【2015 Archives】

Last week I was one of the first journalists in the world to take the Chevrolet Bolt EV015 Archivesa road trip. Unaccompanied, hewing vaguely to a route prescribed by General Motors reps, I drove the electric car through thick soups of fog and oases of sunshine on the most beautiful chunk of the California coast.

The route between Monterey and Santa Barbara was designed not just to be photogenic, but also difficult, curvy and with plenty of hills in the way. I drove the first part of the trip at tremendous range-slashing speed, and used all the AC I wanted on the second, sunnier chunk. I wasn't a cold air hog, but nor was I trying to sip electricity.

SEE ALSO: Sorry, Tesla: Chevy Bolt officially goes 238 miles on a single charge

Nevertheless, I ended my 242.2-mile trip with more than a few electrons to spare. The car practically chuckled as it told me it could have traveled at least another 16 miles on its giant LG-built battery, which takes up the entire undercarriage of the car, before it even thought about choking.

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The official EPA estimate of 238 miles, which we reported earlier but learned about off the record that day, actually seemed somewhat conservative in that moment. The dashboard screen had shown its first warning, but it wasn't flashing red yet. Maybe we could go another 20 miles, the so-called confidence gauge suggested archly.

And maybe, just maybe, another 23.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

I started to feel like I was in a 21st century version of the Seinfeldepisode where Kramer test-drives a car and sucks the salesman into a game of seeing just how far they can drive the fuel gauge into the red.

"Let's just go for it, like Thelma and Louise!" the supposedly sensible Bolt EV seemed to scream.

This is a big deal. When an electric car can go a total of 265 not-very-carefully-driven miles without needing so much as a gulp from the grid, tectonic plates have shifted in the auto industry.

The Bolt has passed an important middle-class milestone: you can drive for a full and harried work week, at the distance of the average American commute, with miles to spare for evening jaunts, and you won't have to think about plugging in until Saturday.

More than just early adopters will likely consider Chevy's new car, which should cost no more than $30,000 after tax deductions. The torque-filled thrill of near-silent electric driving is not just for elites any more.

(And the relatively quiet aspect of it really hits you when you spend hours hearing it, or rather not hearing it — the strange absence of internal combustion sounds on a long road trip.)

If Elon Musk isn't shaking his Iron Man fist at the sky today, he ought to be.

Moreover, this is a General Motors car. Think about that. This is GM. This is supposedly staid, old-school Motor City. This company is the answer to the question posed by the award-winning 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?

Now, in the space of a decade, not only has the auto giant made up for its blunder in pulping the EV1 all those years ago, it has leapfrogged Tesla in brisk and thoughtful fashion. If Elon Musk isn't shaking his Iron Man fist at the sky today, he ought to be.

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In fact, the Bolt ought to send a jolt of worry through any EV automaker who assumed the lumbering giants of Detroit were too slow, too entrenched in gasland to properly play the planet-saving game. It's no longer true. The car that just overtook you is a Chevy.

Take a seat

Is it perfect? Does it have the finesse of a Tesla Model S? Certainly not. This is still a mass-produced vehicle, a mid-90s Windows PC to Apple's mid-90s Macintosh. Not that the metaphor works, exactly, since the Bolt has Apple CarPlay, but you get the idea. It was perfectly acceptable to prefer the mass-market Windows 95 to the overly exclusive, then-hard-to-find Mac system, despite its design advantages.

The engineers worked under the gun here, and the creative constriction seems to have sharpened their wits. I found no trace of the aerodynamic problems the car was rumored to have. It handled much better than the Chevy Volt, the confusingly, similarly named hybrid car. Compare the Volt to the Bolt and you have a quantum leap in evolution.

Take the seat, an often underestimated function of driving. Because the car needed to be as light as possible in every area, the seat was redesigned from the ground up. "This is the most highly engineered seat we've ever done at GM," Bolt EV Chief Engineer Josh Tavel said before the drive, boasting in detail of the eight strategically placed springs.

He was right; it was a significantly more comfortable car to plant yourself in than the Volt, in which I'd driven to the start of the test drive. It may not seem that much different at first, but after a few hundred miles your ass will thank the engineers.

SEE ALSO: Tesla exec calls other automakers' EVs 'little more than appliances'

Tavel was also responsible for the confidence gauge. This was designed to avoid the problem in other electric cars, such as the otherwise wonderful and zippy little Fiat 500e my wife leases, where the number of miles in the car's current range keeps bouncing around during driving, making it a useless metric.

There's a reason for that: how you drive keeps changing, what kind of terrain you drive keeps changing, and the algorithm is constantly changing to keep up with your new reality. Still, "it freaks people out," Tavel concluded.

Hence the best case scenario miles, the worst case scenario miles, and the middle case that the confidence gauge offers. It's the fuzzy logic of an algorithm turned into a game, a test. Who doesn't want to win, to pass, to aim for the best case scenario?

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Even with range anxiety effectively removed from the equation by the car's massive range -- it feels like it's never going to run out -- I felt my driving style shift subtly, almost subconsciously on the second half of the trip. I wanted to hit the high end of that range. I wanted to reward the confidence gauge's confidence.

I wasn't too much of a fan of the car's second driving mode, "Low," which effectively grinds the brakes a bit any time you're not accelerating. Braking is essential to recuperating battery charge and hitting the high estimate, but Low was a bit much; it spoiled the blissful quiet.

I did enjoy the paddle, round the back on the left of the steering wheel. Pump it gently and you get a little braking effect; enough tiny staccato taps and a pleasing green line appears under the confidence gauge, while a battery symbol pops up to tell you the car is regenerating.

(Turns out you don't really need to brake with your foot. If GM wanted to go all Apple on us, it could remove the brake pedal altogether in a future iteration.)

All in all, it was a very pleasant drive in a very pleasant, genuinely game-changing car. It may not look like much on the outside, but on the inside, believe the hype. Well, don't believe allthe hype. I didn't use all the Bolt's bells and whistles, likely to be used in pricier trims, and didn't need them.

For example, the rear-view mirror turns into a wider-angle rearview screen when you're reversing if you flip a button. Which is high-tech as heck and clever and all, but who needs it when you've got the exact same reverse view on the car's 12-inch main screen?

But on the whole, here I was in a car that I could drive long distances without feeling as fatigued as normal, and certainly not as guilty from gas expenditure. In fact, it felt so good I just wanted to keep going, past Santa Barbara, past the gas car capital of Los Angeles, all the way down to the border.

Just like Thelma and Louise.

Topics Electric Vehicles Cars