thebaldgeek

One other unusual feature on the BoltEV is the fact that the rearview mirror can be either a mirror or a video monitor for a rear facing camera.

A photo is worth a lot of my words.

You can see how it can also be a mirror, you just flip the lever under the middle to toggle modes. I don’t get any glare at night, so just leave it in camera mode. Why? Because it’s much wider and there are no rear headrests or other blind spots in the video mode.
Yes, you have to focus on the video, not at infinity, but my eyes are used to that now and I don’t even notice it.

Love it.

Found another interesting feature on the car……
It has automatic high beam.

Hit the little ‘A’ button on the stalk and it will look for oncoming cars (if it’s dark enough to require headlights – which it automatically turns on if need be), if there is on, it will dip the lights, if there is nothing for a few seconds, then it turns on the high beam.
Soon as a car shows up, and I do mean as soon as, it dips.
My one and only complaint is that I wish it would flip back on as soon as the car goes past, but it takes about 5 seconds to see if there is another car behind it first.
It gets a little confused in towns, so I just turn it off then, but in all other driving that I have done with it so far (about 2 hours) its been fantastic.

It is really surprising just how less ‘stress’ there is when driving at night in the country when you don’t have to be flicking the high beam stalk back and forth all the time.
You can just keep your hands on the wheel and focus on the road…. Keep in mind this is a guy that loves driving and loves driving at night. I would have thought that having less to do would be annoying or somehow taking pleasure away from me, but its not, its just the opposite, I found I was enjoying and more involved in the road without having to keep flipping the stalk. Surprising. In a nice way.

Sorry. Not sorry to be going on about the car… I just keep finding interesting things that I want to share…..

Freddy and I did a backroads trip to Borrego Springs and back over the weekend.
It was our first solid trip with little traffic on a road that we both know pretty well. Once we got out of the canyon it becomes an open winding road in pretty good condition with lots of rolling hills. I could then engage the cruise control and watch it work for the first time.

Astounded.
Just blown away with the dead nuts on accuracy of it holding the speed. I mean it was dead nuts on. Not a single mile per hour (1.6ish kph) variation up and down hills or anything else that the countryside threw at us.
All the cars I have driven that have cruise have never (ever) been that accurate.
It was just creepy really because the sound does not vary, the car is holding the same speed at all times and so the road and wind noise never changes.
The car never feels like its braking to hold speed going downhill, the regen just keeps the speed dead on.
It never feels like it’s accelerating as it has more than enough silent power to hold the speed going uphill.

Best way to describe it is in Freddy’s words ‘It’s like flying in a hovercraft’….. It really is an odd experience after a little while.
At first it’s just like, eh, cruise control works, but then you stear and steer and steer and then it starts to sink in, the car has not varied one little bit in any way. Just steer, that’s all there to do.
Amazing.

I have always tried to be nice to my car engines. Mostly by warming them up each and every time before relaxing how I drive (ie, keep the rpm down till they are warm).
The thing is, with a 6 mile (9.5km) commute, there is not a lot of relaxing that you can do.

BB changes that with a motor rather than an engine. Now, I have 4 wheel bearings and I suppose two bearings in the electric motor (one each side?).
It is direct drive, so there is no gearbox……

I didn’t really expect this aspect of my daily commute. It’s nice and welcome, I don’t drive any different really, but have noticed that the car drives exactly the same from the moment I pull out of the garage to the moment I pull into work, the performance is exactly consistent.

The one thing that does need warming up (or cooling down) is me!
There is an electric heater for the cab, my computer data from my Android has shown at times some 2500 watts of heat being used to warm me.
I have a steering wheel and seat heater, so these cool mornings I might try those.
The real question I have (just out of interest) is what pulls the most power, the ac or the heat? (And does it really make that much difference to the range?)