Tag: Chevy Bolt

Post #1934: No spare tire? When did this happen?

 

You buy into new tech, you expect certain aspects of your life to change.

Buy a Chevy Bolt, and part of the deal is that you stop saying “gas pedal” for the accelerator.  Likewise, “step on the gas” is no longer a valid request.

I guess I should have seen it coming.  But I now wonder how long it will be before the phrase “spare tire” goes the way of “cigarette lighter socket”.

Flat tire?  Use OnStar

The Chevy Bolt provides absolutely nothing for dealing with a flat tire.  It has taken me a while to get my mind around why they did that.  And no, I don’t think it’s just to sell OnStar services.

Era 1:  Ancient history, the true spare tire.

Standard equipment:  Full-service tire and rim, jack, lug wrench.

Back in the day, cars came with five functional rims, and five full-sized tires.  One of those was the spare tire. If you had a flat you could drive on your spare more-or-less indefinitely.  Because your spare was a real tire.

In most cases, you could use any of the five tires/rims, on front or back, or either side of the car.  This, despite whatever folklore you may have absorbed.  This, per the standard method for “rotating the tires”, according to the experts at Bridgestone tires, among others.  (Directional tires — those that have a forward direction of rotation — are the exception.)

Source:  tirerack.com

Era 2:  The limited-service, compact, or doughnut spare

Standard equipment:  Limited-service tire and rim, jack, lug wrench.

Sometime in the 1980s, car makers began to replace the full-sized spare with a “compact spare”.  This was an era when cars were shrinking, gas mileage was at a premium, and competition from foreign manufacturers was intense.  Credit for the first compact spare apparently goes to Volkswagen (reference).

Initially the compact spare was the mark of the econo-box, but eventually it became the norm.

Today, there are still plenty of cars that come with a full-sized spare tire standard, but these tend to run to be cars meant to have an “off road” look, as well as some top-end sedans.  If you buy your typical mid-size middle-of-the-road vehicle, chances are pretty good it comes with a compact spare.

To be honest, as tires got better over the years, and cars got smaller, I found that the full-sized spare was more of a nuisance than a comfort.  Improvements in manufacturing made tire sidewall “blowouts” a thing of the past.  Steel-belted radials made it far harder to get a flat by picking up a nail in the tread.  And, in general, tires just became a whole lot more reliable.  And the full-sized spare ended up just taking up space.

My wife’s 2005 Prius came with a doughnut spare.  We sneered at the time, but a) we used it several times so far, b) it works fine for getting the car to the tire shop, and c) little did we know what was coming up next.

Era 3:  Tire pump, Fix-a-Flat, and a prayer

Standard equipment:  Tire puncture repair kit.

My wife’s 2021 Prius Prime came with no spare at all.  Instead, Toyota provides a “tire puncture repair kit” which, as far as I can tell, consists of some tire sealant in a pressurized can, an electric air pump, and directions for use.

Prayer is optional but recommended.  And as I am a non-religious person, I tossed in an actual tire plugging kit as backup.

This is now the standard on all Prius models.  You don’t even get a doughnut spare,  In effect, you get a can of Fix-a-Flat, an electric tire pump that fits that can, and roughly 35-step directions for use.  I don’t think we even got a lug wrench or a jack, so there’s literally no way for us to take the tire off the car, unless we buy those tools separately. Edit:  Nope, Toyota hid them in an odd spot.  So, oddly, the car does come with jack and lug wrench, but no spare tire of any sort.  That’s a mixed message, for sure.

(For those unfamiliar with the product, Fix-a-Flat (r) is this pressurized goo that you can squirt into a flat tire, and, if all goes well, and you follow directions, it’ll seal the leak in the tire.  At least long enough for you to get to a service station.)

Era 4:  The Chevy Bolt:  Self-sealing tires and real-time tire pressure monitoring.

Standard equipment:  Nada.

The Chevy Bolt takes this to a new low, or new high, depending on your point of view.  Like the Prius Prime, the Chevy Bolt gives you no way to remove a wheel from the car.  No jack, no tire iron. But in addition, they give you no way to fix a flat, period.

Instead, the car comes with “self-sealing tires”.  Bicyclists familiar with the product “Slime” will grasp the concept.  In effect, they have pre-installed Fix-a-Flat, with the idea being that the goo already inside the tires it should seal holes up to about an eighth of an inch.  It also lets you see the tire pressures in real time, which I think would be handy if you’re trying to get a car with a low tire to a service station.

That’s the theory, anyway.  Plus, you are encouraged to subscribe to OnStar.  (I still haven’t figured out how to shut up the OnStar lady upon startup, so I just keep the volume on the radio turned off.)

I have of course put a 12 volt tire pump in the trunk of the Bolt.  Because, in my experience, “self-sealing” tires are more like slower-leaking tires.  It just takes them longer to go flat than if there were no sealant inside the tire.  So I do want to carry some way to inflate the tire.

