Driving the Chevy Volt

After years of anticipation, I got to drive the Chevy Volt on October 14th. The Volt Unplugged PR tour was visiting San Francisco, holding short test drives around the Presidio, right next to the Golden Gate Bridge.

The best part about the experience was standing in line with a bunch of other electric car nerds and chatting about the Volt. There's a lot of controversy around the Volt's drivetrain, so it was good to hear informed opinions. Of course there's a huge amount of selection bias here, but all of our enthusiasm for the Volt remains undiminished. GM told us it would be an car that ran on battery only until the battery ran out, and then ran on gas, and that's what they delivered. All the fuss about whether the Volt is really an electric car or whether GM lied in its description of the Volt seems rather orthogonal to the car and its technology. It was fun to talk with people who understood the details enough to discuss these things. Some of the people standing in line had already ordered their cars, so we talked a little about the ordering process and which dealerships are refraining from price gouging.

The actual drive was a little underwhelming. It felt like driving any other car, except I couldn't tell if the engine was on. The window was rolled down, and so I thought it'd be very obvious when the engine turned on and off, but I just couldn't tell. The battery had long been depleted by the time I came to drive the car, so it was in "Charge Sustaining" mode the entire time, where the job of the gasoline engine is to keep the battery at a minimum state of charge, despite the fact that power transients requested by the driver will momentarily deplete the battery under its minimum state of charge. I drove on winding, hilly roads around the Presidio, which limited the attention I could devote to the drive itself, since I was busy trying not to go the wrong way or run over pedestrians. I didn't get a chance to test the Volt's acceleration much because the speed limit was ~25 or 30.

The Volt's two LCD screens had a lot of information on them. I didn't watch the one in the center stack much, because I was trying to drive, but it was showing animations of how the power was flowing through the drivetrain. To be honest, the animations weren't that impressive to me, the framerate wasn't that high and the aesthetics of the animation were underwhelming. If I get a Volt, I'd like the option to show something besides those animations on the screen (which probably exists, I just didn't play with it much.) The main screen with the speedometer, etc. was easy to read and functional, if not beautiful. It has a little ball that rises and falls, shrinks and grows as you drive, with the goal being to keep it centered, where you have maximum efficiency. It was fairly easy to keep the ball centered, although it did make for slow driving - you need to start slowing down early and accelerate slowly to maximize efficiency, and the ball does a good job of informing you how well you're doing. The engineer who accompanied me on the drive engaged the "sport" mode for me (which required some cumbersome navigation of the computer in the center stack, I was glad I wasn't trying to do this while driving). Sport mode did make a big difference in how the car responded to my requests for acceleration - I floored it while the engineer was in mid-sentence explaining what sport mode is, and the "jerk" (rate of acceleration) was sufficient to interrupt him mid word. That was fun. =) The brakes seemed a little weird to me, they didn't seem as smooth as a normal car's brakes, although they didn't bother me too much. I'm ok with the car driving differently than a conventional car, after all the drivetrain is quite different. So, the most important part of the Volt - its drivetrain, seemed adequate to me. I didn't get to test it on the freeway, but it definitely seemed drivable, and as a car primarily driven by an electric motor, it has that intoxicating torque which I fondly remember from rides in my neighbor's EV1 back in the late 1990s.

The Volt as a car was smaller than I'd remembered from seeing it at the SF Auto show last year. It's much smaller than a Prius, more like the new Honda Insight. I would say everything about it is "snug". I don't think the Volt would work well for me if I were larger, or if I hated being in enclosed spaces. The air conditioning was running while I drove, it seemed normal, which is great since GM actually had to develop an all-electric heater/air conditioner for the Volt. The Volt has two color choices for the center stack: charcoal and white, the one I drove was white. I didn't like the white look, it seemed like it was copying an iPod circa 2001, despite the fact that Apple has moved on quite a ways from that design aesthetic since then. I also am not a huge fan of the capacitive buttons on the center stack. There must be 50 or so of them, and almost all of them are capacitive, meaning that they don't have a mechanical spring/electric connection like traditional buttons, but instead just detect the capacitance of your finger when it moves close. The stack itself is made of a continuous molded plastic piece, with little studs molded into the plastic to indicate where you should press to actuate a button. I think the studs really ruin the seamlessness of the center stack, and would prefer them to be removed. They don't add much tactile feedback anyway, it still feels like you're pressing a big flat piece of plastic. Despite my skepticism, the buttons actuated fine when I tried them, but they just seems like an unnecessary complication, and I'd prefer traditional buttons. I was curious, though, as to whether the buttons would still actuate if the driver had gloves on. Living for two years in Russia will convince you that you should be able to drive a car with gloves on, but I know the iPhone's capacitive touchscreen doesn't work with gloves on. Hence the South Korean trick of using mini-sausages to simulate the capacitance of a finger and allow you to use your iPhone outside when it's cold. I don't want to poke at my car's buttons with a sausage, thank you very much. So, I wrapped a sweater a couple times around my finger to simulate a glove, and then tried to actuate the sensors. They still worked, surprisingly. Perhaps the iPhone has such problems with gloves because it's trying to localize your finger more precisely, whereas the buttons on the Volt center stack don't need to be that precise. Anyway, the center stack seems functional, although I'd prefer a large charcoal monolith to a shiny white monolith. I'm also not a huge fan of GM's constant need to decorate everything with shiny shiny chrome strips. Like the top of the center stack - a chrome strip there does not make the car look "upscale", it just catches the sunlight and shines in the driver's eyes. The car I was driving had sedate plastic inserts in the doors, instead of having strong graphic patterns printed on them, they were blank silver.

I was a little concerned about the Volt's very low spoiler underneath the nose of the car, which was required to get good aerodynamic performance. It comes within 3 or 4 inches of the pavement, which means that it's going to get mangled by curbs and debris all the time. It's made of soft rubber, but I couldn't help but notice that on some of the Volts being driven around at the event, the rubber had already been a little beaten up and looked deformed. Maybe it's just a preproduction problem, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of Volts eventually end up losing that spoiler altogether.


A big downside of the Volt for my family is its limited space. The middle seat in the back row is actually occupied by part of the battery, which I think is disappointing. The trunk area is also rather small, although I'm glad it's a hatchback. Hopefully GM will make a Volt 2.0 with some of these practical problems resolved.

Overall, I was really happy to get a test drive of the Volt. Despite my complaints, I think the car is a well executed 1.0 version of the serial plugin hybrid concept, and I look forward to the Volt's future. I hope GM sells a lot of them and makes a 2.0 version soon which is cheaper and more functional. In the meantime, I'll keep dreaming...