Cars.com's David Thomas shoots his own diary of a few days with the Volt in frigid Chicago.
Transcript
<v Announcer>Cars.com auto review. Hi, Dave Thomas with cars.com here. And this is my second full day having the Chevy Volt in my garage. And I'm about ready to commute to work.
If you remember yesterday's little diary, temperature was around 20 degrees, this morning, -2. As you can see here, this is a screen I use a lot. I used it yesterday. Temperature says 15, but that's dropping rapidly. It is definitely at least 0 degrees here. And that's the air temperature with a 15 to 20 negative windchill. This will really affect I think how well this car does this morning. We'll see when I finish up at work. Everything's reset, trip computer. When I got in the car with the plug still in, it was 32 mile range with that battery there. Now it's having a 31 just for me being in the driveway. The engine did kick on when I first got in and started it up. This was after a remote start, mind you. So it dropped, the engine kicked on. It's at that 30 now on the charge. This is like within two or three minutes, guys. I haven't really been running the car very long. So on that note, I don't really wanna waste much time. So I'm off to work. So as you can see I just finished my nearly 90 minute commute. And in this temperature, it's saying 6 now. It was -1 at one point. So it was a very cold commute. The 20.9 miles on the battery were actually pretty medium traffic. The 11 when the gas kicked on, unfortunately those were the worst 11 miles. It was bumper to bumper traffic. Not an efficient way to drive at all. And you can see it kind of, it shows you the green is the battery, distance, and the blue is gas. So it kind of gives you a pie chart there. It's actually 3D so it looks like a big ball. And on the right is your mile per gallon overall. I only use 0.4 six gallons of gas. But if you figure a half a gallon to go 11 miles, a full gallon would be 22 miles per gallon on just the gas in this kind of weather in bumper to bumper traffic. Which is typical. It usually gets city mileage when I'm in bumper to bumper in every other test car. <v Announcer>For more car related news, go to cars.com or our blog, kickingtires.net.