Having myself driven a Chevy Volt for the past two and a half years, when it came time
for my parents to get a new car my experiences with the Volt (and a little prodding) led
them to get the Chevy Bolt EV, that Bolt with a B as in Bravo.
Yes, GM is wonderful at naming their products.
Anyway, both myself and my parents live in Illinois, I live about 20 miles from the city
of Chicago, they live actually 120 miles away from Chicago which is a video in and of itself,
because even in a rural setting, the Bolt meets their needs.
But, anyway, what we're talking about in this video is winter driving performance.
Many people are worried about how the winter affects electric vehicle range, so why not
find out?
I'm gonna take the Bolt to and from work.
I have a very long commute--it's 35 miles each way.
So come along with me and we'll find out what sort of range we get.
For reference the Chevy Bolt EV's EPA estimated range is 238 miles, but what will it be in the winter?
So I'm about to go to work, and it's a pretty cold day, and it's gonna snow two to four
inches while I'm at work.
I figured today would be an excellent day to test the winter mileage of the Chevy Bolt EV.
If you haven't run across my earlier videos you might not know that I live in a condo
building but I do have access to EV charging, there's a whole video on that if you want to check that out.
Alright--
Car!
Obviously one advantage that I get because I do live in a condo building is that I am
in a heated garage, so that thing buzzes away.
My space is usually about 50 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit so I do have that as an advantage.
Alright.
So, um, I'm about to get going.
And...
most of the footage that you're going to see is coming from my dashcam cause I don't have
a good way to hold the phone while I'm driving, um, but just thought I would show you...
hopefully..
Ah.
That didn't go well.
Let's turn the car on.
(Chiming from the car)
Ugh.
We are predicted with 173 miles of range, but I need to turn the heat off right now
cause...I'll explain that later.
But anyway, turning the heat off gets us 180 --(sound of the turn signal flashing)--my
goodness.
This is not going well.
Turning the heat off gives us 182 miles predicted range.
That's a little optimistic, as you'll see, but let's find out what we really get.
So range is currently, um, I currently have the heating off because I don't need it, when
I Ieave the garage, and sometimes the automatic climate control seems to get confused in a heated
garage; I like to set the temperature very low and it will sometimes cool when I first
turn on the car.
I've never actually looked at dashcam footage from the roads that I take on my normal commute
and it's actually quite noisy so I'm going to be doing most of this in voiceover.
So what I was explaining about the heat was that, because I start with a heated garage,
I like to turn the heat off because I like to set the heat very low and the Bolt's climate
control seems to get confused when it's in a heated garage.
If I have the heat set to 62, and it's 55 according to its ambient temperature sensor,
it will actually run the air conditioning.
And it takes it quite a while from leaving the garage to realize "It's cold outside,
stop doing that", so that's a minor annoyance but it saves energy anyway to turn off the
climate control when you do have a heated garage until you actually need the heat.
So I'm starting my journey on I-88 in the Western suburbs, heading Eastbound, and then
I'll be taking the Tri-State Northbound.
The noise levels improved once I got on the Tri-State, so I'm going to switch back to
the dashcam audio.
It is still fairly noise so I apologize for that.
(Audio from dashcam) Welcome to the Tri-State Tollway!
Everybody's favorite!
Gotta love the TRI-STATE!
So at this point I am going to turn the heat on because I'm starting to get a little chilly,
and the longer you wait then the longer...it has to fight to get back up to a temperature
you really want, so, I'm gonna turn it to 64--I tend to be pretty frugal with my heating.
It's especially great here in this car because my parents opted to get one with a heated
steering wheel which was my recommendation, and holding it is delightful!
You can tolerate the cabin temperature being much colder if you have a heated seat and
a heated steering wheel.
And you should know that by turning on the heat it immediately dropped the range estimate
by about 12 miles.
So I'm now showing 169 miles of range remaining, and I have traveled 7.8 miles of my 35.
As far as speed I like to keep my speed to about 65 or less.
In an EV and this is especially true in the winter I've discovered, the slower you drive
the better range you get.
And anything above 60, every 5 miles an hour you take a significant range hit.
So I try to keep to 65 or less which can be difficult on
the Tri-state, because although the speed limit is 55 that Prius over there is probably
going 80.
So more often than not I find myself putzing along in the right lane, just because I want
to save energy and not go quite so fast.
