2011 Chevrolet Volt Test Drive Uncovers Good & Bad

Yesterday, GM provided electric-car enthusiasts and a few journalists the opportunity to test drive the new 2011 Chevy Volt in a parking lot near AT&T Park in San Francisco. After a conversation with Team Volt and a few minutes behind the wheel, here are the insights we had.

1. The electricity-driven miles are simple, but the charge-sustaining mode is more difficult. The most famous aspect of the Volt is that it can drive up to 40 miles on electric power alone before the engine kicks in to maintain the charge of the battery pack. During those 40 electric miles, the Volt acts exactly like a pure EV (electric vehicle). The ride is smooth, fast, and very quiet. More drive time is required to make a judgment on the dash instrumentation, but it seemed a bit daunting at first blush.Really, the biggest challenge facing the Volt is what occurs after the 40 electric miles. “The EV mode was the easy thing,” explained Tony Posawatz, the Volt’s vehicle line director. The difficult part, he said, was employing the Volt’s high-tech software to “blend and smooth out” when and how the traditional engine is activated to lengthen the driving range.“At low speeds, the engine almost never comes on in charge sustaining mode. At high speeds, we take advantage of running the RPMs a little bit higher, but never to a point where it affects the pleasability of the car. The engine is never roaring.”
2. Extra driver controls are forthcoming. Several weeks ago, we learned that the Chevy Volt will offer “mountain mode” that lets drivers choose a higher amount of battery charge to offer additional resources for steep, long uphill drives. Posawatz said that the European model of the Volt will most likely offer a “hold” option, but the name of the feature might change. “You can hit a button and wherever you’re at on your state of charge, it will hold the charge sustain at that point. It’s like saving your EV miles,” Posawatz explained. This option could be perfect for conserving your EV miles after a long highway drive in a high-traffic city, where EV miles would probably be more helpful.
3. Auto connectivity is crucial. Yesterday, GM offers additional details about its partnership with Google and also showed that the mobile app for the Volt will let drivers schedule and monitor charging from wherever they are. The app will also have the ability to open and close doors from any location and download directions from the Web to the vehicle’s navigation system.And that’s not all…“If you understand a person’s driving patterns, you can perhaps in the future modify the operation of the vehicle, contoured to his or her driving pattern,” explained Posawatz. He said that the goal is to understand the driver’s needs and real-world behavior, possibly including where to position charging stations.
4. GM is making a large transition to the consumer buying process. GM has officially moved on to the Volt’s sales process. “We’re at the point where the vehicle and the technology are pretty much locked in,” explained Rob Peterson, General Motors spokesman. “Instead, we’re going to start seeing a lot of activity around how people actually put the car in their driveway.”Peterson says that GM has built roughly 130 Volts thus far, and those units are nearly all in the care of engineers. In other words, buyer test drives will not happen for a while simply because there are not yet enough units to go around. In the next few weeks, GM employees test-driving the Volt will start equipping their own garages with charging paraphernalia so the automaker can discover any possible problems with the process.The 2011 Chevy Volt will be manufactured “in the thousands,” says Peterson, and by the “tens of thousands” in the coming years. The 2011 Volt will be on sale from November 2010 to summer 2011, which is when the 2012 Chevy Volt will go on sale, with a few technology and design changes possible.
5. The whisper-quiet Volt offers clues to alert technicians and pedestrians of its presence. Because hybrid and electric vehicles are almost silent, a concern exists about their danger to the visually impaired. The makers of the Volt addressed this issue by enabling drivers to pull on the bright-lights lever to make a chirping sound from the hood. It’s much less startling than the horn, but still loud enough to inform people of the vehicle’s presence.