The other day I was at a stop light next to a hopped up Civic with a fart-can exhaust pipe. I got to wondering if the Bolt was faster than a Civic Si. I did some research and the answer is yes (depending on the year & trim).
The Chevy Bolt clocks in at 0-60 mph in 6.4 seconds, and a quarter mile in 14.9. My old WRX could run the 1320 (1/4 mile) in 14.3 seconds. But as you can see, the Bolt is no slouch and it’s in pretty good company with some cars that people would associate as sporty:
BTW, if you’re into sport tuning the Bolt EV Tuning facebook group is a great resource, you’ll find people doing autocross, track days, installing sway bars & coilovers, etc.
People have tons of questions about owning and driving an electric vehicle (EV). There are also a bunch of people that nay-say and make assumptions about EVs without first hand experience.
I look at the new Ford F-150 Lightning as a truck of the future. The base model is around $40k, it has a 230 mile range, and can tow 11,000 lbs.
You’re not going to get 230 miles range while towing.
Well duh! We have a Highlander Hybrid that gets 24-27MPG normally but when it’s pulling a boat it gets 10-12. Towing cuts the effective range of any vehicle to about half. Anyone that thinks it would be otherwise is fooling themselves. Why is this such a surprise?
There’s another article covering the same topic that’s much more click-baity. The bottom line is, no matter if you’re using petroleum or electricity, towing reduces range. The Denali they used gets up to 20MPG (unladen). It was getting 9MPG while towing. The difference is the Denali has a 24-gallon tank, putting the range between 216-480 miles – towing and unladen. Range is still (equally) greatly reduced, but the longer starting range of the Denali provides a greater range cushion.
It’s not going to get me to my mother-in-law’s house in rural North Dakota
Again, you’re probably right, but how often are you actually going there? In 2022 I did one road trip that was longer than the total range of my electric vehicle. You know what I did? I took the van. Most couples/families have two cars. Even if both were full electric, you could rent a gasoline car if you’re driving to BFE where there are no charging stations. Guarantee the money you saved on fuel the rest of the year would cover your rental.
EVs don’t charge fast enough
This complaint is only valid on road trips (see above) and how many are you taking a year? I’ve driven my Chevy Bolt EV to Chicago multiple times and it is one of the slowest charging EVs – accepting a max of 53kwh. It takes about 45 mins to recharge so I plan my charging stop around my lunch break. Literally every other EV out there charges faster. Without experience, you have nothing to complain about. 99% of the year it will charge in your garage and be fully ready to use every morning. When was the last time your gasoline car did that?!?
I was talking to a friend about my Chevy Bolt after I got it, and remarked how many features it has. Then I realized nothing on the list of features would impress him. He’s the type of guy that gets a new car every 2 years, so he’s seen the gradual stair-step addition of features across several models.
The “new” automatic windows that go all the way up/down with a single button press astound/annoy me. That’s how far behind I was.
I’d driven a 2002 Subaru WRX since 2005. It was a fantastic little car that was terrifically fast. At the time it didn’t have a lot of extra features – you could buy the base WRX for less than $25k in 2002. While the base MSRP for a 2021 Chevy Bolt is in the $30k range, tax and dealer incentives frequently brought it to the $25k price point.
Are there some things I miss from my WRX that the Bolt doesn’t offer? Of course. One of the things I’m completely willing to let go of is the additional .6 seconds of quarter-mile time. The Bolt does it in 14.9 to the WRX’s (stock) 14.3. The fastest I ever drove my WRX in the 1/4 mile was 14.001 – after several modifications. I’m OK with the Bolt being “stuck” where it’s at in terms of speed, because the motor/transmission/drivetrain is so dead simple that it may last forever.
The things the WRX had that I will actually miss:
Great seats (the Bolt’s are notoriously un-bolstered)
CD Player
All wheel drive
Turbocharger
Manual transmission
Occasionally that rumbly sound (but not on road trips)
Part of the reason I bought the Bolt without a test drive is because of this enormous gap in time. I knew that there would be a tremendous amount of “new stuff” that I wasn’t accustomed to. Would I have purchased a higher trim level like the Premier if I had test driven? Maybe, but only for the stereo upgrade 🔊
Being a die-hard Minnesotan, I’ve developed some habits that I need to break. Many of these are stubborn/stupid habits that simply come from getting old and always doing things the old way.
One of them is my insistence on not using seat warmers in cars. Mostly because my first encounter with them was unknowing. I was riding in someones fancy car (Lexus) and it detected that a butt was in the passenger seat. Combined with the outdoor temperature, the climate computer decided it should activate the heated seat. About a minute later I was wondering if I had peed my pants 😳🍑🔥
I decided then and there that it would be the first and last time I used a heated seat… But was it really?
Driving my Chevy Bolt in winter, the range is reduced due to several factors: batteries don’t like the cold, the factory heater is a resistance unit instead of an efficient heat pump like on the newer Teslas. Combined with the fact that my car is currently limited to an 80% charge, the juice gets used up much faster in the winter.
I still love this car, and I’ve come to terms that I won’t be doing any winter road trips in it this year. But even with long-ish drives around town, I want to know my options for energy conservation. My two best friends in this department are the heated seats and the heated steering wheel.
