2011 Chevy Volt: Road Trip Mileage

It’s perhaps the most important and maybe the most unfair question about our cross-country road trip: How was the mileage?

It’s important because the 2011 Chevy Volt is touted as an entirely new approach to hybrid cars, but unfair because we used it in the one way it will be least efficient. Of course, the all-American road trip is one thing no electric-only car can offer and that’s an advantage for the Volt. But how much does that advantage cost?

A few caveats about our trip:

• The Volt only takes premium gas, which of course made filling it up more expensive.
• We ran the car in Mountain mode for significant stretches, which uses more fuel because the engine and generator put some power into the battery to make sure it has enough for mountain climbing. (Normally, the generator only keeps the car moving once the battery is depleted; it doesn’t attempt to recharge it fully.)
• We used the air conditioning sparingly, which improved mileage. That’s mostly because it was cool where we were driving. Occasionally, we needed to run the defroster to clear the windows.

Our best leg of the trip? From Gallup to Tucumcari, N.M., where the Volt reached 39.9 mpg on the 319-mile leg. It was largely a downhill stretch, though we stayed in Mountain mode through about 80 percent of the trip.

Our worst leg? The drive from Indio, Calif., into Phoenix, where we hit 33.7 mpg over about 250 miles. This leg included climbing drives through mountain passes, and we were in Mountain mode the entire leg.

The overall mileage? Over 2,115.6 miles, our Volt averaged 36.4 mpg. Remember, only the first 33 miles came from plug-in power. (We were able to run on battery power three more times on the trip. Each of those times, we had come out of Mountain mode, and there was enough energy in the battery that the engine turned off.)

Without being able to use the Volt’s full battery charge more than once, we were pretty impressed that the highway mileage was still on par or better than most non-hybrids this size on the market.