2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV Review

 2017 Chevrolet Volt is a milestone among electric vehicles and why is it a milestone well it's the price for your 228 miles of range on a charge it costs about thirty seven thousand five hundred dollars with destination before a $7,500 federal tax credit before the bolt for that amount of range you would have to spend typically close to a hundred thousand dollars for a Tesla the driving experience in the bolt is actually terrific like most electric vehicles the bulk evie is pretty responsive actually zero

 To sixty is claimed to be below 6.5 seconds that's really good it's better than the lead not quite as crazy as some of the Tesla's but still really responsive nice feel the handling also really good having the battery pack down low with all of its weight it really helps keep the center of gravity low and keeps the car cornering flat the tires are the weak link here they aren't terrible as efficient tires go but they do tend to give up grip and start.

squealing pretty easily one thing I'm not wild about is the ride quality I'm not saying it's bad but it's a little firm the interior is really nicely appointed we are in a premier which is the higher trim level but I have to say the LT which I've also experienced is also nice good quality materials cloth seats but a similar color palette nicely done now one of the things I like about the car is the instrument panel gives you an estimated range of how much distance you can travel based on your current state of charge but not just the one number it also gives you a maximum which is higher in a minimum which is lower and this just emphasizes that your range will vary with how you drive where you drive whether you're using cabin heat which sucks a lot of electricity air conditioning also pull some juice so you get the middle number here based on how you've been driving recently and this does a pretty good job of estimating how much range you have if you drive a little bit more aggressively a little bit of a little green line will inch down on the bottom part on the side and show you that you're trending less efficient and if you're driving you know with a light foot and be more efficient

That bar will go upward and show you that you're trending a little bit more efficient so at least you're always mindful of how efficiently you're driving and how it's affecting your range another great feature is the optional full-time rear-view camera which appears in the rearview mirror like right now it's a mirror camera and what that does is it eliminates any of the obstructions behind you like the pillars anyone in the backseat or anything in your cargo area it also gives a wider review like right now I don't see the truck next to me there I do on the camera there are a few things I don't like about the bolts primarily the seat several of our people have been complaining about the comfort they designed the seats in a different way to make them thinner and produce more interior room but I feel like the side bolsters on the bottom cushion are very tight I keep feeling like maybe I left something in my back pocket I don't say I think this is something they need to work on for the next model year another thing I'm not wild about is it's not always really easy to see a traffic signal because the roof comes out pretty far forward similar to problem we've noted in the bolt and on the other hand this is high enough that I get summoned through the side window and for whatever reason the visors don't extend even though they do on a lot of vehicles these days something else we're not wild about it has an optional 360-degree camera and backup camera and for some reason the resolution is quite poor it looks downright blurry and we have cleaned the cameras we made sure they're not just dirty and the quality is just not what you find on a lot of cars these days and not as good as the full time rear view camera in the rear view mirror the back seat is another area where the bolt has an advantage over the leaf even though the car is one foot shorter from bumper to bumper the cabin is larger a couple cubic feet and has six foot tall guy I got plenty of room back here a lot of headroom a lot of legroom actually if they wanted to make the seats a little bit thicker to make them a little more comfortable I'd be fine with that now

The cargo area shows that there's been some compromise to make more room for the passengers but it's not quite as bad as it looked at first because this panel comes out drops down so the height is pretty good overall behind the back seat the volume isn't as good as the Nissan Leaf but once you remove the shade here and lower the seats the maximum cargo volume is a lot closer and here you see

 The value of having this panel that can go upward it gives you a continuous cargo floor and some hidden storage underneath that brings us to an important aspect which is electric cars need to be charged and one way they can be charged is with a supplied cable for charging the bolt has a standard connection called je 1772 looks like this on one end it's used by all V's except Tesla and it goes in here now this is the one that plugs into your household outlet 120 volt this will add three and a half to five miles of range for every hour of charging we got three and a half miles per every hour that is not fast enough so you're going to need what's called level two 240 volts that looks a little bit more like this typically it's mounted to the wall you need to have it installed professionally and what it gives you is up to 25 miles of range for every hour of charging so clearly even if you run this thing down to practically nothing overnight it'll fill it up to 228 miles of range now you also have the option to quick charges if you pay for the option 750 bucks extra DC fast charging now is in the form of a combination connection pcs combo connection system where instead of a separate port like the lease has called Chatham oh this one is actually just integrated now when you connect that you can charge at seventy to ninety miles of range in 30 minutes but you're not going to have DC fast charging at home you've got to do that in public and in some cases it'll cost you now bears noting that Tesla doesn't require this hardware they just need an outlet and the level two hardware will cost you 750 bucks roughly and then whatever cost to install to get 240 volts to your garage or charging area which could be a hundred bucks it could be ten thousand it depends on how far away your service panel is now some municipalities or States will rebate the cost or part of the cost of the hardware of the installation so once you make that initial outlay and by the car by our calculations you're paying about half as much to drive this car per mile as you would if you had say a 35 mile per gallon gas powered car and that's based on pretty low gas prices as we shoot this definitely 

milestone car definitely a really good price at this point as v's go this is the first one that make it seem like it really is something that can appeal beyond environmentalist to people that want to save a little bit of money in the long.

om deddy Thursday, June 8, 2017 Chevrolet