Running both full blast for one person is less than one hundred watts 💯
Compare those numbers to the resistance style heater that is used to heat the cabin – it can use up to 9kW. That’s 9,000 watts y’all – enough power for a small rock concert 🎸 It works well – the cabin heats quickly, especially compared to an internal combustion engine. It’s just sort of a power hog… granted it won’t be using 9kW all of the time, but it will use that much to get up to your desired temperature.
Reducing heater usage
There are a few things you can do to reduce the mega energy sap from the heater:
Pre-heat the car while it’s plugged in
My 240V charger can deliver 40 amps of power to the vehicle, that’s 9kW (240V x 40A = 9600W). The Bolt will use up to 7.6kW of that (32A). If the car is plugged in while pre-conditioning, the Bolt will use as much of the AC power it can. This will pull at most 1-2kW from the battery even if the heater is going full-tilt. Result: pre-heating while plugged in won’t take away any range from your trip, plus your car is toasty warm when you get in.
Use the heated seats and steering wheel
I’ve learned to love the heated seats and steering wheel. You’ll be surprised how much a difference it makes to heat the surfaces your body touches. The wheel is like holding a hot cup of coffee, which has some sort of lizard-brain effect on your perceived comfort.
The climate controls will guess how high to turn the seat warmers on. Despite my earlier protests, I now find myself turning the seat heater up an additional setting so I can turn down the cabin heater a few degrees.
Turn the heater off
I don’t normally do this, but I will if I really need to conserve range or it’s not terribly cold out. The difficult part to manage when the heater is off is window fogging. Face masks help with moisture from our breath – what a strange time we live in. Wet hair from a recent shower certainly won’t help either. Even a cup of coffee can make things worse, but I have to draw the line somewhere! ☕
I really wish there was such thing as a heated foot plate. I think I could go further with heater off longer if my feet had a little heat 🥾🔥Maybe I’ll get some heated socks or boots to see how much it helps.
I knew having two electric-powered vehicles in the garage would initially present some charging problems. We have a garage fridge and an air compressor that already like to trip the circuit breaker when both are running full-tilt. Charging two vehicles from that same 120V circuit was going to be tricky.
Offset Charging Schedules
Until we could add a dedicated 240V circuit, the first thing I did was set charging schedules for both vehicles. I set the Bolt to charge from Midnight to 4PM. Because I work from home, I tend to drive my car (usually to rehearsal) after work.
Setting the Bolt’s charging schedule is a bit complex. It’s labeled rate scheduling because you can configure it to match your power company’s off-peak, mid-peak, and peak rates for weekdays and weekends, summer and winter. Lots of options!
I set the car to charge on off-peak only when at home and then made the off-peak hours Midnight to 4PM every day, year-round. Done and done.
The Pacifica is easier to set a schedule. It simply has start and stop times for weekdays and weekends. I set it to charge from 4PM to Midnight every day.
Because both vehicles clocks are synced to the cell phone network or GPS, I made them turn on/off at the exact same time. This seemed to work for a while until I tripped the breaker at 4PM one day. Just one second of overlap with one car coming off the charge and the other firing up was enough to trip the 20 amp circuit.
Both vehicles use 15-minute increments in their scheduling software. So I set the Bolt to charge from 12:15AM to 3:45PM to give a buffer. Still, on days when both cars were driven, neither were getting a full charge, so it was time for an upgrade.
240V Outlet & Level 1.5 Charging
To facilitate a Level 2 charger, we had an electrician install a 14-50 50-amp RV-style 240V outlet in the garage. If you have a 240V outlet and don’t yet have a Level 2 charger – don’t worry, you can double your charge rate with the included “portable” charger.
Dual Level 2 Charging
After the electrician installed a 50-amp 240V outlet, it was time to go big or go home at home. I ordered a Clipper Creek 40-amp dual car charger. While it’s true that most charging stations are just “fancy extension cords” – this one has some smarts in it. If two cars are charging at the same time it will split the charge and feed 20-amps to each vehicle. If only one vehicle is charging, it will get the full 40-amps.
At that rate, the van can charge fully in 2 hours and the Chevy could always get to a full charge overnight. Because having a Level 2 charger means we can really blast some power into charging, I set both vehicles charging schedules to 9PM-9AM which is off-peak for my power company.
Charging Extension
While I’m waiting to get my Bolt’s battery replaced because of the recall, I need to keep it outside. To be able to charge in the driveway I purchased a 40-amp J-1772 extension cable. It adds 20 feet to to my garage charger so I can reach it in the driveway. So the charge handle doesn’t just get left on the ground (or in the snow), I mounted a EV holster to the side of the garage.
When I first got the message about the battery recall affecting every model year Bolt, I started parking the car in the driveway (per Chevy’s recommendation). Before I got the extension cord I switched from using the high-amp Clipper Creek charger to the included “portable” charger, but plugged into 240 volts. This worked great for a while because I could use a normal extension cord with the included charger. To work on 240 volts, the extension cord just has to have low-gauge wires (thick) with no extras like LED indicator lights.
It started to become a nuisance as charging both cars meant I’d have to go out and switch the one active charge plug to the other car once the first was done. I could have purchased a 50-amp RV splitter for $100 and used both portable chargers at the same time. The 50 amp outlet would have more than enough overhead as each portable charger maxes out at 12 amps for 24 amps total. This would actually be a great (cheap!) setup for two cars and 240 volts without having to invest in a big charger.
But I already had the big charger and $100 was more than half of the J-1772 extension, so I went that route and it’s been working great.
