Yeah, long time no blog. Moving on.
We just bought a brand new car. Notable for two reasons. Firstly, its my first ever new car and secondondly because its all electric.
We bought an all American made 2019 Chevrolet (Chevy) BoltEV…. The net result of about 2 years of talking and looking. Perhaps longer.
Short story short, I felt it was time to move on from the Smart (relax, looks like Terry is going to buy it, so it’s still in the family/garage).
Here is my first charge at home.
Sadly, the dealer gave it to us pretty much flat, so it was going to take a while to charge on the level 1 charger that it comes with.
Level 1 is 110VAC. It’s pretty much good for nothing. I carry the cord just in case, but they are talking about 3 days (all day and all night for three days) to charge, so yeah, not a lot of use.
As a result, that very day we found out about the joys of fast charging.
The local shopping center has as fast charger. In about 45 minutes – aka, dinner, we had 80% charge. This is known as level 3. Or HSDC. High Speed Direct Current. It cost me 9 bucks. Not too bad, cheaper than petrol (gas).
I guess under the hood is about as expected. The battery is 400 volts. Its front wheel drive, so what you see here is about everything. The rest of the car is battery under the floor. The inside floor is flat as a result, no tunnel running down the length and so there is plenty of legroom. It’s a good size to performance ratio I feel.
This is what the driver sees. The dashboard. Speed is front and center.
Trip meter under that, you can select different things to show under the speed, tire pressure, timer or music.
To the left is the main battery gauge. The top number is the guestimate on range if you drive nice, the number in the middle is the range based on the past 5 mile average and the number at the bottom is the range you will get if you have some fun (Yes, typical electric, she gets up and boogies if you lean on the fun pedal).
On the right is the current power you are using. Either upward for draw, or downward when you are regen (braking). We managed to go 5 miles for the cost of 1 in some heavy stop and go traffic in LA last week. The regen works really well.
Pretty typical inside I suspect.
The center infotainment has the usual screens for car info and music. It has more bells and whistles that I plan to use. (Satellite radio for example). She plays USB stick trance just fine and that works for me. I’m told that the car will refuse to play country and western, so Slim and Dolly are automatically blocked….. Pretty smart feature in my mind.
There are some driver safety features as well…..
Kind of hard to see, but cameras all over. Front facing (not photographed), side facing (under the rear view mirror) and back facing.
It will alert me if there is a car in my side blind spot with an orange LED in the side mirror and will alert me if I am going forward to a stopped car too fast and will alert me if I am going to back into something.
It will also alert me if I drift over a lane without indicating or being direct with the steering.
She is super quiet and smooth. If I had to sum up the whole thing in as few words as possible, that would be it. Quiet and smooth. No gear changes and not a lot of road noise. The tires are not great (low rolling resistance sipperly junk), but we will sort that out when they are due to be changed in a year or so.
So there you have it.
Picked it up with 5 miles (and a flat battery).
Pretty humbled and thankful for the chance to have such a cool car become part of the family. Looking forward to my first sleepless Sunday sunrise drive up to Palomar or Borrego Springs.
Oh, and her name is BB.
