlet, or four hours at 240 volts. And because the Volt also has a gasoline engine on board, you can go 350 miles or so before filling up again at a gasoline pump.

Because of this fundamental difference, the installation of fast-charging stations is more important for Leaf owners than for Volt owners. The federally supported EV Project aims to get 15,000 publicly available charging stations installed in six states and the District of Columbia over the next year, and thousands more will no doubt join the list.

Today, however, the pickings are slim: The number of publicly available 240-volt charging stations in the Seattle area can be counted on one hand, and I haven't yet found a place to plug in at 480 volts if need be. Because we're gearing up for an extended test drive, I wanted to make sure I could top off the batteries as much as possible. And that's what motivated my search for an outlet in the parking garage nearest to msnbc.com's headquarters.

At first, I hunted around the edges of the parking level, to no avail. Then I wandered around the stairwells and access doors -- and found my first prospect, near the door to the cafeteria. Unfortunately, the spaces surrounding that outlet were all marked for disabled parking. It wouldn't have been P.C., or legal, to park there -- even with an zero-emission car.

Finally, I came across the perfect place: An open "compact car" slot right next to an elevator lobby, with an electrical outlet just inches away. I eased my car into position, flipped open the plug-in door on the Leaf's hood, grabbed my recharging cord and let the juice flow in. Victory at 120 volts!

Every hour of recharging lets you recover about 4 miles of range, so while I've been tapping away at my computer, the Leaf has regained all the power it lost during my drive to the office.

This exercise in power-hunting made me realize that plug-in parking places will become more highly prized as more electric cars enter the market. They'll be as sought after as the electrical outlets in airport terminals. It's not too early to start reserving some of the prime parking spots for electric vehicles -- or to installing more 120/240-volt charging outlets in parking ramps and public places.

The alternative isn't pretty: In the months ahead, there just might be a lot more people like me, lurking around the garages like voltage vampires.

After charging up, I'm all set for an adventure. Keep checking our Green Innovation section for more about electric cars and our "Electric Road Trip." Don't forget that you can try out the Leaf yourself during the "Drive Electric Tour," sponsored by Nissan.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Jim Seida / msnbc.com

Msnbc.com's Alan Boyle lingers in the back seat of a Chevy Volt to finish a blog posting at San Francisco International Airport.

We've fielded hundreds of questions and comments in the course of our "Electric Road Trip" between Seattle and San Francisco in an electric-powered Chevy Volt, but some of the most interesting questions require answers from a real expert. So during the last 150 miles of our odyssey, we fired questions at Tim Perzanowski, a senior project engineer at GM, as he took his turn behind the Volt's wheel. Here are the paraphrased questions and answers:

Q: Why didn't they make a diesel version of the Volt? Wouldn't that be more efficient than a gasoline-fueled car?

A: New rules on vehicle emissions would make the production of a diesel-powered Volt prohibitively expensive, but the idea of developing a diesel Volt for European markets has been under discussion. And looking ahedad, Perzanowski says a new technology called HCCI would bring diesel-like efficiency to gasoline-fueled engines.

Q: How can an electric drive system that draws energy from a relatively small (1.4-liter) gasoline engine produce 40 mpg fuel efficiency, considering that energy would have to be lost in the conversion process? Here's the flip side of the question: What's so great about a gasoline-fueled system that produces 40 mpg fuel efficiency, considering that my Prius or diesel-powered Volkswagen gets as good or better mileage?

A: If you're impressed by the engine's performance, it's because of a) magic, b) good engineering, or c) advanced software and electronics. If you're not impressed by 40 miles per gallon, just remember that the equivalent efficiency in battery-only mode can be 50 to 100 miles per gallon ... based on the assumption that a full charge of the battery costs $1.50, or about half the cost of a gallon of gas.

Q: How much luggage space does the Volt have?

A: Perzanowski says the Volt's luggage space is comparable to that of other small hatchbacks. Chevrolet says the Volt has 10.6 cubic feet of cargo space, compared with Toyota's claim of 21.4 cubic feet for the substantially larger Prius. The Volt's split back seats fold down individually to provide extra space.

Q: I heard that the Volt is not really an all-electric car, but is just a hybrid like the Prius, which costs less. So what's the big deal?

