Living With The Chevy Volt - Is There Still Life After 4000 Miles

Four months into life with my Chevy Volt, and I am still learning about the Volt in every way.  Learning about the XM radio, the best ways to charge, and wondering why they didn’t put nitrogen in the tires.  

The biggest change this month is the addition of my home 240V charger.  This addition has highlighted a flaw in the Onstar - Volt notification system.

 Instead of the Volt Charger that offered a $200 discount from GM, I chose to upgrade and get a Bosch 30 Amp charger in case we wanted to get a battery only car like the Honda Fit.  I also am hoping when my lease is up in three years that the new Volt might need more charging power available than the 15 AMP charger GM was offering through Bosch and have even more electric range.  I bought it directly through Bosch for $500 less than the electrician wanted.  

The faster charging time really comes in handy, and I am using even less gas because of it.  Now my average is over 224 miles for each gallon of gas used.  174 of those are pure electric and the remaining 50 miles are on gas.  Yes, I am really getting 50 MPG on gas even though GM and the EPA say it only gets 38.  

The trick is to manually manage the drive modes, which I understand are new to the 2013 Volt.   When I know I can’t make an entire trip on electricity, or I know the destination charging fees are higher than the cost of using gas, I’ll run the gas on the highway as soon as I hit 40MPH until I’ve run gas for the number of miles that I was going to be short on battery range.  I am sure the “hypermilers” are getting even better milage with their Volts than I am.

As a side note, my calculations figure that $1.00 per hour of commercial electric charging is about the same as $4.25 per gallon of gas.  I am a tree hugger, but a thrifty one, so I will use whichever energy source costs less.  Blink has this figured out, since they charge members $1.00 per charging hour everywhere.  The trouble with Blink is if you can’t get back to unplug, the meter keeps running even though you don’t use any electricity.  

When I pull into Chargers like Seal Beach that are $1.00 per KWH which equals $3.37 per charging hour, I don’t charge.  Obviously when I find free charging like South Coast Plaza Offers, I jump in.  Some free places though are so popular like the two chargers at Bella Terra, I quit trying.  

The little glitch where the car stopped charging lasted two days is fixed. No one knows why, but we did “reboot” the car and it is back to it’s old self.

I also changed my home electric plan so I get really really cheap rates from midnight to 6 am.  With the 120V portable charger, it takes over eight hours to charge so that plan was pretty useless.  Now that the car knows to start charging at midnight, and is done between 3 AM and 4 AM every day, it is even easier on my wallet.  This is also where the car is a bit annoying.  It sends me a text and an email that it has "stopped charging due to an interruption".  Well duh!  I told it not to charge until midnight.  It still does it every time I plug in.

So the glitch here is you have to temporarily override the charging schedule when you plug in at a commercial charger.  I found out the hard way that Blink will still charge you $3.00 if you are plugged in for three hours even if you aren’t charging because you left it in “delay charge” mode.  

I dropped the XM traffic subscription.  More than once a freeway would be closed late at night and the XM would show it as the fastest route home.  Even funnier, my wife beat me home a couple of times just sitting in traffic while I was detouring all over town taking the “faster” route.  Now I leave the GPS route planning in Eco mode and it works perfectly.

The only other place I would change the programming logic is in the charger port alarm.  If the car is fully charged and it is plugged in to 240V, the alarm shouldn't go off.  The next person should be able to unplug your car and charge.   As far as I can tell the only options are alarm on and alarm off.  When the 110V is plugged in, I can see the charger alarm almost making sense, but does anyone really think that will stop somebody from taking your charger?  I etched my license plate into the charger and still don't think that will do anything to deter a determined thief.

So far, the Chevy Volt is still fun to drive and my wife is still taking it every chance she gets.  The magic hasn’t worn off yet, I’ll let you know where we are at five months and 5000 miles.

240V 30A Power Max

240V 15A Voltec Charger

4000 miles and My Chevy Volt Goes Stupid, Or at Least It Made Me Look Stupid

So here we are at month four in my life with my Chevy Volt Plug in car.  I was on track to set a record month of zero gas usage.  I had found electric charging everywhere I went for the month, and had hoped to post a picture of the dash reading 1000 miles 0.0 gal gas.  No Dice.

It all began when I attempted to outsmart myself by installing a Level 2 240v charger.  The faster charge rate of the Level 2 240v PEV charger allowed me to switch my electric plan to a plan with really cheap night rates for charging the car.  Just .09 per KWH.  Well below my lowest "Tier 1" rate on the old plan.

After programming the car with the rates and what time I depart my house, I put the car to bed and sure enough the next morning it was charged and ready to go.  The display said it started at 12:00 am and was complete at 3:48.  Charging at these hours cuts my charge cost in half at home.  So far it was a great start.

Then like many days, I headed off to Wally Park at LAX.  Normally the Valet's do a great job of parking the car, and using the portable charger in the car to plug it in.  When I return the car is charged for the trip home, and I don't feel bad paying the extra money to valet park.  When I got back this time,  the car had a range of 8 miles.  Exactly what it had when I dropped it off.  The Valet's insisted they had it plugged in.

Arriving in my garage after getting 44 mpg on the way home using gas, I realized that the valet didn't know to change the mode from delay charge to instant charge.  I felt pretty stupid for arguing with them about the car not charging.

Note to you Chevy Volt software guys-

Please add a line of code - If Location not equal "HOME", then Charge Instantly "YES".

This should be a no brainer, but I guess they didn't plan on me driving 30-40 miles each way.

The next day, I don't know what happened, no body does, not the Volt people, not OnStar, and maybe not even the Volt itself.  I got home plugged it in and the little lights started blinking green, indicating that it was plugged in and not charging.  This is what I expected since it was programmed to delay charge at 12:00 am.

Much to my surprise when I jumped in at 9:00 am, the car was not charged.  It still had a range of zero since I had driven home from LAX on the gas generator.  At midnight for whatever reason it didn't charge.

Last night I didn't quite trust it, so I went ahead and manually started it charging at 10:30 pm.  Tonight I will try and let it charge on it's own again since I am not going anywhere on Tuesday that I am aware of.

I'll let you know how it goes.  For now I am pulling the Volt out of its third place position on my list of my favorite cars for making me look stupid and being stupid all in the same week.