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I can't speak for the Bolt, but I bought a Tesla over a Volt for several reasons. For one, it's a much more practical car. The Volt has only four seats. The latest generation has a fifth sort-of seat you can squeeze someone into if you really need it. My Tesla seats five adults and two children. It also has about three times the cargo space in a five-seat configuration.

Long range travel is not an issue. Visit https://supercharge.info and see just where you can reach on Tesla's network alone. OK, places like North Dakota and Arkansas won't work too well, but certainly the places I'd like to visit are covered. I find myself planning a lot more road trips with the Tesla than with previous cars. I didn't like burning all that gas before, but now it's just fun. In the past year, I've driven from my home near DC to south Florida, to Ohio, to Montreal, and I'm planning a trip to Wisconsin next month.

As far as long power outages go, I'm less worried with the Tesla than with previous cars. Every morning, the car has 237 miles of range left. With my gas cars, that figure fluctuated anywhere from 500 miles to 40 miles. Gas pumps require electricity to work, so you have to wait for power to come back (or go somewhere that has it) either way. But I know that I'll always have the canonical "half a tank of gas" that they say you should ensure you have for emergency.

EVs are highly practical these days. What they aren't (yet) is both practical and affordable. The Bolt is helping to change that, although the lack of fast charging infrastructure means it doesn't quite get there.

I totally understand why people would want to stick with gas cars or hybrids, whether it's because you live in or visit places like North Dakota, or can't stand the extra charging time needed for long trips, or can't charge at home, or whatever. But I hope this helps you understand the other side.

Good explanation. Checking the map in the southeast is pretty sparse though.

Which part of the southeast are you looking at? If "the southeast" comprises NC, SC, GA, FL, AL, MS, and TN, then the only sparse areas are northern AL and MS and western TN, and northern AL and western TN have sites under construction which will probably be done in a month or two.

Just for an example, I'm in Greenville, SC (which has a location) but regularly drive to Columbia, Florence and the surrounding areas of Myrtle Beach (Murrell's Inlet specifically). That entire route doesn't have anything.

I could round trip Columbia in a Tesla. I could make it to Florence with about 90 miles left but I'd have to get somewhere that I could charge for 22 hours to get enough juice to get back (per the 4 miles per charging hour on the Tesla site for a new standard outlet).

Assuming that 270 mile range was accurate Murrell's Inlet would be doable at 260 miles just barely but then I'm still looking at 67.5 hours wait to charge enough to get back.

EDIT: Just as a side comment, Columbia really seems like a place where they need one since it's the center point to so many routes in the state.

If you'd been watching the supercharger build-out, you'd see that Tesla started by making it possible to drive through SC on I-85 and I-95, and now they're filling in. I suspect there are a lot more Tesla owners in Atlanta and Research Triangle Park than SC... lots of well-paid engineers in Greenville work for BMW and drive BMWs.

Very, very true. This entire area owes most of its economic recovery to BMW.

Columbia is well within range for a round trip without recharging. Myrtle Beach has a supercharger planned. Florence could be sticky, depending on exactly where you're going and how long you're staying. If you want to make a quick day trip, then you'd need to get Tesla's CHAdeMO adapter and hit a third-party quick charging station in Columbia. If you're staying overnight and are near one of the L2 chargers in Florence, or there's an accessible dryer outlet wherever you're staying, then you could just fill back up overnight.

This is pretty amazing timing. Sometime between when you wrote this comment and when I'm writing this reply, Tesla opened a supercharger in Columbia, SC. Not even kidding. I guess they agreed with your assessment!

That's just weird.

That map was a really excellent link. I noticed there was one a few minutes away from my office. I just went and checked it out. Very cool! That explains why I seem to notice Tesla vehicles multiple times a day.

Funny! And yeah, it's a great way to keep track of Tesla's buildout, especially for people who can't see the map in one of their cars. And even if you can, they show (many, but not all) planned sites and sites under construction, whereas Tesla's official stuff only shows you ones that are operating.

For people interested in EVs in general, you can also check out PlugShare to see nearly all public chargers:

https://www.plugshare.com

Many of those are slow chargers not suitable for long-distance travel, but you can filter the map depending on what you're interested in seeing.

> I still don't understand why anyone would buy a Bolt (or a Tesla) over a Volt.

It's a great second car. For families, you buy one PHEV (like your Volt) to handle commutes or road trips, and one Pure EV second car that only gets used for commutes and such. Pure EV's also have significantly lower maintenance.

> Pure EV's are nothing more than "around town" cars in a lot of the country,

This isn't like a LEAF with low 80ish mile limits. At 220+ miles, this new Bolt could drive from Chicago to Milwaukee and back without ever stopping to charge -- quite a bit further than just "around town".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lOV6PdVQbk

Consumer Reports touches a bit on that. One advantage is for example that you don't have to worry about the maintenance and reliability of the combustion engine.

FTA: The battery is expected to last the life of the Bolt EV, and it’s covered by an eight-year/100,000-mile warranty.

