From the 2015 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Cars.com's Kelsey Mays takes a look at the 2016 Chevrolet Volt.
Transcript
(trunk slamming) (upbeat music) (brakes squealing) Certainly one of the more important redesigns at the 2015 Detroit Auto Show is the second generation Chevrolet Volt. It has more electric range.
It gets better gas mileage once the engine generator kicks back in, and it doesn't need premium fuel anymore. We'll take you all the way from the bumpers to the battery. Let's go. Now the redesigned Volt doesn't quite have as much of a science project look as its predecessor did. I looks a little more conventional here. Still a lot of shielded off areas up front here, because the cooling needs obviously are different from a fully gasoline car. There is a little bit of cooling areas that you can see underneath these sort of shields in the upper and lower portions of the grill. The bottom air dam here pulled very far forward in the old Volt. Now pushed back a little bit. Again, all in the name of making the car look a little bit more conventional. You get along the sides here. The Volt actually looks a little bit smaller 'cause the rear is more sculpted. Although the dimensions are very similar to the outgoing car, GM says. Tail lights look a lot like those on the Honda Civic Coupe, but big change in the rear window. It's not a split window anymore. And it allows a little bit more visibility looking back now 'cause you don't have that big bar that's kind of by bisecting your six o'clock view. Speaking of the view inside the car, it's still kind of a tight confined space as far as visibility. Kind of a low windshield, sort of thick A pillars here. That was kind of one of the issues with the old Volt. Looks like it carries over to its successor. Now in terms of interior materials, a much more conventional looking dashboard than the old Volt. No more gigantic center stack here, kind of towering over everything else. Real buttons, real knobs here, which we like to see versus the capacitive buttons and knobs before. And this sort of three-dimensional raised center screen here, kind of a nice attractive implementation. Obviously holds the multimedia system. Let's take a look at the backseat. Pretty good packaging in terms of the backseat here. I'm six feet tall. That's where I would sit to drive. Decent leg room left over, and a pretty good seating position for a car. Again, high enough off the floor that I'm having decent thigh support. Now there is technically a middle seat here. That's a big change versus the last Volt, which didn't have a middle seat in the backseat. So it was just kind of two positions here. Headroom, pretty decent here with one caveat. The rear window here sits above where kind of adults heads would go. And so if you hit a lot of bumps and go up and down, you're kind of maybe gonna be hitting glass here instead of softer headliner material. Now the T-shaped battery pack comes all the way back here and extends across kind of underneath and behind the rear seats a little bit. Put it all together and total system output, 149 horsepower, close to 300 pounds feet of torque, up from about 270, 275 before. Pretty good numbers there. Electric range, now up to 50 total miles. That was up from 38 miles before. And after that, once the engine generator kicks in, Chevy says it'll get about 41 miles per gallon. Now we'll have to wait until all of those numbers are EPA certified. We'll also want to go and see how this car is to drive. We won't know all of that until closer to it's on sale date in late 2015. (engine revving)
