Gadgetory

this is the most anticipated car in your life no pressure there let's find out about it as we drive the 2011 Chevy Volt and check the tech the 1970 Z car 76 accord the 86 Taurus all watershed introductions and all pale in the glare of the hype around this guy the 2011 Chevy Volt it's being asked to save the environment your fuel budget and GM's reputation in one stroke I don't envy it the Volt is distinctive in its look but whether folks are going to aspire to be seen in it for its styling is doubtful that Malibu meets Cruze thing is neither hot nor hideous it's a 4 passenger sedan not 5 due to a console between the rear seats to accommodate part of the battery now inside the Volt the first thing you notice is look what made it into production this white stuff this was in all the concepts and I thought oh that's interesting they're trying to do like an what an iPod Classic meets a you know Imperial stormtrooper but no here it is more notable than that though are these touch sensitive buttons almost every button here is a touch contact kind of like on current my Ford in my link in touch which I have not been a big fan of that part of touch if you're looking around you may have already noticed something else really cutting-edge on this car no dials no gauges all screens you've got one in the center that we've seen before this is all new a complete LCD square instrument panel it's basically like a 7-inch tablet just sitting in front of you all the time you've got a huge array of media options on this car they aren't the main story but let me just run you through them you've got your usual radio categories as well as XM radio on this guy you've got the hard drive disk aux button right here again Touch cycle through at 30 gigabytes of hard drive space - rip - of course aux USB you do have bluetooth streaming and of course Bluetooth hands-free another indication that a volt is being moved is a mid to high end car is the fact that it has navigate patience standard on it as you might imagine there's a drive mode button down here that lets you go from normal to sport to mountain normal is what it says a normal balance of how it uses electric versus charges versus gives you responsiveness to the throttle your sport mode is going to give you greater sensitivity and accelerate a response in particular but of course that's going to tap more juice and then the mountain mode is one that will start to charge the battery sooner when you're doing lots of mountain grades because that will deplete the battery rapidly so the generator will kick in before the battery is as low as it would be normally aside from in the driver's seat you can also run your volt from your phone OnStar mobile lets you lock and unlock the doors start the Volt prep the cabin climate check your charge state tell the car when and how to charge even blow the horn to find the thing ok here's where GM has been spending all their time and their bajillions of dollars developing the voltec powertrain here's what makes this car interesting it's an electric car but it has a gas engine there's a 1.4 liter inline-4 super lean-burn gas engine here that does nothing but turn a generator that generator puts juice into a big old t-shaped Power Cell that's in the middle of the car and that power is an electric motor that drives the front wheels through a one speed gear reduction transmission bottom line 150 horsepower 273 foot-pounds of torque huge Delta there because it's all electric power zero to sixty about eight and a half seconds not bad you're gonna get about 35 40 mpg but there's also a number called mpge or equivalent that's ninety three and your evu range before the car starts to burn any gas to replenish its batteries is around twenty five to forty miles there's a lot going on here now mpge is an odd bird it's a measurement you'll see on some new window stickers that converts electricity and roughly equivocates it to the same energy in a gallon of gas rule of thumb one gallon of gas is 34 kilowatt hours because I know you wanted to know now weird about charging you can plug this guy into 120 or a to 40 outlet charging apparatus right here this guy lives on this kind of wind-up thing in the back you see you got a regular plug on there that can plug into whatever outlets you've got and then this will go into the little door here keep that guy on the side of the car that's this new universal thing that all the electric cars are using that plugs in there so yes there's nothing wrong with charging this car it works really well you do get a bunch of electric-only range a nice amount that might even handle your entire commute I just think there's an awful lot of hassle that goes around with it if you're not really committed and for most folks just putting gas in it and getting like around 60 mpg it's pretty good and all the hassle of charging may not be worth that 93 MPGe okay so here we are underway the Chevy Volt on the left here in the configuration I mean you can read rigor this - a little bit but on the left there is my fuel tank my gasoline with an estimate of range on this range extending generating on the fly drive motif on the right is something very interesting that green ball is the momentum meter if you will you don't want it to be up or down when you hit the gas to hard the little ball goes up see that and it gets smaller and it kind of withers and it gets this nasty Flemmi color of yellow if I brake really hard watch this same thing it drops down and it's not happy it tells you want to accelerate hard I'm wasting energy either electrons or dinosaur cells but when I brake hard I'm also wasting energy I'm wasting kinetic energy now on this shifter which controls the one speed automatic which is really a gear reduction box than an actual gear box you've got your Drive and low Drive you know what that is low is a little different low is like be on a Prius or a hybrid synergy drive vehicle it brings in an aggressive regeneration so I'm gonna put this guy in low and do nothing else Oh down we go heavy deceleration as it's really putting the electromagnetic brakes on to put juice back in the pack interesting trivia about this guy you can go potentially a year without burning gas if you've got a short commute and you plug in every night and only commute in this car so what happens to that gasoline sitting in your tank gas does go bad you know it jellify is it gets real nasty well they have a pressurized gas tank on this car also sensors that will run the engine and burn off some gas about every couple weeks I understand it if you never use gas otherwise okay you got a bunch of modes here on the power flow thing there's battery power I'm running off stored electricity and the engines not running right now I hit the brakes alright Coast and there's regen that's regenerating with the electromagnetic clutching of the motor to drive back to the batteries now when I get on and I have engine power where I'm generating through the generator through the battery pack into the electric motors okay so all of this gets down to the bottom line what's the efficiency on this car let's take a look that's under energy info here on the main screen you've got lots of things it will tell you what the MGP is the confusion does not end on this charge since the car was last plugged in and got a charge in the driving history since then I got a bunch of things to look at I got 55 miles per gallon overall on this charge the cars done 60 miles per gallon average and it's twenty two hundred and seventy two mile life here's my driving style and climate setting efficiency on this trip I've not been driving terribly efficiently only thirty four percent efficient but I've had my climate control 100% efficient that basically had it turned off here's your climate system where you can save as much power as possible if you go to Eco mode it'll use the climate in a way that doesn't SAP energy so it'll run the AC very limited li down here that little green ball that's where you see the total efficiency you want that number to be low on the climate scale Chevy has turned out a nicely engineered car here it's a technical tour de force enjoyable to drive and seriously efficient its hurdles are the somewhat complicated story around its electric miss suburban looks the fact that it comes from a recently bankrupt car brand and then there's the price okay so you decided the volts for you here are the numbers forty-one thousand dollars with destination now there's a little bit of I don't know I think it's a little misleading on the Chevy Volt website that shows the price of this in great big bold numbers with a $7,500 tax credit already - doubt of it but that's a tax credit that's not a rebate as of today's taping though the Obama administration's trying to convert it to a rebate that'll be different right now it's a credit it's a $7,500 deduction if you will off any federal tax that you owe in the tax year you buy this car if you don't own a federal tax you don't get any benefit and even if you do get a benefit it can never turn into a refund all I can do is reduce your tax to zero so in other words you've got to at least $7,500 federal tax to get the full $7,500 tax credit from buying one of these cars it's not as simple as getting a check from the government if the Obama administration just changed the law as they're trying to you will actually get a $7,500 rebate at deal time at the showroom that will be different