Author: chogan@directresearch.com

In a nutshell:  It’s a fine car.

But if I ever run out of windshield wiper fluid, I’m going to have to buy another car.  That’s because, even with buying it used, and driving it almost daily for half a year now — I’ve never opened the hood.  Why should I?  This, by itself, sets it apart from every gas or hybrid car I’ve ever owned,

To me, the Chevy Bolt is like an electric toothbrush. It makes reassuring noises when I turn it on.  It does what its supposed to do, better than any other practical alternative.  When I’m done, I plug it in.  And the next day, it’s ready to use again.

Beyond that, I don’t give it another thought.  Which, to me, is exactly how a car should be.

It has enough range to be able to drive an hour or two out of town.  And, more importantly, drive back again.  All without having to do a fast-recharge on the road.  Which, as I have noted in earlier blog posts, is a hassle.

It’s surprisingly efficient, despite its relatively tall profile.  I get just under 5 miles / kilowatt-hour as driven, running the AC.   It seems to get roughly the same mileage city or highway.  But I’m an easy-going driver, and we have no super-speed (e.g., 80 MPH) highways around here.  (At least, not legally.)

In terms of carbon emissions per mile, it’s equivalent to a gasoline-powered vehicle getting about 155 MPG.  So it’s a real step up, in terms of efficiency, from a Prius or other efficient hybrid.  (All that is based on where I charge it (Virginia), where grid electricity is delivered at an average of about 0.65 pounds C02/KWH.)

In terms of the lifetime carbon footprint of the car, including creation, use, and recycling, it’s still carbon-sparing compared to (say) a Prius hybrid.  But the advantage isn’t as large as the fuel-only comparison above, owing to the energy-intensive nature of making lithium-ion batteries.  You spend a few years “paying back” the C02 used to make the battery.  After that, it’s all gravy.

And, FWIW, I think there’s still a lot of uncertainty over the eventual recycling of those big lithium-ion batteries when this car is eventually scrapped.  Everybody seems to think this is (eventually going to be) a non-issue, but I am not yet convinced that’s true. Sure ain’t true now, around here.

I’ve beaten that drum before, in this blog.

It’s zippy at low speed, but I now realize this is a generic fault with all direct-drive EVs.  It’s a little too torque-ey for its own good, really.  But as I now understand it (thanks to Watch Wes Work), manufacturers have to make them over-torqued, at low speed, in order for direct-drive electric cars to have adequate torque at high speed.

But if you like zipping around, a Bolt will do that, for sure.

Biggest shortcomings?

Well, it’s short.   It’s a hatchback, which I like.  But it’s about a foot and a half shorter than a Prius, bumper-to-bumper.  And the Prius is hardly a large car.

This has a few implications.  First, you are limited in what you can carry with the hatchback closed.  If I bring home eight-foot-long 2x4s from the hardware store, I have to run the up through the opening between the front seats.  That’s pretty ugly.  Second, it has a tight suspension, which I suspect is due to the high weight (4300 pounds), in a relatively small footprint.  When combined with the short bumper-to-bumper length, makes for a fairly choppy ride under the wrong road conditions.   If it were a sailboat, I’d say it hobby-horses.  That is, rocks front-to-back, excessively, on just the right kind of rough road surface.

The second consequence of that is luggage space is small with the back seats up.  By eye, I’d have been hard-pressed to take my family of four on a week’s vacation, with this car, unless we packed really lightly.  Whereas I did that with both a Prius and a Mazda 5 — not exactly large vehicles in either case — with no problems.

Overall, the ride is a bit more “jiggly” than I would prefer.

But that may be because overall, I’m a bit more “jiggly” than I would prefer.

It also has a surprisingly wide turning radius, given that it’s basically a small car.  Noticeably wider than any other cars I’ve owned recently, including a Prius.

In addition, it creeps me out when I look at my dashboard, and see that my car knows who I’ve been talking to on my phone.   Particularly because, as I understand it, Chevy retains the right to (and does) pull any and all data it wants to off my car.  Which, given that it has a built-in GPS, means not just (e.g.,) driving performance data, but location data as well.  Plus anything it can cadge off your phone.  In any case, it creeps me out so much that at I’ve taken Android Auto off my phone, and I’ve erased the Bluetooth connection between car and phone from my car’s memory.  I went so far as to buy the parts to replace the car’s phone antenna with a dummy load, but I have not gone so far as to replace it.  Among other things, it seems that Chevy’s OnStar connection has multiple antennas connected to it, and is extremely difficult to disable without disabling other, necessary functions of the vehicle.

In other words, this car connects to Skynet and you can’t effectively opt out of that.  I assume all modern cars sold in the U.S. are now about the same, in disregarding any notion of privacy.  But I’m old enough that this bothers me.

Finally, it didn’t come with either a jack or a spare tire, both of which I’ve fixed through the magic of Ebay and a couple-hundred bucks.

Beyond that, no complaints.  It gets me from A to B efficiently, safely, and comfortably.  I push the gas pedal and the car goes.  I push the brake, and it stops.  AC cools the interior well.  Heat does the reverse.  The weight makes it stable on the road.  And it feels extremely solid and safe.  No rattles.