A: This relates to a controversy that arose over the past few days and was addressed in an earlier item, but Perzanowski said that the Volt's power system is substantially different from the Prius, and even from the after-market plug-in Priuses that are popping up nowadays. Of course Perzanowski thinks the Volt's system is much better, but that's the sort of thing you should judge for yourself. There'll always be folks who are hard-core Prius fans, or Leaf fans, or Volt fans — who will argue with each other just as Mustang and Corvette fans did a generation ago.

Revisit the entire collection of postings from the "Electric Road Trip," or check out the short updates from @boyle on Twitter.

Jim Seida / msnbc.com

The Bay Bridge can be seen in the side view mirror as the Volt approaches San Francisco after 856 miles of driving.

We've reached San Francisco International Airport, the end point of our two-day road trip from Seattle in a Chevy Volt electric-plus-gas vehicle. We've gone 873 miles, which is more than the direct-drive distance between the two cities just because there have been some extra drive-arounds and detours along the way. More than 95 percent of that driving was done while the gas-driven "range extender" engine was running. You could argue that this wasn't a fair test of the Volt, because we went far more than the 25 to 50 miles a day that Chevy says is the "sweet spot" for commuters.

If you consider just the battery-powered driving we did on the first day, our mileage was a pretty darn good 80-plus miles per gallon equivalent. Technically, it was 32.9 gasoline-free miles driven with less than $1.50 worth of electricity. That's the kind of performance a commuter might expect from the Volt. If you consider the total long-haul mileage, the figure comes down to about 40 miles per gallon. Sure, other cars can do better than that, but that's not really the point.

While we wait for our airplane to take off, we'll post a couple of summing-up items about our "Electric Road Trip."

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

A Chevy Volt tools down Interstate 5 with Mount Shasta in the background, as seen through the windshield of another Volt.

We're back on the road in a Chevy Volt, driving the second half of our 800-mile odyssey from Seattle to San Francisco — and that meant we were back on all-electric driving, at least for nine miles.

Our car was fully charged during the overnight stay in Medford, Ore., and usually that would give you 25 to 50 miles of gasoline-free travel. Chevrolet figures that most people drive less than 40 miles a day most of the time, and thus the Volt could plausibly go without using a drop of gas for days on end. Some have even talked about an issue with unused gasoline sitting in the tank so long that it goes stale. Turns out that the Volt has a special mode that will turn on the gasoline engine occasionally in that scenario, just to verify that the fuel lines are fresh and clean.

That wasn't a problem for us this morning. For one thing, the Chevy team had to upload masses of data about the car's performance so far, which drained the battery after its overnight charging. For another thing, we were heading into the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon, and that meant we had to give up some of that low-cost electric rolling to provide hill-climbing oomph.

When the Volt goes up a steep grade, it draws electricity from the gasoline-powered generator, but even then, its performance can be a bit laggy. To increase the available power for the climb, extra juice comes from the batteries. But that means more of the battery power has to be held in reserve to start with. Normally, the Voltec drive train cuts over from batteries to gas-generated power when the battery reserve is drained to 20 percent of capacity. In mountain mode, that reserve is increased to 40 percent. But you have to hold onto that 40 percent to start with.

"That's why you have to put it in mountain mode 20 to 30 minutes before you hit a steep grade," Chevrolet Communications' Adam Denison told us. A lot of that power comes back during downhill costs, when the regenerative braking system captures electricity for the batteries. In fact, we were able to return to normal mode and resume all-electric driving after we went over Siskiyou Summit.

Mountain mode is the main reason why we drove for only 9.4 miles before the Volt's engine kicked in. That's got to be one of the shortest stretches of all-electric driving ever recorded with the Volt. One of the longest stretches was reported just this week, by AOL News auto writer Jeff Sabatini. He got 57 miles on the initial electric charge. But that's OK. He was probably driving on one of those sissy-boy roads in Michigan.

Follow msnbc.com's Alan Boyle and Jim Seida as they take an 800-mile "Electric Road Trip" in a Chevy Volt ... and file their dispatches from the road. Boyle is also tweeting about the trip as @b0yle on Twitter.