Just though I'd chime in again and explain that so far the trend-line on the range meter
which tells you whether or not you're going towards the max or the min range, is about
a quarter of the way up towards max, so based on current driving conditions, although the
predicted range is 164 miles it thinks I'll do a little bit better than that.
That trend-line on the range meter is one of the things...it's a genius thing about
this car and I really, I mean, it really helps explain how it's calculating your range and
how you're doing, because when you just get a number; that number is usually pretty accurate,
but you won't know, if-- the only way to know if you're exceeding or doing worse than that
number would be to actually be looking at a trip meter and see if the numbers you add
match the numbers that subtract, so for instance in the Volt, if you're doing better, then the
number on the range meter will only go down maybe every
1.2 or 1.3 miles, but you have to manually keep track of that.
But with this clever range meter here, that gives you that trend-line, not only do you
have a maximum and a minimum number which many automotive journalists have talked about,
and said "That's a great idea", but you also get that indication of which way you're going
which is genius.
And really really helpful.
This is a photo of the energy information screen once I got to work.
As you can see we used 10.7 kilowatt hours of the battery to go 34.7 miles.
Now that's an efficiency of 3.24 miles/kWh, which is not fantastic but it's also not that bad.
4 miles/kWh is considered "normal", though the Bolt is known to go about 5 if you're
driving well.
And you know that 4 is about the normal benchmark because it's a 60 kilowatt-hour battery, it's
EPA range is 238 miles which is almost 240, 240 divided by 60 is 4 so simple math there.
So we're doing a little bit worse than what would be considered average, um, but not too bad.
You'll also see here that our climate setting, the actual heat, only accounted for 10% of
our usage.
If I were able to tolerate driving without the heat on at all--which I would not be--but
if I would then we would have gotten a slight boost in efficiency.
Also of note is that no energy was spent on battery conditioning.
Pretty much because the car started in that heated garage.
But if it wasn't in a heated garage, even if it was outside, so long as the car were
plugged in it should keep its battery pack warm, and you won't need battery conditioning.
Well, out of work.
And there's about 4 inches of snow on the ground.
Time to clear off the car and get going.
It's warming up right now, that's why the lights are on.
OK so welcome back to the car.
Now that we're back on the highway, obviously--I don't know how well you can see cause my dashcam's
nighttime performance isn't fantastic--but there is snow on the road, but where there isn't
snow there's plenty of traction.
So I'm comfortable driving 55 (miles per hour).
That's still, you know, the speed limit is 65 here so I could be going faster but I'm
actually passing up a good deal of people, so, I don't need to go faster nor do I want to.
That trend-line is pointing very negative right now, and I did expect that to happen.
I've noticed with the Volt, my daily driver, that there appears to be an elevation difference
downward towards my work, because I always end up getting to work using a much smaller
percentage of the battery then getting back from work.
Now looking at the energy info screen the car has needed to spend some energy on battery
conditioning, and what that means is it's only 11 degrees outside right now and because
it wasn't plugged in the battery got very cold so when I turned it on it spent some
of the battery's energy just to warm itself up.
It is a thermally managed battery, it can both heat and cool itself, and in the winter
it will need to heat itself if the battery pack is allowed to get cold.
Now if you have the car plugged in it will periodically run a heater in the battery pack
to keep it conditioned, but when you're outside without it being plugged in....
you don't get any help.
As far as winter weather traction goes with this car, it's very, very good.
I've never had a car with four-wheel drive because living in Illinois the land is flat
everywhere.
Four-wheel drive is not a huge advantage here.
Grant you there is some advantage, but, you're never--you almost never need to traverse a
hill, so no one in my family has every thought it necessary to have a vehicle with four-wheel drive.
With that being said, the road's getting pretty bad here, I better slow down...
The fact that I'm only going 55 is helping the range again, especially when it's only
12 degrees outside, but its range estimate is still pretty... it's still trending pretty
negative because it was expecting to have, um... it's last estimate was based on the
warmer weather without wet roads, so that's one thing you need to keep in mind.
That range estimate is only as accurate as the data it's getting, so when you change
its environment which we have significantly; like I said I believe we're going uphill overall--I
haven't verified that, I should, but I think we are--the roads are wet and slick, and it's
colder.
So it's going to impact range more negatively.
But we are doing a little better than we would be if I were going, say, 65, because we have
the benefit of reduced speed, reduced wind resistance, and it doesn't have to work as
hard to heat the cabin.
Well, so much for going 55.
