An intro to Day 1 can be found in the .
The Volt was delivered during the prescribed time. The gentleman who delivered the vehicle asked if I was familiar with it and I said that I could use a walk through. He proceeded to show me how the basic systems worked. On/Off, radio, climate control, shifting, locks, parking brake, charging system, etc.
Our neighbor is having her house painted and the painter noted the car and I offered him a ride around the block. He said he was really impressed. So far, so am I!
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The car was deliverd to me with 14 miles of electric range and a full tank of gasoline. I knew 14 miles would be enough to make it to work, but just barely.
So I left home using L and drove to work, about 14 miles. Surprised as I was, I made it to work with seven miles of electric range remaining. Unfortunately, a nice chunk of that was used driving around the parking structure looking for an outlet that was accessible to recharge.
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After I arrived at work I toyed around with the navigation system and one complaint I do have is that in the Points of Interest menu, under Auto, it doesn't list Electricity or Recharge as point of interest choice for public charging stations. Although it does have Biodiesel, CNG etc listed.
The car comes equipped with three driving modes. Normal, Sport and Mountain. Sport has a slightly agressive acceleration profile compared to normal. Mountain allows the cars gasoline generator to run in situations where the battery may become depleted rather quickly, like when driving in the mountains.
D and L are the forward driving choices, D represents normal forward driving and normal regenerative braking when lifting off of the go pedal (formerly known as gas pedal, but that doesn't really apply in this case). The L also represents normal forward driving but has additional regenerative braking force applied when lifting off the go pedal. In most situations, coming to a stop requires little to no brake pedal force when selecting L. Both braking modes recapture forward motion as electricity, but L is quite a bit more aggressive. Making L a better choice in stop and go traffic.
After 28 miles of commuting to/from work, I then gave the keys to my wife and we ran some errands.
We logged an additional 13 miles to make it a total of 41 miles for the day.
One thing we noticed was that going downhill toward Glendale to run errands the car actually bought back energy, it regenerated almost the whole way. We left with 9 miles of charge and ended up with 12. The exact opposite happened on the way back, going up the hills uses signficantly more energy than on the flats.
Its really kind of telling how obvious energy use is with different gradients. This applies to all cars regardless of fuel type.
First day in the books, I left the car tongiht with one mile left in the battery and used zero gallons of gasoline. We hooked it up to the 110v outlet to charge overnight using the supplied charger.
Until tomorrow!
References and Resources:
Chevrolet.com: Volt information from Chevrolet
GM-Volt.com: Volt and EV related blog
The Future is Electric: GM blog related to the Volt and EV in general
EV World: dedicated EV blog and resource
