2016 Chevy Volt review: 53 miles electric range

2016 Chevy Volt review – can it go 53 electric miles

This video will be checking LT 2016 Chevy Volt to the next generation Chevy Volt a rather than do my usual review. I thought I do something a little bit different because a little she did they give me with information about the car. It says it has 53 miles of electric-only range and it just so happens that the fuel economy course that I take over my vehicles on its about 52 – 53 miles somewhere in that range and so I thought let’s see if this vehicle can do it without the engine ever kicking on. So that’s what we’re going to do.

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To turn on the vehicle, you’ve got a blue button to start it up and then should come on here shortly. Interesting, there’s a bit of delay of the screen coming on. Now it says here that we have 43 miles of all-electric range and you may be wondering okay if I mean some empty parking lot, how do I know that battery is fully charged?.

Well the car comes with a mode called Hold mod and so I drove here in that Hold mod, and what that Hold mode does is it keeps your engine on so that you don’t use any of your electric charge. So I drove here in that hold mode when I left my house with that battery at full. So I had been charging in my garage after 24 hours. Now we’re gonna go see if it can make it now. They don’t seem to confident in that 53 miles statement because it’s fully charged and it says 43 miles. But you some people are going to drive more or less aggressively in different driving conditions.

Most of the vehicles which are driven on this fuel economy course. I can do better than their highway training, so I expect that with this vehicle I’d be able to at least get those 53 miles without the engine kicking on. All display here which shows me where the energy is coming from, so I got Energy from my battery now.

Let take a look under the hood: there’s to drive motors, there is internal combustion engine – a 1.5-liter-four-cylinder engine produces about 100 HP (horsepower) and the dual electric motors produce about 250 horsepower. So this is really an electric car with a generator on board that you can extend the range. The electric range is 53 miles. They claim total combined range is about 20 miles.

As kind of test scores will usually do, I don’t exceed the speed limit by any more than 5 miles per hour. So here was gonna float along at speed limit and see how it does now. It’s going down to 42 miles and I don’t think I’ve quite gone a mile. I did reset the trip computer a little late, so I can add a little bit to that, but I go back and figure out what that was close.

The interior is decently quite in here and of course you don’t hear the engine at all – it is an electric vehicle. The Visibility on the front, into the sides is pretty good. Looking out the rear isn’t too bad. There’s a decent black spot back there to the sides but aside from that overall visibility is pretty good. I’ve plenty of room for my legs in here, The seat is actually really comfortable and they’ve got some nice pull string as well so I do like the seat. Along with drive mode Hold, there are 3 other drive mode: Sport, Normal and Melton.

In Sport and Normal, it’s gonna try and use up all the electric battery before switching over to the engines. Sport Mode gona give you a little bit more aggressive acceleration, you might lose a little bit of efficiency.

In Melton mode, you start climbing a hill, it will kick on the engine to save some of that battery power and then when you go down, you can charge up the battery. If you start going downhill, the engine can shut off. Basically, kick the engine on help provide power to the electric motors.

Driving on the highway, you actually don’t hear much noise. I’ve got the cruise control set at 65, it’s a little bit tired decently quiet in here and one of the cool things you have is this travel on the left side of the steering wheel which you can use to decelerating only uses regions. You can store a lot of that energy and actually get some pretty decently aggressive braking when you do it in  all of the energy is going to be restored back into that battery. Of course not all of that energy, but it’s gonna do only used to reach and instead of using the disc brakes. So we’re coming up on the most challenging portion of this fuel economy test course. And this is gonna be a fairly long grade going up hills or 10% uphill grade for the next mile and a half. Now, keep in mind that this hill economy course is a loop so I end in the exact same spot to a net elevation gain of zero. We will come back down this hill and be able to regenerate entire way coming down. So far we’ve gone about 9 miles and we used about 9 miles of range, so it’s been matching up. So far, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be able to get those 53 miles of electric range.

53 miles of electric range and then having an on-board generator means most of the time that engines never gonna be on, because most people in a day won’t be driving 50 miles where you get to your destination, charge and then come back. Won’t have to be using that engines. You can get really efficient, really cost effective solution and then you don’t have to worry about range anxiety because should you run out of battery will you got the on-board generator. So I think that idea is awesome. Also with government incentives you can get into this vehicle for very reasonable price. Over all I think the package makes a lot of sense.

Going up that hill we’re down to 27 miles of range and I’ve only gone 10.2 miles plus a little bit more than that because I reset the odometer a little later. But it isn’t looking good for the Volt hit these 53 miles.

One another cool thing I do like about this car is its display shows you exactly how much power using, how much power you’re sending from the battery at any given time or how much power is going in to it slam on the brakes. You can see a lot of negative power which is battery power getting charged. Or you can see it up high number up to the motor is rated for. 99 KW. You ‘ll see that Kilowatt rating if you floor.

Now we are braking coming down this hill and its reaching -18 KW there. Negative KW when I’m reaching the region button so it still is charging. It just going down this hill and I’m of course not using any battery power. It’s going back into battery. In the display shows, you can see the function where it’s sending energy back into the battery. We are getting a little bit of fog on the window, I’m gonna try and not use climate control as much as possible just so that I can say that it was as fair as a test as possible giving it every advantage could have.

From this point forward. It’s gonna be mostly downhill and no more flat ground so for the rest of the fuel economy course there are big challenges as far as efficiency is concerned. So we’ll see if it starts to do a little bit better. We’ve got 25 miles remaining and we have a significant amount of the driver meaning so it doesn’t look like it’s going to work out. But this part will start to recharge.

So far, I’m actually pretty impressed with the car and There’s really not much about it that I don’t like. Sitting in the rear seats, you don’t really have much headroom back there and they’ve added a fifth seat.