Gadgetory

this is the 2012 chevrolet volt now chevy and GM have dumped a whole lot of money into developing this electric vehicle and probably a lot more advertising and getting the word about what exactly it is so why is it that no one I've run into this week knows that you could actually run it on gasoline if you need to I'm man Swan goon with cnet.com let's take a look under the hood of this 2012 model and see what makes it tick just remember don't call it a hybrid now the Volt is actually a very interesting potentially very efficient powertrain wrapped in a what's in my opinion kind of lackluster vehicle this instrument cluster is kind of a cluttered mess I mean there's just a lot of text and images and it's kind of tossed around here with what seems like little regard for readability or usability I mean heck even the Prius is monochrome eyebrow is better-looking than this thing you'll be lucky if you don't crash this car on the first time out when you spend five minutes looking for the navigation button fortunately you've got a couple of actual physical buttons here in there and at the top of the display you've got a nice touch sensitive display now this 7-inch display is actually kind of nice because it's good to be able to have that touch sensitivity when you need to for example quickly input in a dress or select a song you've got your energy info screen here that shows you how green you're driving you've also got a nice break out that lets you know how much electric energy you've used versus how much gas now audio sources for this cars optional seven speaker Bose audio system include a USB port an auxilary jack in the thinner console here you've also got Bluetooth hands-free calling Sirius XM satellite radio and of course a CD am/fm radio sort of receiver there curiously you don't have Bluetooth audio streaming and that's me this Android user very frustrated this week now the navigation system includes traffic data and it's passable but it's not exactly what I'd call good let's go into the point of interest database here and look for fuel for this car now it shows gas shows biodiesel diesel hydrogen compressed natural gas things that this car doesn't actually use nowhere in here will it actually show you charging stations you think that GM would want that in this car if they want you to get the best possible fuel economy but sorry it's not here now under the volts hood is a 1.4 liter gasoline engine now that may seem like a pretty low displacement for a car this size I mean things about the size of a Camry but don't worry that's not actually turning the wheels the wheels are actually turned by a 111 kilowatt electric motor now that's actually twisting those front wheels to the tune of about 273 pound-feet of torque that's a lot more like it that amount of torque gives you pretty good pick up from a vehicle this size and all of that torque is available from about zero rpm now the electric motor gets his juice from a sixteen kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack that's a t-shape battery pack that actually runs the spine of the vehicle it's actually the reason why you have two bucket seats in the back instead of a conventional bench but don't call it a hybrid in front of a Chevrolet engineer that kind of talk will get you wrapped across the knuckles with a ruler this is a range extender electric vehicle that's basically because the gasoline engine isn't physically connected to the wheels under most circumstances that allows the gasoline engine to run at an RPM that is independent of the vehicle's road speed so that it can get the best possible energy out of every gallon of gasoline this is the volts electrical charging port and this is the charger comes with the car the gasoline port is actually on the other side so you don't get confused now plug this thing up to 240 volts of electricity and you'll get about thirty five miles of range in about four hours now if you drop down to standard 110-volt power you can pretty much double that charging time now one of the first things you're gonna notice about the Volt when you hop into it and you've got a good battery charge going is that it is quiet that's what electric cars get you I mean just go ahead take a second to listen to that I think this car as I mentioned earlier it's got torque for days I mean even when you're in just a standard mode you actually have three different modes of mountain mode a standard mode and a sport mode haha sport mode in a Volt the sport mode actually gives you really good pickup now one thing that I did notice is that once you run out of your electric power and that gasoline engine kicks on it does seem a little bit loud just I mean you can hear it you can feel it through the pedal it's not a really good sounding engine and because it sits at one rpm the entire time it tend to kind of drone on now one thing that I do not like about the bowl do not like is the brakes and they've been more than a couple of situations where I thought oh yeah I'm giving it enough brakes but the car just doesn't slow and it leads to hair-raising what clinching moments where you think you're gonna rear-end somebody the bolt starts set 39 thousand one hundred and forty-five dollars but you can probably knock about 75 hundred dollars off of that price if you qualify for the full federal evey tax credit now let's get into those tech options navigation is one thousand nine hundred and ninety five dollars go ahead and add four hundred ninety five dollars for the premium Bose audio system because these options can't actually be separated all in our s tested price comes to forty four thousand one hundred seventy dollars before any sort of tax incentives ultimately the Volt's value will depend on whether you have a home charging station installed which you most definitely should because without daily recharges the Volt only pretty much gives you about Prius fuel economy for what seems like a lot of extra money you