The cramped interior doesn’t sit well with an aging baby boomer looking for a car that makes entry and exit easy. GM’s Bob Lutz aimed the Volt toward the sports car crowd and I think that was a mistake. Bagdikian liked the sports-car feel of the car. Some of my early criticism of GM and its design choices remain. Not as good as our previous Prius, but more than good enough when coupled with the EV. We measured our Volt at 39-41 mpg on the gasoline engine for the trip of 660 miles. The EPA rating on the gasoline engine is 37 mpg. We drove it in all different modes: normal, mountain, and hold. We put the Volt through its paces, driving it up to nearly 10,000 feet five different times. We took a mini vacation in the Volt up the East Side of the Sierra Nevada-a trip that’s just not possible today in the Leaf. Sure, on road trips you drive the Volt as a gasser, but most of the time you drive it around town as an EV. My new take: The Volt is a Tesla for the rest of us. The doors close with a reassuring thump that you’d expect in a high-end car. (Our Leaf and its battery pack were built in Tennessee in a non-union shop.) The Volt is quiet even on the gasoline engine. It was assembled by UAW 22 in Hamtramck, Michigan. (2017 Volts are substantially less than were the 2013 models.) It’s affordable to us because we could buy it used. We probably wouldn’t have bought the 2013 Volt new as its original sticker price was outside our comfort zone. The Volt is the “fanciest” or most expensive car we’ve ever owned. We are still forming our impressions, but our first take is that the Volt is a much more high-end car than Nissan’s Leaf, certainly the base model Leaf we drive. That’s impressive no matter how you look at it. Stats on the Volt show that, on average, the car is driven as an EV two-thirds of the time, giving the fleet an average efficiency of nearly 110 miles per gallon. This is similar to how other Volt owners have used the car. Our car has 36,000 miles on the odometer and the running tally was 92 miles per gallon during the three year period when it was on lease. ![]() We charge the Volt more often, but not that much more than the Leaf.Īs noted, most miles on the Volt are EV miles. In practice, we drive our Leaf 50-60 miles before charging with 20-30 miles left on the range indicator. We driven the Leaf for two full years and I’ve written extensively about the experience. We are now a two EV family: Evie I (Leaf), Evie II (the Volt). ![]() ![]() With the Volt we can cruise up the drive way after running the battery to zero. He ran out of juice literally in our drive way and he couldn’t quite push his Mitsubishi iMiev up our drive. (We’re on Plugshare.) Unfortunately, in Rowell’s case our charge station is up a slight hill. Unless you’ve owned an EV, you don’t realize this dilemma. For example, John Rowell learned this the hard way once when he wanted to charge at our house. Obviously, you can’t do that in a BEV, or you end up pushing it. Unlike a typical battery electric vehicle (BEV), you can drive the Volt as an EV until the battery is exhausted, knowing that you can get to the next charge station on the gasoline engine. It has a real-world EV range of 38-40 miles before the engine kicks in. Most people drive the Chevy Volt as an EV. It’s one solid electric vehicle (EV) that also includes a range extending gasoline engine. True, that’s not long, but we’ve put nearly 1,000 miles on it and I would have to say that Bagdikian was right. We’ve now owned a 2013 Volt for three weeks.
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