7/3/2023 0 Comments Chevy volt range on electric![]() Chevy is already testing the 2012 version, adding small upgrades and planning to certify the car as a California Advanced Technology Partial Zero Emission Vehicle, a label that requires a ten-year battery warranty. Tony Posawatz, Volt’s chief engineer, hinted that better lights may be coming to future versions of the Volt. So while the Volt driver aims to conserve electricity as frugally as Tom Hanks in Apollo 13, a switch to LED lights will both save power and improve the light. Today, LED headlights for bikes create the appearance of motorcycles on the bike path at night, so bright are the lights. Remember the toy headlights on Schwinns and Huffys growing up? They worked well in our imaginations, but cast little actual light, dashing our hopes of riding our bikes at night. The single rear back-up light looks cool from the outside, but it casts a useless single cone of light rearward when backing at night.Ī more serious issue is the dimness of the Volt’s headlights. The Volt only comes with these terrible controls, so it risks a similar rebuke despite its other qualities.Īnd then there’s the matter of the car’s lights. At least MyFordTouch is optional on the Edge. This abominable system recalls Ford’s infernal MyFordTouch system, with its interface that was so diabolical that Consumer Reports withheld its recommendation from the excellent Ford Edge because of the system’s shortcomings. ![]() Want to find another radio station? Good luck with that. But they don’t sense the touch of a finger in a glove - this in a car that encourages you to forego heat to save the battery.Īdditionally, the dozens of controls on the dashboard are hard to distinguish from one another. In the middle of the dashboard - the “center stack” in industry parlance - is a smooth, high-gloss panel fitted with an array of capacitive switches, the kind that sense the touch of a finger. In fact, other controls in the Volt are designed so poorly they’d get a Microsoft engineer fired. It’s a neat idea, but having the horn control on the headlight dimmer means regularly quacking the horn accidentally when switch from high to low beams. The vehicle’s silent running in parking lots can sneak up on pedestrians, and blowing the horn would likely scare them to death, so Chevy has included the ability to make the horn quack like the AFLAC duck to warn of the Volt’s approach. Twenty-six miles down the road and the forty grand spent for the green goodness of electric drive is reduced to a gas-burning car that doesn’t do as well on the highway as the Chevrolet Cruz Eco - a conventionally-powered car built on the same platform as the Volt, but one that costs half as much. But running on gas power isn’t the way for a driver to feel good about purchasing the Volt. It generates power to spin the electric motor when the battery is depleted. However, unlike the Leaf the Volt has a gas engine to fall back on. (Suddenly, the 75-mile winter range of an electric-only model like the Nissan Leaf seems amazing.) Thankfully, GM charges only $500 (plus installation) for the 240-volt home charger, because if you fall behind with the built-in 120-volt charger it seems impossible to replenish the charge you’ve lost. The difference is important because the 26 miles I experienced in the car I tested is a lot different from 40 miles when making a round-trip drive.Īnd the complication is that because it takes so long to achieve your 26 miles of range on the charger, it can be tough to keep the car at or near a full charge. GM now says the Volt’s range is between 25 and 50 miles rather than the 40 miles discussed previously. Want to use the nifty-in-concept OnStar smartphone apps to check the car’s charging, or its battery status? Think about that creeping Windows progress bar and plan to wait long enough to download a big photo file over the dial-up connection.Īnd when the battery is fully charged and you’re ready to whir off to electric nirvana? Nirvana better not be far away, because if it’s cold and dark outside your ten hours on the charger will have bought you only about 26 miles of electric range. Want to charge the Volt using the included 120-volt charger? Be prepared to wait even longer than it used to take to send your boss a big PowerPoint file for final approval - way longer. But just as when we despised the torturous wait to download a single picture online, the Volt and the current state of electric vehicle technology leaves us looking forward to the vehicular equivalent of broadband connectivity. From the Volt’s driver’s seat we can glimpse the future, we can taste it, and we can even experience it to a degree. The Chevrolet Volt is an example of this.
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