Does Your Volt Have Bugs? Mine Does...

Overall my Chevy Volt has been great for the last five and a half months, but is isn't perfect by any means.  This week has been a challenge, in fact the last three weeks have really been odd.

In previous posts, I talked about the issues with valet parking and auto charging when the alarm is set and the auto lock feature is on.   If you valet and autolock the car, they can't even get to the charger after the key is hung in the key rack.  

That is just one annoyance.  We also discovered that if you send an address to turn by turn, cancel before it loads and try and send it to the  "in dash Nav" it locks up the whole system.  I figured out how to fix it, but I am not giving that secret away.  Chevrolet says this bug will be fixed next time it is at the dealer for a software update.  Why can't the Volt by like my iPhone and update while I am asleep?

Speaking of the iPhone, upgrading to iOS 7 changed how the Volt and the iPhone get along.  The feature that allowed me to play music over bluetooth no longer works.  Pluggin in with a USB cable which didn't work before, now works brilliantly but my phone won't work on handsfree when the iPod mode is active via USB. What didn't work works and what did work doesn't.  

Another interesting issue that has popped up is related to the clock.  For whatever reason it can't keep time.  Each week it is almost a full minute off.  Why doesn't a GPS equipped car use satellite time?

This leads right to the next question.  How come a GPS equipped car can't tell if I am plugged in at home on an electric schedule or away and commercial chargers?  I shouldn't have to tell the car I am at home so it should charge between 12 and 6 or I am at a parking garage and paying to charge so it should charge now should I?  I paid for 4 hours at a blink charger only to find out I left the car in delay mode and didn't charge it at all.  $4.00 down the drain.  I don't know who was being more stupid, me or the car.

The single most annoying system in the Volt so far is the "anti collision" system.  There is a button on the steering wheel to turn it on or off.  I think it is a placebo.  With the system off, when you exit the freeway, it sees that you aren't following the lines and starts yelling at you.  Once on the offramp and in between the lines again it is fine.  Even with the system off, it will turn off the cruise control automatically.  While this doesn't sound like much, I have learned that I can get three to five more miles out of the battery in "L" instead of "D".  The problem is when the cruise control turns off and you are in "L" you are already in the first level of regenerative breaking.

On the highway, the guy behind catches up awfully quick for no reason.

Cruising on the freeway about once every 15 miles the car will "see" a potential collision and turn off the cruise control.   Most of the time I have no idea what it "sees".  Tonight I was in the second lane, with no cars on either side or in front of me for at least a quarter mile, and it beeped and flashed and turned off the cruise control as if I was about to hit another car.  All I can figure was fog on the camera lens as I got closer to the beach?

I can't imagine what the "big brothers" at Progressive are seeing if they get the data from a car like mine.  They must think Volt Drivers are high risk idiots trying to hit another car every 15 miles or so.  Thankfully I have USAA, and they don't try to raise my rates based on phantoms that the car thinks I am going to hit.

The last funny bug this week has to do with the lights.  The car has a new habit of going into night mode when I go through tunnels and not going back to day mode for well over a minute when we get back into the sunshine.  More than once I couldn't see a turn on the NAV screen because it was still dimmed into the night mode.  Sadly I am a GPS cripple, which means I can't find my way home from the corner without my magenta line and the checkered flag on the screen.  I turned the voice off because it interrupted my music.

Another funny bug, the tire pressure monitor will come on with a different tire each time I add air.  It will show that they all have 31 psi for example but one will be yellow.  Even when they warm up and all show 33 or 35 PSI it stays Yellow.  When I pump up to 36 they all turn green.  Within a week, usually in the morning, one will be yellow.  Over the last four weeks, each tire has turned yellow at least once.

I wonder if the guys at GM are laughing their butts off, or think I don't care for my car and am trying to hit everything in site?

So how is your Volt doing?  Don't worry Chevrolet, we still want another one.  Slate Grey if you have a spare sitting around.

Is iOS 7 A Trick To Force You To Upgrade Your iPhone?

