Most of my viewers are aware that I love technology and I've been driving a 2013 Chevy Volt for
quite some time.
And I've been watching the information coming out about the Tesla model 3, which appears
to be a really cool car.
I think I'll go out and buy one.
Oh, wait a minute.
That's not a Tesla, that's a second generation Volt.
So, yeah, after test driving the new Volt I really decided there was no real good reason
to wait 2 to 3 years in order to buy a Tesla Model 3.
And, you know, when I look online, on youtube for example, there really just aren't any
good reviews of the Chevy Volt.
And you know, my go to channel for watching Ev related stuff is, of course, Robert Llewellyn's
Fully Charged show.
I'll put a link to it down in the description.
And since he lives in the U.K. he can't really review a Volt so I just decided to take it
upon myself to do a proper review of this car.
A lot of people think that the Volt "is just a hybrid like the Prius, Right?".
It's not.
"It shares a lot of similar technology, so it must be the same, right?"
Well, you know what?
Mila Kunis shares 96% of her DNA with a Chimpanzee, but which one would you rather take home
with you?
Other people think "it's just an electric car that can only drive 53 miles before stranding
you!"
Wrong!
The Volt is one of the few cars that can run either on electric or gasoline.
Now, since I've owned an EV for several years, I'm well aware of the three big questions
that people always ask.
And those are: How fast, how far, and how much?
In the words of Chelsea Sexton.
How far, how fast, how much.
These are the three questions we're getting, please put it in the advertising, it's not
rocket science.
So I'm going to start by tackling those 3 questions.
I'm going to start with number one: HOW FAST?
Now, where can I go to do a proper test of this car?
Oh, I know, how about the drag strip?
All right, I am in line.
And a little nervous, I've never done anything like this before.
It's kind of hot in here because they say you can't have your air conditioning on and
I need the windows up because it's so freaking noisy outside.
So for the first time I wanted to go full out, all electric mode.
Well, at least I know I'm not the slowest car at the track.In my first time to run down
the track, I wasn’t even sure if I was supposed to go, so you’ll notice I actually let off
the accelerator temporarily, which undoubtedly hurt my time.
I guess my screw up didn’t matter because the scoring system wasn’t even working this
time so I couldn’t even see my time.
Well, here's something I don't do every day.
So I got in line again, and this time I ended up by myself.
I’m still doing EV mode this time.
I had to roll down my window down and it messed up my camera, which I didn’t have time to
fix.
I got my ticket, and here’s the result.So the 3rd time, I put the car into hold mode,
which means it will run on gasoline, to see if there is any difference.
And I ended up with a souped up pickup truck next to me this time.
For some reason my interior camera wasn’t recording, so I don’t have that angle to
show.
I noticed right away the car was slower off the line in this mode.
And the results here confirm that.
So this is reaction time, and yeah..
I suck.
But I can’t be too hard on myself being this was my first time.
Also this time has no effect on the rest of these numbers I’m about to show you.
This is how long it took to get to 60 feet.
You can see EV mode was much faster.
But what is more interesting is comparing this to other cars.
For example, look at the different Tesla Model S. You can see that the Volt fits right in
here, actually being faster off the line than a base model Tesla.
And this is how long it took to get to 330 feet, again EV mode being faster.
And this was the speed the car was traveling when it reached 330 feet.
This shows how long it took to complete the 1/8 mile strip.
Again, EV mode being faster.
And finally, the speed I was traveling when I hit the end.
Now what’s interesting here is that gas mode was actually faster here.
Indiciating that when in gas mode there may more power in the upper speeds, even though
takeoff power is less.OK, so definitively answer how fast this car is, well it's plenty
fast.
In fact, it's quicker off the line than most cars except for legitimate performance cars.
So, I don't think there's going to be any problem with how fast it is.
OK, so to answer the question of how far it can go.
Well, when I tell people that it can go 53 miles, sometimes they reply and go "is that
all?"
And you know, I think a lot of people just don't have a good conception of how far a
mile is, much less 53 of them.
I think a lot of people just fill up their tanks, run it
until it goes empty and fill it up again and they don't really pay attention to how far
they've driven.
So I've devised a little trip to help you better understand exactly how far this car
can go in electric mode.
I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex.
Now to give you an idea of how large this metro area is, here's the state of Connecticut
overlaid.
So DF/W is essentially the same size as the entire state.
and by sheer coincidence, if you were to start at the far end of loop 820 and drive to the
far side of 635 it is exactly 53 miles.
For my trip, I'm going to start in downtown Fort Worth, sometimes referred to locally
as Cowtown.
I'm taking a stroll through the Watergardens.
This is an amazing place, I recommend people visit.
And for those nerds following my channel, you might recognize this from the Cult sci-fi
classic Logan's Run which was filmed around here.