We might be behind some plows taking care of the road, but I don't think so because
it's not very close to pavement right here, but we're now going about 30 miles an hour
keeping up with traffic.
And the trend-line has swung way up.
It's still below its estimate, but slowing down like this is going to increase our range
significantly.
So I have completed my 70 mile, you can see exactly 70.0 miles, roundtrip commute and
it took twenty--it just rolled over to 25.1 kWh--but 25 kilowatt-hours.
Now that's a significant chunk of the battery but I still have more than half remaining.
And estimated range at this point is 101 miles.
So, since we've gone 70, and it thinks we have 101 to go, that means we probably would
get 170 miles per charge even in these awful weather conditions.
Now granted we were helped out a little bit by the slow driving.
I'm kinda surprised it's using this much energy to heat right now, it must not realize it's
inside.
So we were helped out by the slow speed we were going, but it's important to note that
even though the weather conditions weren't great and the road conditions were awful,
this is actually a pretty typical number.
I've done this commute 4 or 5 times in this car, with weather conditions around this much
without snow, and it's usually about 24 kWh consumed, so, 170 miles per charge is a not
unrealistic number with these weather conditions.
So there you go, a 70 mile commute in pretty cold temperatures with horrible road conditions
on the way back, still only used 25 of the 60 kilowatt hours and we could go another
100 miles if we needed to.
Now I'm going to plug this car in, and it will be done charging in about 4 hours.
And we can start this all over again.
And for those who say, "Oh you have to remember to plug in every night"--I could forget tonight
and I would be fine for tomorrow.
I'd need to plug in the second night, but again, I'm going to plug it in now, and in
about 4 hours it will be charged.
So I'm only gonna be halfway through sleeping and this car's gonna be ready to do the same
thing over again tomorrow.
Let's go inside and talk a little bit more about the numbers.
So one of the most important things, here, to figure out is how much did this cost?
Now I pay a flat ten cents per kilowatt-hour, so the car will make it seem as though this
cost $2.50.
Now it is going to be under-reported slightly because the car is telling you energy use
from the battery, not energy pulled from the wall.
However, my charger is on its own meter.
This is how I'm able to repay the condo association for my electricity usage; that's why they agreed
to allow me to install this charger in the first place, and it shows I started the commute
with 2,519 kWh on the meter, and I came back with 2,547, which is a difference of 28 so
there is a difference of 3 kilowatt-hours, but that's only thirty cents.
I have a flat $0.10/kWh rate (it's like $0.099 from ComEd but I just round it up to $0.10)
so that means this commute, even though it was seventy miles in the winter, cost just
$2.80.
It cost more in tolls to get to work and back then it did for fuel.
When I did the same commute the next day, the weather wasn't much better it was only
about 20 degrees outside, however it was sunny.
And because it was sunny I was able to do the entire drive to work without using the
heat at all.
I know it sounds ridiculous, but having a heated seat and a heated steering wheel makes
it that much easier to stay in the car without running the heat.
The only thing I needed to do was periodically run the defroster, just with the fan, because
the windows were fogging up a little bit.
Now because I didn't use the heat at all it only took 8.9 kWh to get to work, but we already
know if I had been using the heat it probably would be about 10.5, maybe 11 in the worst case.
And as I was saying, it's a very similar commute energy usage regardless of whether its snowing
or not.
On the way back I did have to use the heat of course, in the end we used 23.3 kWh, so
had I used the heat on the way to work we would have ended up with probably 24.5 maybe
25, pretty much the exact same thing we had the night before.
Even though this drive I didn't have to slow down, I was going 55+ the whole time, however
I did encounter some snow towards the end of my drive, but not enough to slow me down.
But that's not all.
In addition to having a simple commute scenario, I also have a more long-distance drive.
Back in December, I needed to get the vehicle from where I Iive to where my parents live,
and that's a 114 mile journey.
We did this in 17 degree weather with some snow.
So here's an idea of what our range was.
So I am currently head West on Interstate 80 in Illinois and it is 17 degrees out, and
snowing moderately.
And to maintain 68 miles an hour, which is what I'm currently driving on flat land, it
takes about 24 or 25 kilowatts.
Now with a 60 kilowatt-hour battery, that means that we could go for about 2 hours and
twenty minutes at 68 miles per hour, I'll have to double-check my math on that, but
that means basically assuming these driving conditions and maintaining this speed
our anticipated range from a full charge should be 165-170 miles or so.
At this point in my journey I have 2 bars over half of the battery which is 26.6 kWh
used, with an anticipated remaining range of 87 miles.