100,000 miles is not remarkable for cars made in the last decade at least. Most will go 100,000 miles easily with only routine fluid changes. Granted that may be more than what an EV needs but it's not something most people really "worry" about.

None of my current cars are less than 10 years old and none have less than 100,000 miles; my main family car for long trips is a Honda minivan w/210,000 on the clock and it runs like new and is very reliable. And I only paid 8,000 for it when I bought it with 80,000 miles.

So it's warrantied for 100k miles, not that it's going to die at 100,001. Are any of your cars warrantied for more than $100k?

Not like the battery is expoxied in and you can't replace it.

I leased a Volt for 3 years to try it out without having to commit to the early adopter risk. Oil changes were every 20,000 miles. Occasionally the engine would turn on and run automatically because I hadn't used it at all in a few weeks just for maintenance sake.

For a gas first approach like most hybrids I think it's a bigger concern. In the Volt since it's just a generator I don't know if the maintenance burden is quite as much of a concern.

The first gen Volt had a parallel-hybrid mode, which increases wear compared to a pure series-hybrid, so maintenance isn't as low as it could be.

Could you explain further?

GM initially promised that the first generation Volt would be fully series-hybrid--the engine would drive the electrical generator and have no mechanical connection to the rest of the powertrain. This means that the engine can spin at its most efficient RPM (most of the time, peak torque RPM) regardless of how fast the car is going and thus everything on this engine could be optimized to run at that speed, which reduces wear and maintenance requirements. However at the last moment GM revealed that at certain times the engine would drive the wheels directly, probably to prevent some idiots from driving at maximum power and depleting the battery.

The Volt has a planetary gear system that is engaged at highway speeds when the gas engine is being used anyway. At certain speeds, it uses less gas to maintain speed that way instead of generating electricity and using it. When it is more efficient for the engine to supply electricity only, that is how it is done. I don't view this as a compromise at all. It wouldn't make sense to chose a less efficient path just to maintain some sort of purity.

I already have 2 cars, so I'm not concerned about range.

One of those cars is a Prius. While it has been very reliable, as we come up on 200,000 miles my wife is getting anxious about failure modes that are hybrid only. I mostly don't want to ever have to get another oil change again.

Or Prius Prime? The new version of prius plug in would give epa estimated 133 mpge which is the highest number for any car sold in USA. So if you really consider efficiency and even carbon emissions then that is the car one should get. A good amount of electricity is generated in America by coal based power plants so in a way, comparing mpge numbers make more sense while thinking about reducing the carbon emissions. Also found this tool really useful to see carbon footprint of a car.

Www.carboncounter.com

Definitely the right approach. The more options out there like that the better IMHO.

I'd just like to add that mpge does not really make sense for EVs.

There simply aren't enough EVs to make any significant impact on short-term carbon emission. All the EVs produced by the end of this decade won't make even a tiny dent. You can't really think of EV as relevant at all in the short term. You have to think of it as part of a two-decade long strategic plan.

The same is partly true for PHEV with sufficient battery capacity.

So the question is really, how is electricity generated in 20 years?

I think there's reason to be optimistic about that question.

In general, when it comes to the environment: don't mistake the forest for the trees.

But I see that, ironically, both environmentalists and deniers like to focus on carbon emissions on EVs (equivalent or not). Environmentalists like to say that they're "zero-emission" to boost their ego, while deniers like to show worst-case scenarios to try to make EVs no better than gasoline cars. But if you're calculating the carbon emission of an EV today, you've already missed the point.

I totally agree with you. The Volt seems like the perfect car, but I ultimately picked the Prius over the Volt for 2 reasons: the Prius looks a lot better and, more importantly, has a lot more interior space that I need. The Volt felt both heavy and cramped, like a flawed first generation product. The 2nd gen Volt is a big improvement.

I also picked a Prius EV. It think that was a mistake. A Volt would have made my EV driving percentage way higher.

After test driving both, as well as the C-Max, the Volt felt much snappier and suits our lifestyle better. We don't need 5 seats but we like the layout of the cargo space. The overall ride of the Volt is very smooth. In 2.5 years we haven't needed an oil change. My one complaint is that it doesn't corner as well as my 1999 Corolla did.

Wife has the minivan for when we all are going somewhere, daughter has a beater ('95 Buick) after she wrecked(totaled) my Impala(and two other peoples cars), All I need is an around the town car. I drive 3.6 miles to work, home for lunch then back to work and home again in the evening, sometime a few errands. The only practical drawback is how low slung these small cars are. As a backup if my wife's van is in the shop, we need something higher off the ground as the wife has had six back surgeries and getting in/out of something low is hard for her. If Chevy would do an all electric equinox...

Maybe because you don't want the cost, complexity, and weight of having two completely different drive trains?

As chevy shows with the CotY you can make a hell of a car if you design a car for electric and invest the weight/savings in the better electric car. Why carry around a complete drive train for the 5% case when that you could invest in the electric side for the 100% case.

It hits every trip need of mine except for that ill-advised 1000 mile road trip. Looking forward to the UK variant.

They're not bringing the first gen model to the UK: http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/vauxhall/94351/opel-ampera-e-el...