The last car that I bought, before buying a used Bolt a) had a manual transmission, b) had a CD player, c) had no USB ports, not even for charging, and d) could only communicate with the outside world via the OBD-II port, as God and the U.S. EPA intended.
And, needless to say, ran on gasoline.
I am now making a sincere effort to join the modern world, car-wise. Here are a few observations.
Some things change, some do not.
I did get the car to talk to my phone. This was surprisingly easy. But only after giving it permission to divulge my innermost secrets, on a whim. Denying any permission, anywhere in the process of setting up Android Auto, brought the process to a dead halt, with no clue as to how to continue. I assume they did that on purpose, and it worked, because I finally gave up and said “just take it all”.
This is also the step where I learned the phone numbers of the prior owner, which had not been wiped from the car when it was re-sold. Oops. So that’s a bit of a lesson, from the get-go.
But I’m still at the point where I spend considerable time saying “why-is-my-car-beeping-at-me”? E.g., I commit some minor transgression, for which the car then makes some coded set of beeps. And I then try to figure out what I did to annoy the car, and promise not to do that again. And/or turn off the damned beeps.
I find this process to be mind-boggling-ly stupid, for one simple reason: They can clearly make the car talk. In know that, because every time I start up, some nice lady informs me about OnStar. And I have not yet figured out how to shut her up.
So, I’ll get out, close the door, and instead of just saying “oh kind master, you seem to have left your fob in the cup holder”, the car squeals like a stuck pig. I then have to guess whether this means I should evacuate the area immediately, or whether I need to open the door, gaze thoughtfully at the interior, and guess what I did wrong this time.
Surely they could have triggered a voice message at the same time they issue all that frantic beeping. Computer memory is cheap. A $5 thumb drive could hold a library of all of those messages, in every language on the planet. Or, at least, allow a voice message as an option, once the car has gotten all that beeping out if its system. Would it have been that difficult to have the vehicle say “fob in car”?
And so, weirdly, in my entire lifetime vehicle progress from gas, to hybrid, to electric; from vehicles that had no electronics at all, to electronics that ran the car and nothing else, to vehicles that constantly chat with Skynet, the only real constant has been the damned door-dinger.
Put the car in gear, without your seatbelt on, and you can party like it’s 1999. Because that’s exactly what your new whiz-bang all-electric miracle-mobile sounds like.
(Backup power)^3
The other constant, since we bought our first hybrid back in the day, is that your car is now your backup generator, for when the power goes out.
Above, you see:
- A 2005 Prius hybrid, with a roughly 1 KWH traction battery.
- A 2021 Prius Prime PHEV, with a 6 KWH (usable) traction battery.
- A 2020 Chevy Bolt EV, with a 60-ish KWH (usable) traction battery.
The first two use gas, once the battery runs down. The last one does not.
All of them can draw power from that big traction battery, in order to provide about 1 kilowatt of AC power during a power outage. Just clip an inverter to the 12V battery, turn the car on, and leave it.
Under some reasonable AC load, the 2005 Prius will automatically run the engine every hour or so, to keep the big battery charged. The 2021 Prius, we haven’t yet had the power go out long enough to figure out how frequently that will run the gas engine. And the 2020 Bolt, N/A.
The only change is that back in the day, the idea of using your hybrid as a backup generator was somewhat radical. Except for the Prius (which attracted a lot of tech-savvy individuals), you had to cut through a lot of tut-tutting and hand-waving before you realized that drawing a modest amount of current off the 12V battery was harmless.
I went looking for information on using the Bolt this way, expecting to see the same dire (but incorrect) warnings I’d seen in the past. Refreshingly enough, the opposite is true. Everybody now knows that if you keep the current draw to something reasonable (consensus is 1.5 KW for the Bolt), it’s perfectly fine to clip an inverter to the 12V battery and run some AC power out of your Bolt.
So that’s some real progress. What was once considered to be odd, cutting-edge, and somewhat risky, is now just a normal part of vehicle ownership. Buy a hybrid, PHEV, or EV, and for the minimal cost of a small inverter, you’ve got maintenance free backup power.
Now that we own three cars that can do this, I’m guessing that if we start out with full tanks and a full charge, we could keep the fridge running and some lights on for several weeks.
I’m also guessing that the entire time we’re doing that, the Bolt will be dinging at me. I’ll learn to live with it.