And I'll take a short walk back to my car, which I have at a public charting station
at a Walgreens.
The reason for this is that I wanted to start my journey with a full charge.
As you can see on the dash, it's fully charged.
And if you look here, you'll see it reset our trip meter to zero miles and zero kilowatthours
used.
Arlight, so we just left downtown Fort Worth and I'm headed towards Dallas.
Now, I'm going to try to do the speed limit.
Which, we're going 70 miles per hour right now, I don't even know... oh look, the speed
limit is 60!
I guess I had better slow down.
Because, you know, I want to be realistic with this trip.
And you know, electric vehicles are kind of opposite of gasoline vehicles.
They actually perform better in city traffic at lower speeds, as far as efficiency goes.
So if we're doing a range test, driving out here on the highway is going to put it to
a pretty realistic test.
Because, if it will go this far on the highway, you know it will go that much further in the
city.
So we left Fort Worth and headed towards Dallas.
All right, we're about half way between Fort Worth and Dallas and I'm going to take a little
detour here.
Just right off the freeway, I want to show you another little important landmark of Dallas/Fort
Worth.
I'm going to stop by the Dallas Cowboys stadium.
At this point, you can see I have travelled 16.1 miles and the car is telling me I can
still travel another 43 miles on battery power.
So here we are at the AT&T or the cowboys stadium.
I'm not a big sports fan, but I've been told that this is the best place to come during
tornado season because there's no chance of a touchdown here.
Unfortunately, it looks like we're going to get stuck in some traffic, which is not normal
for a Sunday.
So, we were stuck in the traffic jam for about 10 minutes, which didn't really hurt our range
test since EVs are actually more efficient in this sort of traffic.
So after a long drive, we were finally approaching downtown Dallas.
All right, so we have arrived in downtown Dallas.
Now, we have travelled 36.1 miles and we have been on the road for an hour and ten minutes.
And, we have used just a little over half of the range of the battery and it's still
saying I have 19 miles left.
Now, there are some charging stations in this area, but I've decided not to use them because
that would kind of defeat the whole purpose behind what we're trying to do here.
We're trying to see how far it goes until it runs out.
So I'm not going to charge up.
So I decided to get out and walk to another interesting landmark just down the street.
This is the Kennedy memorial.
This is the location of the assasination of John F. Kennedy back in November of 1963.
The shot came out of one of these windows.
This little X in the street is the actual location of Kennedy's car when he was shot.
Then we left Dallas and headed back to Fort Worth.
We made it about this far before the car ran out of battery power and seamlessly switched
to gasoline mode.
OK, so we just switched over to gasoline power.
it was seamless, just driving down the road, didn't have to do anything.
We did travel 49.1 miles on electric.
It is kind of hot outside today.
We've been running the air conditioner pretty hard, so that probably did eat a few miles
of the range off.
And so to really answer the question how far it can go.
Well, if you drive in gas mode, it can go as far as you want it to go, and you'll get
a whopping 42 miles per gallon while using gas, so on to the next big question.So, Chevrolet
lists the base model starting at $33,220.
But looking at my window sticker, you'll see I have a base model with a few
upgrades and mine cost $36,735 Of course, I didn't pay anywhere near that much for this
car.
In fact I wouldn't even be able to afford the car if I had to pay that much for it.
You see, I started off with a generous discount since my father is a retired GM employee.
Then I got another $500 off because I had a competing lease on a Nissan Leaf that my
wife was driving.
And then I get $7,500 off of my taxes from the federal government.
So I just loaned myself $7,500 from my savings account, which I will get back at the end
of the year when I do my taxes.
And so the amount I actually paid for the car puts it right in the same ballpark as
a Prius.
And according to Chevrolet's website, you can lease one for $299 per month with no money
down.
So why anyone would buy a Prius instead of this, I have no idea.
Another extremely common question that I get is is how long does it take the car to charge?
Now, that's a perfectly valid question but it's also extremely annoying because there's
no one specific answer.
There's so many different variables that account for how fast
it takes to charge.
For the Volt it charges is 4.5 hours from a commercial charging station, or a 240V station
in your garage.
Now keep in mind that's 4 and a half hours assuming the battery has to charge from empty.
But let's be honest, with 53 miles of range, it's probably pretty rare that you will be
charging a completely empty battery.
More realistically most people will probably be around half full at the end of the day
when plugging in, which means more like 2 hours to charge.
Now if you decide to charge from the included 120V charging cable, that plugs into any standard
outlet it can range from 13 hours on a 12 amp socket to as much as 18 hours on an 8-amp,
again assuming you are starting with an empty battery.
Now, unfortunately, the Volt does not support DC
fast charging.
