In which your Race Organizer drives 340 miles, burns 2.1 gallons of gas
The 2014 season of the 24 Hours of LeMons is in the books, and my role as Chief Justice of the LeMons Supreme Court had me traveling to 18 races in 12 states and evaluating everything from the Mitsubishi i-MiEV to the Chevy SS (plus quite a few others) from the perspective of your perpetually exhausted, surrounded-by-weird-machinery Race Organizer. For the season-ender event at The Track Formerly Known As Sears Point, I decided to follow up the previous California machine— the very green Nissan Leaf SL— with Detroit's poster-child plug-in hybrid, the 2015 Chevrolet Volt. I put plenty of miles on the Volt during five days with the car, plugged it into numerous sketchy wall outlets, and burned a mere 2.1 gallons of gas. Here's what it was like.
I picked up the Volt at the Oakland Airport and, as I always do when visiting the San Francisco Bay Area, headed to my parents' place in nearby Alameda, otherwise known as The Island That Rust Forgot. Alameda is packed with daily-driven old vehicles that you'd normally expect to see only at car shows— say, this elderly Bronco/Land Cruiser/Scout threesome— and I parked right in front of this '73 Pontiac Formula Firebird when I went to the island's old-school hardware storeto pick up a heavy-gauge extension cord. In a very distant sense, the old Pontiac is the ancestor of the electric Chevy.
It's about 50 miles from my childhood home in Alameda to Race Sonoma, and I wanted to do as much of that driving in 100 percent electric mode as possible. Armed with my new 12-gauge extension cord and the knob-and-tube wiring system in my parents' 1889 Victorian, I plugged the Volt's charger into a not-so-reliable outlet and began topping off the batteries.
Fully charged, the Volt's batteries are good for a claimed 38 miles. Unlike other EVs I've driven, the Volt's electric-range display is not wildly optimistic; what it tells you is likely to be pretty accurate. The main display of the instrument cluster is quite busy, sometimes distracting, but it's no problem to figure out what's going on with the charging process. GM says it takes 10-16 hours to get a full charge into the Volt with ordinary 120VAC wall-outlet power, and about four hours with a 240VAC charging station.
Leaving for the track the next morning, I encountered typical Bay Area Friday-morning traffic, i.e., many miles of creeping along in stop-and-go fashion. Determined to get as many electric miles as possible, I kept the heater turned off despite the low-50s temperatures. Even with the chilly interior temperature, the Volt was quite comfortable and the audio system (in this case, the Bose setup that comes with the $995 navigation/premium-audio package) did justice to my favorite Congos tunes.
At some point on Interstate 80 in Emeryville, an urgent-looking warning popped up on the navigation screen: Dense fog advisory in Butte County, 150 miles to the north of where I'd be going. I had to fumble with the touchscreen to remove the warning, which turned out to be a finicky task on an ill-paved budget-cutty California highway. Soon after, I was warned of high winds in Shasta County, way up near Oregon, and (for nowhere near the first time, as it would turn out) cursed my laziness in neglecting to skim the entire owner's manual for configuration of obscure warning settings before setting out on my journey.
With much of the 50-mile drive to Sears Point taking place at a rush-hour creep and no HVAC drain on the batteries, the Volt managed to keep on pure electric power for a good 44 miles before the gasoline engine fired up. What's really impressive about the internal-combustion/electric powertrain in the Volt is the absolute seamlessness of the switch between one form of drive and the other; at full throttle, you can detect a gasoline engine operating, but that's about the only time. The Volt drives like a good comfortable GM midsize sedan, more like an Impala than a Malibu, and the fatigue factor of my 90-minute drive was low. This is always a Race Organizer plus, given the high-stress workplace of a 24 Hours of LeMons event.
I pulled into the paddock and began my quest for a power outlet located close to the garage where the LeMons Supreme Court would be doing its inspection of the race's 175 or so vehicles. I decided that the best spot would be right next to the LeMons Supreme Court's traditional bribe table. Inspecting 175 cars takes a solid eight hours, plus a few hours of setup and administrative stuff, giving the Volt time to get a decent fraction of a full charge for the return drive.
After inspecting the cars and packing up the gear, I had to extricate the Volt from a cramped space and get out of the garage bays. When performing maneuvers such as this, the Volt provides audio and visual feedback that I feel compelled to describe as panic-stricken. It doesn't take much imagination to picture a cadre of GM lawyers flashing laser-pointers at Slide #744 of a marathon PowerPoint presentation, demanding even more beeps, tones, danger symbols, and disclaimers, as the beleaguered managers slump in their chairs and agree to all of it. Most manufacturers seem to listen to their most paranoid attorneys when it comes to this stuff, so the lack of this sort of voodoo-imprecation-to-ward-off-the-lawsuits thinking is one thing that makes the Tesla Model S's user interface so pleasant.
