Monday, February 28, 2011

First Fillup

I had my first fillup of Gasoline after two and a half weeks with 835 miles on the Odomiter ( I recieved the car with 13 miles on the Odometer) I filled it up with 7.672 gallons of premium gas for a calculated 107.1 mpg. but according to the trip computer which I reset when I purchased the car I traveled 821.7 miles but used 8.8 gallons for a 92.6 mpg rating, and finally the Volts lifetime rating say I'm at 102 mpg.
no matter how you calculate it the car is using very little gas and thats what I like to see.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

One week with the chevy Volt

Its been one week since I bought my Chevy Volt, and its been a great experiance driving it so far I've driven 424 miles, 230 of which were in EV mode and have a lifetime gas milage of 93 mpg. Most days here in NJ have been fairly cold, which reduces the electric rangeto 30-35 miles per charge but yesterday it warmed up to 50 and I was able to drive the whole day (39 miles ) without using any gas. Over the weekend we took two long drives 80-100 which really lowered my mpg, but thats ok because with my old all electric MINI E I wouldnt have even tried the drive, and would have taken a gas car instead. With the Volt I have two cars in one, a short range electric and a longer range gas hybrid.

So what's it like to drive an electric car, in a word smooth, there is no roughness from the engine, no roughness from transmission shifting, and very little roughness from road. Sometimes I can tell when the engine comes on, mainly from a light vibration near my foot rather then any noise, but mostly I only know its on by looking at the Gas/Electric milage screen.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

My Volt is Home

Well the day I've been waiting for has finally come, the brand new range extended electric vehicle Chevrolet Volt is mine. I purchased the car on Tuesday from Crane Chevrolet, they were a great group there who treated me well and made me feel like a valued customer, not like the guy we can stiff for extra money and we might consent to letting him buy the car from us, which is how I felt at Chevrolet of Jersey City.

Anyway the days, months, years of waiting are finally over, so many delays there were many times when I just wanted to go out and buy a new car any new car, but I didnt, I waited and waited. Looking back I wish I'd kept the MINI E, it was a fun car and I've really missed it, but now I'm back in an electric car again and things couldnt be better.

As you can see I got a Red Volt, but the picture doesnt do justice to just how how beautiful the Red color is, while at the dealership I saw a white one, which was my second choice, it looked nice, but when I saw my Red one I was so so glade I'd waited for a Red Volt. Also from the picture you can see our work parking lot has no shortage of Salt on it, I'm going to be spending a lot of time at the car wash, unlike the MINI E which couldnt have an undercarriage wash.

At Crane Chevrolet, Mike the salesman spent a few hours going over all the features on the Volt, can you say information overload:) It was great, so what all could we talk about for three hours? Well there's charging the batteries of course, and driving modes normal, sport, and mountain, then there is Onstar which is its own course, the infotainment system which will take weeks to truely understand it all, and climate control  with auto this and auto that, oh and GPS navigation. Unfortunately someone forgot to plug my Volt in last night so I only had 16 miles of electric range when we started, and only 10 miles after 3 hours of playing with the systems,  heating ourselves to stay warm, and a short test drive. I also found out later they forgot to pump up the tires, they were all low on pressure.

Finally it was time to drive off on my own, there's nothing more nerve racking then pulling out of a dealers lot in your brand new car, while every other car on the road is zooming by, luckly the Volt has serious power and I had no trouble merging onto busy Rt 46. One of the cool features of Onstar offers is the ability to press a button, and tell a person where you want to go, in my case Nauna's in Montclair, Tom's restraunt that has become the mecka of Electric Driving in Northern New Jersey. They quickly found the address and downloaded it to my Volt's Navigation system. So I followed the Voice navigation, with a couple wrong turns, and ended up at Nauna's  just as the Gas engine kicked in. Unfortunately Tom wasnt in so I headed inot work, way latter then I had originally planned, the Voice navigation, guiding me through a section of New Jersey I'm not at all familiar with.

Eventually I got home and plugged the car into its 240 volt charger, and spent the rest of the evening playing with the infotainment system, and loading CD's onto the hard drive.