One of the important things about the fact that I'm on 80 head West is that I am facing
a headwind.
It's not very bad at this point, but driving an electric car any time of year wind has
a great impact on range.
It does in a conventional vehicle as well, but you tend to not notice it because you
don't worry about range so much.
But in an electric car, you will see a range hit if you're facing a headwind.
So when I return to my place which is East of here, if we have the same headwind it would
actually be helping me a little bit with the range.
When you're on the highway, especially in the winter, going slower really helps you.
And if you are comfortable following a semi truck, with a moderate distance behind it,
you can get a significant range boost.
(Voice-over) In the ultimate showcase of incompetence I forgot to take a picture of the energy screen
on this journey but I did end up finishing the journey with about 50 miles of range left,
so with 114 we had already traveled plus 50 remaining would be a range of about 164 miles.
Which makes perfect sense because were were going a little faster on this trip than I
was during my commute, we were facing West fighting a bit of a wind, and so even though
the temperature was quite similar we did have some conditions that hampered range slightly.
Now if you're looking for a sort-of worst case scenario, for the Chicago area anyway,
we did do a journey--that same 114 miles--in pretty much zero degree weather the entire
way, and we would've only gotten 140 miles on that charge if we didn't alter our driving
at all.
Now we were maintaining 68 miles per hour for that entire trip, partially to test the
limits of the car, so if we had slowed down to, say, 60 I think we probably would have
gotten at least another 20 miles on that charge and gotten back up to 160 or so miles of range.
But because it was so cold, the heat needed to be run at a very high intensity just to
maintain a comfortable cabin temperature.
You can see from the energy graph that almost a quarter of the energy usage was simply for
heat.
A large percentage of that battery was just going to keep the cabin at a comfortable temperature.
And so, a lot of that range drop wasn't directly because it was cold, it was because we needed
to heat to keep ourselves warm.
Going along with that, you'll notice it doesn't have an battery conditioning on that graph
at all, that's because we started this journey with the vehicle plugged in.
Actually it was outside, but we started with the car plugged in, we had it run for about
10 minutes with it plugged in to allow it to heat up before we started our journey,
and therefore no battery conditioning was necessary at all.
So I hope you enjoyed this video on the winter performance of the Chevy Bolt EV here in the
Chicagoland area.
This channel doesn't normally do electric vehicle videos, I do them from time-to-time
as I am an electric vehicle advocate and I am also and electric vehicle enthusiast.
However, I want to close this video out by saying if you are looking for an electric
vehicle and want some advice on it, sometimes electric vehicle enthusiasts are not the best
people to ask.
Now I'm going to explain why, and I'll probably get some hate for this, but there are many
electric vehicle enthusiasts that live in California that have no context of what winter
is like here in areas like Chicago.
So I've seen many different forum posts where people say, "You know if you do a needs analysis,
you might find out you only need a 100 mile range for your car".
Now that's very true, I could almost get away with a 100 mile range.
But because I live in the Chicago area, every year for three months out of the year at least,
it's going to be below freezing.
And I need to know that I have a vehicle that can get me through that time.
If I had an electric vehicle with only 100 miles of range, every winter it would not
get me where I need to go.
That's why people like us in the Midwest have been waiting for a vehicle like the Chevy
Bolt or the Tesla Model 3 to have a range over 200 miles, that way even if we had a
horrendous efficiency and our battery range somehow dropped in half (which is likely never
would) but even if that happened, we'd still be able to get wherever we needed to go.
Now another reason why electric vehicle enthusiasts can sometimes cloud the picture for someone
outside of the group, is they tend to form fanclubs.
And what I mean by this is they get on the side of one automaker or another, and their
judgement gets clouded.
If you go back a year from, a year before from now, you'll find plenty of auto forums
talking about the Tesla Model 3 and comparing it to the Chevy Bolt, and many people who
are Tesla fanboys were insisting that "GM doesn't really want to sell the Bolt, this
is a Compliance car, it's not gonna be sold outside of the CARB states", and guess what?
Here in Illinois I've seen about 10 Bolts, haven't seen a single Tesla Model 3 yet.
So I'm just saying, the fanboys in the EV enthusiast club are gonna give you information
that may or may not be correct, it might just be what they want to hear.
Anyway, thank you so much for watching.
If you have any questions please feel free to leave them in the comments, I'll try to
answer them the best that I can, and I'll see you next time.