Decent radio.

It’s all I need: An efficient urban grocery-getter.  But with the option of taking longer trips if you want, due to an EPA range of 250 miles, and a real-world range (for me) of more than 300 miles.

And it ain’t getting much better any time soon.  Assuming I understand the physics of it, it’s unlikely that electric cars are going to get more efficient than this.  The batteries may get lighter and have more capacity, but cars will still be getting 5 miles per KWH decades from now.  If cars still exist at that point.

Motivated buyer

So I took the plunge and bought one.  In January 2024 I bought a 2020 Chevy Bolt with 5,000 miles on it, for just under $19,000, all-in (including taxes, tags, fees).  (Shout out to Kingstowne Motorcars, as that was the easiest and least stressful car purchase I’ve ever had.)

My Bolt came off three years’ lease in Vermont, and was shipped to a warmer climate for resale. All the used Bolts for sale around here were, similarly, Bolts from northern states that had been shipped south for resale as used cars.

It seemed like a reasonable deal, for a low-mileage late-model used car.

But the icing on the cake is the $4000 Federal tax credit.  Uncle Sam will give me $4000 of my tax money back, because I bought this US-made EV.  Used, no less.  At least, that’s the theory.  Assuming I can keep my income low enough this year.

Net of tax credit, I will have bought a 3-year-old car with 5000 miles on it for under $15,000, all in.

Before you get bent out of shape about that tax credit, realize that Uncle Sam has been providing similar tax credits for decades now.  So if you’re angry about the current set of time-limited EV subsidies, you’re late to the party.  Uncle Sam offered a similar tax subsidy for purchasing a hybrid — back in the mid-2000’s — when hybrids were the brand-new fuel-saving technology.  The current EV (and PHEV) subsidies have Biden’s Buy-American twist to them (cars have to have adequate U.S. content to qualify), plus some fairly socialist caps on the income you can have, and still qualify for the tax credit.  But aside from those details, the current EV tax credits are just the most recent in a long line of subsidies aimed at improving U.S. transportation efficiency and reducing domestic use of fossil fuels.

Which, if you understand the long-term consequences of global warming, for the U.S. and the world, is a good thing.  Depending on how much it costs, relative to other polices to curb emissions.  This may be too little too late.  Certainly, with a Republican takeover of the Federal government shaping up for November,  it probably is too late.

Arguably, offering incentives to switch to more efficient modes of private transport is better than doing nothing.  Unarguably, it’s miles ahead of making things worse by encouraging use of fossil fuels. Which, unless I’ve missed something, seems to be all the Republicans have to offer in this area. 

Maybe I need to do a post on the big-league god-awful things that are projected to happen to the U.S.A. under unabated global warming.  This century.  In order, I’d put a) loss of the Great Plains as a crop-growing area, followed by b) loss of considerable coastal real estate, with no hope of ever again having a stable shoreline for … the next millennium or so.

Let me rank those 1 and 2, with the shutdown of the Gulf Stream (the thermohaline ocean circulation) a pretty good third.  When that happens, that ought to give the U.S. East Coast about 4′ of sea level rise in a matter of months.  That should set off a pretty spectacular scramble.

This is why I’m bothering with an EV in the first place.  The U.S. will bear high economic and human costs by the end of this century, under unabated build up of atmospheric C02.  Costs that could have been avoided by relative cheap actions taken now.  I could not, in good conscience, not avail myself of a good deal on an EV, rather than drive a hybrid.

But as a nation, seems like the Republican Party is psyched to roll back any progress we’ve made in terms of reducing fossil fuel use.  Just as they did the last time they took the White House, so that’s not a surprise.  The upshot is that instead of doing the cheap, forward-looking thing — moving to a low-carbon-emissions economy, and throw our weight around internationally to see that others do the same — looks like we’re just going to let our descendants pay for it.  And hope the country stays glued together without the food surpluses generated by growing crops in the U.S. Midwest.

As a geezer with some money, I’m supposed to be flying all over the world, taking ocean cruises, touring the U.S. in a motor home.  Because why not?  I’ll be dead before anything but the slightest impacts of global warming are being felt in the U.S.  A catastrophic forest fire here, maybe some Cat-5 hurricanes there.  No biggie.

But then there’s this:

The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all. At the global level, it is a complex system linked to many of the essential conditions for human life. A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system. In recent decades this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon. Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it.

Source:  The Pope.  (ENCYCLICAL LETTER LAUDATO SI’ OF THE HOLY FATHER FRANCIS ON CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME, published May 24, 2015

I’m not sure the Catholic church is the greatest source for environmentalism, but the Pope gets global warming.  Once the interiors of the continents (ours and others) dry out and no longer reliably produce food, a whole lot of the poorest people on the planet are going to starve to death.  So he called on Catholics to give the same moral weight to stopping global warming as to, say, the banning of abortion.

As if.

On a less helpful note, did anybody ever both to check on in the coal miners that Trump said he was going to help?  That was from, what, the 2016 election cycle?