Ever since I switched to the iPhone, I have been a raving lunatic fan, laughing at all who go with anything else.  Once in my life I worked for Apple as a contract employee so maybe this is expected.  I did try an Android phone, a Windows Phone, and even a Blackberry first.

The android phone didn't last a month. I couldn't use it and didn't have the time to learn it or figure it out.  The Blackberry worked great, so when my wife got an iPhone 3G, I simply upgraded my Blackberry.  At the time, no self respecting business owner would own an iPhone.  They were still "toys". 

Today I took a class from Marki Costello, and noticed that she still had a Blackberry. It made me realize how much more of my online life I was attending too because of my iPhone.  She didn't care about Twitter, Facebook or social media in general.  Like me she feels it is a necessary evil of her business.  In fact a good part of my business exists simply because social media has become a necessary evil to almost all businesses.

Leaving the class I had 25 emails, 10 messages and a couple of voicemails.  One of them was from an attorney asking for some technical assistance on a texting while driving case.  After this call, all I can say is don't do it.  It isn't worth it.

We walked over to Johnny Rockets for lunch and I started answering all of these messages.  Half of me was thinking how cool it was that I could do this and not be in the office, while the other half realized only two emails, one message and one of the two voicemails really needed my attention.  The rest would have never known if I looked at them or not.

Trying to respond to the only email that mattered just about gave me an aneurism.  I am sure that my thumbs were hitting ten or more letters and nothing would appear on the screen.  Then everything would appear all jumbled up.  This didn't happen with iOS 6.x  

When I tried to change apps from the main screen, the swipe motion opened an app just as often as it actually swiped the screen.  More annoying.

Then I attempted to get my voicemails, and the phone couldn't do it.  Five bars, er dots, and I can't get Voicemail?  45 seconds later, the screen changed so I could hit the play icon.  63 seconds later noise be can to emanate from the speaker.  I now believe that iOS 7 is a trick to get me to spend $500 each on two phones.  

In the past every upgrade to an OS from Apple gave you more and went faster.  iOS 7 is the first time I have regretted making a software upgrade.  It worked fine on my iPad2, and I needed to upgrade that for a software package I use regularly for work.  Thinking it would be easier to just have everything be the same I upgraded my iPhone.  Bad Dog.

Thankfully, my brilliant wife stayed on iOS 6 reminding me "It works, why change?"  The problem is her phone is now out of apple care and the home button doesn't always work when you leave the Apple Store.  Of course it works fine in there.  So it looks like two new phones need to get worked into the budget quick.  Ouch

I was excited to go buy my iPhone 4 and put my Blackberry to rest in a box in the garage.  Getting the iPhone 5, not so.  I feel like I was forced to choose between an upgrade of my phone, or changing to another phone that will take up all my time to learn how to use it again.  

The new windows phone looks great, but it doesn't work right out of the box, get all of my contacts, email accounts and set it self up just by plugging into my MacBook Air and connecting with iTunes does it?  Besides with two Mac Mini's, three iPads, two iPhones, an iPod touch and a Request Server with iTunes in the house, a PC phone just isn't going to cut it.

Never mind my Insteon Lighting Control is run by a little magic box with software running on the iPads and my iPhones.  

Apple has broken the code.  Like any great drug dealer.  The first iPhone was "free", and then for years they made it better, faster and cheaper.  The iPhone 4 was so far ahead of the iPhone 3 that the day after I came home with my iPhone 4 my wife ran out and got on the list.  I got an early release thanks to a good friend at AT&T.  Now that I am hooked, they know it and are selling me More More and More.  And yes I am still buying so don't be surprised to find me with a 5s which also means new chargers, new accessories, new cables, new docs.  This bill isn't going to be pretty. 

They couldn't just keep one silly little connector now could they.  I bet they are going to try and get me to by a iPad mini next, after all, with the iPhone 5, I'll already have all the accessories.

It's a trick (that worked) and that is my verdict.  What's yours?