Which brings me to my one big complaint about a car that's otherwise a technological masterpiece: many of the driver's displays and controls are poorly laid out, slow to react to input, and frustrating to use. Granted, I spent many years working in the software industry, where new ideas can be implemented much more quickly than in the automotive industry, and so I'm more sensitive to this stuff that I should be… but it still drives me crazy that you can buy a $40 smartphone in a flyblown Shenzhen street market and get a better touchscreen interface than what you'll get in a brand-new car. Once you memorize the location of all the dash buttons (which appear to have been lifted straight from a 1992-vintage microwave oven) and the menus on the touchscreen interface, though, I'm sure you'd be fine.
California LeMons races tend to be packed with Silicon Valley types, and so I sought out racers who work at high-profile, known-for-great-design corporations (that would likely sue me out of existence if I mentioned their names) and had them go through the Volt's various interfaces and point out glitches that they'd never have been able to get away with at their day jobs. This exercise became, well, depressing after several user-interface experts weighed in (e.g., "I suspect that they are emulating some long-discontinued processor in there"), and so I grabbed a very sharp racer who works as an engineer at a (GM competitor) car manufacturer and asked him for his opinion. "In our industry, the process of designing and updating this sort of interface is so painful, and under so many weird legal and organizational constraints, that what those software geeks think can be done here is basically a bunch of candyland bullshit," he said, and then I felt guilty for being one of them and judging the Volt so harshly. So, the upshot here is that only the nerdliest of UI nerds is going to be driven crazy by this stuff, and even then only until said nerd has RTFM'd up and then memorized the location of all those microwave-oven buttons. OK? OK!
I drove back to Alameda Friday night, with the Volt having obtained 28 miles worth of charge during my workday and thus able to drive more than half the journey on the electric motor, and plugged it in for a full overnight charge. On Saturday, the lack of traffic and 70 mph cruising speeds cut the all-battery range down to just over 30 miles. When I arrived at the track, I set the car up for charging just outside of the Penalty Box.
Because I'd need to use the Volt to drive to all corners of the Race Sonoma facility when taking a break from punishing miscreant drivers in order to shoot photos of the action, it would be receiving fewer hours of charging. In addition, receiving its power through about 100 feet of janky scavenged-up extension cords (note: the Volt's charger specifically forbids using an extension cord, but I figured I'd be able to keep an eye out for melting insulation, etc.) would be likely to cut down the current flow. On the plus side, I could keep an eye on the car while doing my judging thing.
A Race Organizer Review tradition is the Pose Your Race Car With My Review Car Penalty, in which a miscreant driver (i.e., one who has spun out, crashed, gone off-roading, passed under a caution flag, or otherwise screwed up) with a car made by the same manufacturer as my review car must pose his or her car just so with my car. While not as great as the '14 Impreza with '85 RX shot, the photo of the Volt with the '84 Corvette of Team Learning2Turn (which finished in 153rd place) should put a lump in the throats of true Chevy fans.
Speaking of LeMons racers and the Volt, this car did not impress a single racer with its automotive awesomeness. For that, a Race Organizer needs something faster, or at least weirder, and Volts are common sights all over the Bay Area and not particularly noteworthy in this context.
I did a lot of driving on washed-out dirt access roads and gravel lots, in search of good photographic vantage points (of which Race Sonoma has many), and the Volt was very Impala-like in its ability to go where needed and make all my camera gear accessible. Unlike electric cars of a more punitive era, the Volt drives like a real car and doesn't make you sacrifice function for greenness.
As for the actual amount of planet-saving you'd do with the Volt… well, that all depends on where your electricity comes from. After 340 miles of driving, I filled up the gas tank and put in 2.119 gallons. In addition, I was using about 12.9 kilowatt-hours each time I put a full charge into the Volt, at about $1.68 per charge. Alameda Municipal Power, which provided my overnight charges between days at the race track, says that 37% of its electricity comes from renewable sources (most of which are non-carbon-generating), while the other 63% comes from "unspecified" sources… and if you think that means mostly coal and natural gas, you're probably right. Then again, internal-combustion engines piss away a huge chunk of their energy as waste heat, but electrical power lines suffer from big transmission losses, but dirty old coal is going away, but the jury is still out on the impact of EVs on pollution levels. One thing for sure: if you put serious photovoltaic panels on your roof and charge your Volt that way, you'll be emitting no carbon and no particulates as long as you drive on the batteries alone.
If you're a serious cheapskate, this car— which has a base price of just over 34 grand— would need gas prices to climb to collapse-of-civilization levels in order to have the fuel savings (versus the 10-grand-cheaper Malibu) make up for the additional purchase cost. For the true cheapskate, the super-stingy and surprisingly-fun-to-drive Spark EV might be a better choice, though local and federal tax credits (and deals at your local Chevy store) have a huge effect on the math.
So, the Volt is a pleasant daily driver, in the long tradition of such cars from GM, and it will run on cheap electric power for most or all of a typical American's commute. There's no range anxiety with the brilliantly executed hybrid powertrain, and the car isn't bad-looking. How green it is depends on how its plug-in electricity is generated, so it makes sense to check with your power company if you care about such things. The driver's controls and touchscreen interface can be frustrating and seem outdated. LeMons racers don't even notice this car. Overall, a decent car with some flaws that probably wouldn't bother you after a few weeks
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