General Motors’ shift from an internal combustion engine-producing company to one that makes electric motors is sputtering. EV sales are up, but growing slower than expected. The company’s next-generation Ultium platform, in particular, isn’t meeting expectations. GM’s new electric trucks and SUVs seem perennially delayed — or full of buggy software.
I think I have an easy solution to a lot of these problems: bring back the Chevy Volt.
Remember the Volt, GM’s scrappy Toyota Prius fighter from the mid-2010s? The company was lauded when it first came out in 2010 as a prescient bet on vehicles with electric powertrains. And it was undeniably a very good hybrid. The first-generation model got 36 miles of electric range before the gas kicked in, while later versions would get a whopping 53 miles of electric range.
Fwiw, after two months of owning an EV, with a L2 charger at home, I’ve used an outside charger only once, and it was 110 miles away. I also converted to an induction stove this year, so the stove circuit cost about the same as the charger circuit (plus the charger was $500) … both are 50a
So far, the range thing is a real issue. My car supposedly has a 330 mile range under ideal conditions, but they never are. In the cold, with pre-heating and a loaded up car, and my son the speed-demon driving, 110 miles was 52% of the battery. If you do consider an EV and live where there is winter, my experience is to expect only 2/3 the advertised range
Which is my concern. In the middle of nowhere where I’m at we regularly go to that city with a charger 100 miles away. It’s where hardware stores, furniture stores, cheaper groceries, clothing stores and pretty much anything else you can’t buy at a gas station are. If we go in the winter, unless we go to the mall where the charger is and deliberately walk around every. Single. Time. We won’t have the range to go to that city and drive to every store we would usually go to.
Yeah, I’ve been living in an urban area long enough to forget what that’s like. Certainly it’s tougher where things are spread out more.