Bloggers on the Volt

I’ve been reading some blogs by Chevy Volt owners and have found that everyone so far (including myself) seems to really like the car.  I hadn’t expected it to be so much fun to drive; we bought it primarily because it was a way to reduce CO2, which we have to do to stop the climate catastrophe that is already underway and is sure to get much worse.  And the car does what it promised in that regard, but it is also satisfying to drive because it is so quiet and peppy.  When I pull onto High Street every day, I have to accelerate fairly quickly to make the merge.  The Volt zooms up to 30 mph so effortlessly and quickly that I am always amazed.

One drawback is that with the heater turned on the electric range goes down quickly. I assume the same is true of the air conditioner. Of course in Oakland we rarely need the heater or the air conditioner, but it is a consideration.  From the blogs it appears that the mileage range is more like 20 miles on a cold day when the heater is running.  There is also some debate about whether very cold temperatures are bad for the batteries.  My sense is that it is best to pre-start the car and warm it up using the house current in order to maximize driving range.  There is also a feature to buy seat warmers, which are more efficient than the fan, but we didn’t opt for that.  Needing heat and air conditioning is pretty basic for most of the U.S. so I’ll be interested to see if that is a problem for the Volt and other electric vehicles.

On the very positive side I found the comments from Felix Kramer of calcars.org particularly poetic (see full comments at http://gm-volt.com/forum/showthread.php?6534-Lucky-Family-First-to-Get-a-Volt-amp-a-Leaf)

Since we got our Volt on Dec. 22 and our Leaf Jan. 24, I've felt like we've taken a time machine to the future. Since as the Founder of CalCars.org I've been doing little else but talk and evangelize about this for a decade, I thought I'd be ready for this moment. But now that it's really here, it's far better than I ever imagined! Each car is like a 21st century space capsule, gliding silently through streets clogged with last-century vehicles. I was never so aware of the unique and ugly sounds from each gas-guzzler.  At stop lights I even feel their low-frequency vibrations. As a driver of a Prius since 2004, which 60,000 miles ago in 2006 was converted to a plug-in hybrid, and as an occasional driver of a RAV4 EV or a Tesla Roadster, I've had glimpses of how this feels. But it's completely different to drive this way almost all the time!  Each car greets the driver with fun as its first feature. The instant torque of electric motors turns each of them into rocketships at low speeds, and easy lane-changers on the highway.