If you take a look at some commercial stations, you'll notice they will have a regular 240
volt connector that works in pretty much any electric vehicle.
But some will have this larger connector, notice the extra prongs!
Using this, you'll count the charge time in minutes rather than hours.
But like I said, the Volt doesn't support it.
And, you know, I think I know why.
I believe the thinking at General Motors is that it is, after all, a Plug-in Hybrid.It
has a gasoline engine so it's not like you're going to be stranded.
You don't absolutely need to have the fast charge feature.
And to be honest, you need a reason to run the gas engine every now and then because
if you don't the car will actually force you to burn a little bit of gas to keep it from
going stale.
In fact, the only reason fast charging is even a topic of discussion on this car can
be attributed to the fact it has such a large battery compared to other plug-in hybrids.
Only one other hybrid has more EV range than the Volt.
I mean, nobody even talks about having fast charging on any of these other hybrids because
the range isn't long enough to matter.
Oh, and one more thing.
Officially speaking, this charger that comes with
the car is only supposed to support 120 Volts.
However, many people online have found that this particular charger that comes with the
2016 and 2017 Volt, is actually capable of running at 240V just by putting an adapter
on this cable and plugging it into a 240V socket.
At which point, you can charge twice as fast although still not quite as fast as a full
fledged level 2 charger.
However, General Motors does not officially acknowledge
this and there's no guarantee all of the chargers are the same, so I would try that at your
own risk.
Now , My car is a base model So there are a lot of features like adaptive cruise control,
for example, that I can't show you because I just don't have them.
But it does have LED headlights, which you pretty much have to experience to really appreciate,
and of course it helps save on some battery power as compared to traditional halogen lights.
Also the interior lights are LED and there's also little LED accent lights in places such
as the door handles.
In fact, it looks really cool at night.
It's as close as you'll ever get to being in a space ship.
It has a lighted charge port that flashes along with the indicator on the dash to let
you know the state of charge.
1 blink is 1 quarter full, 2 blinks is half full, then 3
quarters, 4 blinks is almost done, and a solid light means it is fully charged.The center
console does support Apple CarPlay so you can plug your iPhone into it and certain apps
that support the feature will appear on the display.
The most helpful one is maps, of course.
I didn't even bother to buy satellite navigation in this vehicle.
And you can see why.
Of course, I'm a cheapskate so I wouldn't have paid for it anyway.
Now over time, more and more apps are going to support this.
Of course, it can play MP3's from a USB stick, but that's nothing new, my old Volt would
do that.
But, what's interesting is what it lacks - which is a CD player.
Not that I'm going to miss it anymore than I would miss having a tape deck in my
car.The main instrument display is really cool.
Down here on the left, it shows an estimate of your EV range remaining.
Along with a bar graph here giving a visual representation.
Over here, this shows your energy usage on battery power.
So when I punch it hard, you can see the power move up, and when I regenerate power, you
can see it go down.
Also the very top shows you exactly how many kilowatts you are using in realtime.
This is very similar to the meter you might have on the side of your house.
Now, of course, on the other side you have your fuel tank graph, and the number of miles
you can travel on fuel if you desire to switch over to gas.
And of course, the engine has its own little power reading as well, which only moves in
one direction, showing the power output.
It will also show all kinds of different information, even bizarre stuff like coolant temperature.
And if you change stations on your radio, using the steering wheel controls, it will
show that.
If you change the volume, it will show that.
And there's a whole menu of customizable features.
The little climate control knob is cool.
Of course, it has heated seats and a heated steering wheel, which will help save you range
in the winter if it means you can avoid running the cabin heater which really sucks a lot
of battery power.
The smartphone app lets you do some cool stuff like start your air-conditioning, check your
available battery range, and many other cool things.
It will even let you locate your car on a map, like your own personal lojack.
I also had my friend Rob, who's very tall try out the front seat to see if it would
fit well for him.
OK, so I'm 6 foot 5 and for a car this size, this is really cavernous.
I'm actually very comfortable.
No knees hitting the steering wheel.
This would be an easy car for me to drive.
And I was able to get this entire basket full of stuff into the hatchback with no problems.
So I had been waiting for Elon Musk to reveal the Tesla Model III.
Now, Elon says its going to be revolutionary since it is a great looking, great performing
electric car with long range capability and will sell for $35,000.
It sounds great.
I wouldn't mind having one.
But its at least 2 or 3 years away before I would be able to get one.
Yet, the truth of the matter is, the 2017 Volt is available today and already fills
all of those check boxes.
Now, I'm not saying the Volt is better than the Model III.
In fact, we won't really be able to make that determination until the Model III comes to
market.
But what I am saying is that if you are waiting 2 to 3 years to buy a car that just fits those
particular check boxes, wait no longer.
Go buy a Volt!