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Presence
From the outside, the four Volts lined up sitting silently in the pissing down rain don't look much different than the car we spent a little bit of time with this spring. If you haven't seen a Volt yet, well, you should know it isn't a car that will turn heads, but neither is it a one that will sneer lips. It looks like a Chevy compact, from a distance easily mistaken for the company's other new little cruiser the Cruze. In terms of profile nothing stands out -- exactly the point on such an efficiency-minded auto: anything sticking out drags in the wind and drag is a cardinal sin of those who chant at the church of aerodynamics.
Ultimately the Volt is a better looking car going than coming, but get a little closer and the details start to come out. |
Getting comfortable
The prototype model we drove in the spring had an interior clearly cobbled together with wood, sticks, and bubblegum that looked nice and advanced and cool so long as you didn't have your index finger a half-inch too far to the left when shifting into P. Do so and you'd be quickly shifting back to D again and driving to ER where some kind doctor would hopefully sew that finger back on again. The new shifter is now smaller and unlikely to sever digits against the console when it tucks into park.
Dominating the dash is a mass of cool and creamy white plastic in the center console, peppered by capacitive buttons. |
On there you can get a real-time view of the flowing of energy from batteries or internal combustion engine to electric motor. It's way fancier than that found in the Prius (think PS3 splash screen to PS1 boot-up) but ultimately shows the same information. You can also get readouts on your personal driving efficiency, see how far you've made it on batteries alone, and interact with the navigation system.
For a factory nav unit the one in the Volt is quite good -- not flashy by any means, the interface is a bit clumsy, and the lady voice is bossy and weird as usual, but she's full of info. Lane closure up ahead? She'll let you know with plenty of time to get out of the way and then tell you just how much stop-and-go traffic you'll sit through thanks to all the schmucks who tried to merge a little later.
A second 7-inch display sits behind the steering wheel, presenting necessary information like speed and fuel tank capacity while also spitting out remaining range, battery charge, and of course telling you that you've left the blinker on -- easy to do here as its chime is awfully quiet. We have some concerns about using a panel like this to display vital car information, as when the temperature drops way south of zero your average LCD turns into a Technicolor dream show, but we're told it'll work just fine even in Fargo.
The top of the dash, where you might expect an expanse of cheap black plastic, is actually tastefully sculpted with grooves flowing outward into the door sills and back from there, a nice aesthetic touch that shows someone actually tried to do something interesting in here, and succeeded.
Front seats are leather-clad, heated, and comfortable, though they show their domestic heritage by being rather flat. They're also unfortunately fully manual and yes, we're sure that power ones would put a tiny hurting on the Volt's efficiency, but this is a $41k car we're talking about here. Throw us some electric controls. Rear seats, meanwhile, are nearly as good as the fronts, with plenty of legroom and plenty of comfort.
Other details include USB and 3.5mm inputs tucked away in the glove box as well as a 40GB entertainment system onto which you can copy tunes or directly from the FM... you know, so you can record that new song by that one girl you heard during the sad retrospective that rolled before the credits of that show you kind of like.
It's only when you're sitting in traffic that you really notice the engine's presence, droning and complaining occasionally as you wait for a light. |
However, this does nothing to help pedestrians hear you coming, and instead of a constant murmuring noise like found on the Leaf GM engineers basically put a second horn mode on the Volt. Pull on the light stalk and the car lets out a string of unobtrusive chirps, useful when slaloming through a couple of texting jaywalkers but not contributing noise pollution the rest of the time.
The drive
It's possible that's because we also made liberal use of the bum-sweatening seat warmers, or maybe it's because we weren't using Low gear enough on our trip out of DC. In your average slushbox shifting it into L just keeps the transmission from selecting high gear. Here it hugely boosts the regenerative braking effect so that as soon as you lift off the throttle the car quite rapidly turns inertia into tickle juice for the Li-Ion cells.
It's a little like driving a Formula One car with a high downforce package on, except not really the same at all, but it actually does result in boosted efficiency. With a little planning you can avoid using the mechanical brakes almost altogether.
And then there's Sport mode, which boosts the throttle response and turns the Volt into a respectably quick car. This naturally doesn't do your EV range any favors, but human commuters can't live on superior MPG figures alone. A little fun goes a long way. Similarly the car is quite handy on cloverleafs, with not exactly nimble but positive turn-in and handling that will have you grinning before the front tires start to push, even in the rain.
The Volt isn't a sports car by anyone's definition of the word but it's definitely more fun to drive than the Prius. |
That said, we certainly felt the Volt's final impact, the brutal one that broke its wheel just as we were entering the Lincoln Tunnel. A pothole swallowed the left-front and dinged the inner lip of the wheel just enough to set the integrated tire pressure monitors alight. Thankfully we made it through the tunnel, but had to break out the car's trunk-mounted inflation kit to limp the last mile to our downtown destination, milky white coagulant oozing onto the asphalt.
Mileage
This kind of trip is basically an example of what the Volt can do, not what it should do. |
Wrap-up
But, clearly if you have a need to go farther than 30 miles between charges on a regular basis the Volt makes no sense. A standard economy car will save you tens of thousands of dollars up front and deliver better mileage in the long-run. Need something a bit more overtly environmentalist? Next year's plug-in Prius we just tested will surely be cheaper, does 15 miles on a charge, delivers 60ish MPG over the rest of your trip, and can still coddle your inner environmentalist.
Or, you could just buy a $16,000, 40mpg Ford Fiesta, put a plant on the dash, and donate the difference to charity.
Update: A lot of people are wondering in comments why this route was chosen when it clearly did not make best use of the Volt's Li-Ion assets, and the simple answer is that it wasn't our choice. We'd hoped to test a Volt over a couple of days of mixed driving conditions, but were told that wasn't possible, and this opportunity was given to us as an alternative.
[Thanks to GM's Larry Wilson for acting as an impromptu cameraman during the trip]