Accountability is easy enough.  Here’s coal mining employment from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank (FRED).

Hmm.  It’s almost as if coal mining industry employment was determined by economic trends, or something.  And any promise from a politician’s lips, to resurrect U.S. Coal, is just nonsense.  Although, to be honest, I can’t recall what policies whatsisname tried to get enacted, after he was elected, that were actually aimed at helping coal miners. I mean, they aren’t rich people.

Sure, Trump killed the Obama clean power plan, and pulled the U.S. out of the (completely voluntary, set-your-own-targets) Paris climate agreement.  That, as part of rolling back any recent progress in weaning the American economy off fossil fuels. Thus attempting to drive the U.S. economy with eyes firmly fixed on the rear-view mirror.

In any case, as you can see above, the answer to my question is no.  No, as far as the numbers go, Trump didn’t come to the aid of the coal miners.  Unsurprisingly, destroying existing policy isn’t the same as taking positive steps to improve anything.  The coal industry included.  In any case, if any actual targeted pro-coal policies were enacted during that  era, they don’t seem to have done much for the U.S. coal-industry employment.

OK, forget about coal.  Ludicrous Republican promises to revive failed and now must be forgotten.  (Failed because, among other things, natural gas is now a cheaper and more flexible fuel for electrical generation.)  Voters never seem to remember anything, anyway.  So take the place of Coal as a symbol of backward-looking policy, now it’s drill baby drill.

Luckily, this is self-limiting, in that if the world does nothing about C02 emissions, there likely won’t be anything resembling the U.S.A. a century from now.  What’s left of our current territory will resemble Australia, with settlement along the coasts, and a dry continental interior.  Except that, unlike current-day Australia, the coasts will be creeping unstoppably land-ward at an ever-accelerating rate.

(It’s not even hard to grasp why the soil in the middles of continents is predicted to dry out, as the world warms.  Take a wet sponge, sit it on a table, and it will eventually dry out.  Warm up that sponge, and it dries out faster.  For any given initial moisture level, the warmer sponge is the dryer sponge.  Now substitute “U.S. Midwest topsoil” for sponge, and you’ll get the gist of why the Great Plains are going to revert toward being the Great American Desert.  As average temperatures rise, the climate (and mean soil moisture levels) that you see in west Texas and Mexico will simply move north and become the climate of the U.S. Midwest.  Truly not rocket science.  Interestingly, the atmosphere will hold more water as it warms, and there will therefore be more precipitation on net.  But that precipitation will move northward as well, owing to expansion of the Hadley cell(s), the big chunks of global atmospheric circulation that are rooted by the rise of hot air at the equator.  Canada will remain well-watered.  The U.S., not so much.)

My only point being that people who think we can just keep on consuming fossil fuels at our current rate, and generations from now Americans will live much as we live today … that’s a fantasy.

We can clean up our own mess, at modest cost, or our descendants will live with some extremely expensive consequences.  That’s the reality of it.  And that’s exactly how I see the whole issue of C02-driven global warming.  We now know that C02 emissions are making a mess of the Earth.  It’s just a case of being willing to clean up you own mess, like an adult, rather than leave your mess for others to clean up, like a child.

So that’s why I bought a Bolt.  It’s not a lefty-liberal thing to do.  It’s the efficient thing to do.  It makes less mess than a gas-powered car.  So, in the end, I’m just trying to act like an adult, socially speaking.

End of rant.

Conclusion.

As I was driving my car, it occurred to me that, per mile, my car produces about one-tenth of the C02 per mile that my father’s cars did. (He was partial to V8 Ford products, and drove Mercuries for most of my childhood.)  Fifteen MPG isn’t a bad guess for a late-1960s V8 sedan.  Versus over 150 MPG-equivalent, for this vehicle.

That’s the sort of carbon-efficiency improvement we now need, across-the-board, to get the current runaway atmospheric C02 level under control. 

So in the end, it doesn’t really much matter whether or not the Bolt is the car of my dreams.  It’s the car that fit my needs to a T.  The fact that I like driving it, and that it was about as cheap as any low-mileage used car, those are just a bonus.  It was a no-brainer to go with an efficient small EV.

If nothing else, cars last a long time.  The purchase decision you make today means that the world is gifted with that car for its full usable service life.  Given the high quality of modern vehicles, that can easily be two decade.  I sincerely hope that 20 years from now, gas-powered cars are viewed as ridiculously old-fashioned.  And not in a good way.  Whereas I’m pretty sure that if this Bolt is still running at that point, it’ll fit right in with the then-current U.S. car fleet.  Assuming the U.S. car fleet still exists.

The other day, almost unprompted, my next-door-neighbor (who is also an economist) said something like “capitalism will survive, even if the U.S. doesn’t”.

So I’m not the only one having thoughts like that these days.

I can’t solve this problem, but at least I can make some minimal effort to avoid contributing to it more than necessary.

Hence, an EV was the only realistic choice for me.  It’s just gravy that the Bolt is working out so well.

YMMV.

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