But I’m thinking long and hard about buying a jack and lug wrench for it.  Not only is the Bolt a relative dense car — short wheelbase, but weighs more than two tons — it has some weird, non-standard jack points.  And Chevy is pretty cagey about just where, exactly, those jack points are, and what will fit.

Crazy as it sounds, to an old guy, Chevy engineers really don’t want the owners to jack up the car, to remove a tire.  And for once, I might just go along with the plan.

In any case, for this car, at least, I think I understand the lack of doughnut spare.  It’s a small, very heavy car.  (As a result, it has a stiff and sometimes uncomfortable suspension, to take all that weight.)  There wouldn’t be a lot of wheel travel with a doughnut spare.  And I think you’d put your battery down too close to the road to be comfortable.

So, on a Prius, if you hit a pothole with the doughnut spare, you might ding a little sheet metal.  With a Bolt, you’ve got some great big battery modules there on the underside of the car.  And I suspect Chevy was a little hesitant to put just a doughnut spare between those and the road surface.

Conclusion

Having had cars with a full-sized spare, a doughnut spare, and no spare, I think the doughnut spare hits the global optimum.  You really only need something that will give you a few miles of travel, a few times in the life of the car.  Just enough to get you home, or to a tire-repair shop.  Dedicating a full-sized tire and rim to that task is wasteful, and overkill.

But no spare?  I’m not too keen on that.  With the Prius Prime, there really is no place to put a doughnut spare.  So I guess I’ll accept Toyota’s puncture repair kit as a necessary evil.  On the Bolt, I can see why Chevy’s engineers might have wanted to avoid a doughnut spare, owing to a very dense, small car with critical components located in the floor of the vehicle.   I’m still not sure why they’ve gone so far out of their way to make it difficult for the Bolt owner to remove a wheel.

In either case — the Prime or the Bolt — I can definitely imagine a situation where I’d want to take the wheel off the car, to get a tire repaired.  That’s a lot less stress on the vehicle than towing the car, just to get a nail puncture repaired.  And right now, that’s not possible, given what the manufacturer supplies with the car.  Not sure what I’m going to do about it.

But this seems to be the trend.  Just as my kids thought I was kidding when I called the 12V power outlet under the dash the “cigarette lighter socket”, someday, when an old guy refers to somebody’s fat gut as a spare tire, none of the younger people are going to have the faintest idea what he’s talking about.

Addendum:  Notes to self on adding donut spares.

Upon further research, nope, no way I can be comfortable driving a care without a spare tire.  Not when I can remedy the situation for a modest expense.

For the 2021 Prius Prime:  The car actually does have a jack, just stowed in an odd place (in a compartment under the back seat).  By report, the tire puncture repair kit is to be used only as a last resort, as using it will kill the tire pressure sensor and require that to be replaced.  By report, the same donut spare fits all regular Prius models from 2004 to 2022.  But the 2017 and later models use a larger, 17″ rim, compared to the earlier models with a 16″ rim.  Experts say you’re better off getting the proper donut for the vehicle.  The Prime still has no place to put a compact spare, and several drivers report tucking it behind a front seat for long trips.  But all we need to do is pick up a donut spare from a junkyard, for any standard Prius model in that range of years,.

For the 2020 Bolt, I’ve already ordered a Chevy S10 jack, from a model year that has the right “button” top jack plate to fit the jack points on the Bolt.  Rumor has it that a Chevy Cruze (2010-2019, excluding diesels!) donut spare will fit the Bolt, with its odd 5/105 bolt pattern.  (The Cruze diesel had slightly larger wheels with a 5/115 bolt pattern).  Everyone says that, owing to the radically smaller diameter of the compact spare (compared to the normal wheel and tire), the compact spare should not be used to replace the front tires (but instead, tires should be shuffled as needed so that a compact spare is used on the rear, in the event of a flat).  The Bolt actually has a wheel well designed to hold a compact spare, but Chevy blocked off part of it, and a spare will only fit completely if stored deflated. 

The upshot is that we’re shopping our local junkyards and/or Ebay for his-‘n’-hers used donut spares, so that when we have a flat, we have some option other than getting towed.

Addendum to Addendum:  I bought some donuts.

Last night I bought what I hope are the relevant donut spare tires off Ebay, having already Ebay’ed a jack/lug wrench for a Chevy S10, to fit the Bolt.  This was more expensive than scrounging the junkyards, but far less expensive than buying a generic boutique “spare nouveu” off Amazon.

The deciding factors in going with the internet were age and fit.  I wanted tires in good shape, because tires degrade over time.  (I didn’t want to buy a donut and immediately have to replace the tire.)  And for the Prius, the rim fit was fairly important.  I only wanted a donut from the latest Prius models, not earlier ones, which means fewer wrecks in the junkyard.

Really, it was like anything else — these days, you get a better selection off the internet than you do in person.  You just pay for it.  When all was said and done, I figured I had a better chance of success picking among 20 or 30 current offerings for each donut on Ebay, than I did driving out to my nearest you-pick junkyard and managing to find exactly what I was after.

On balance, it’s probably a little bit wasteful to carry around that donut spare, when both manufacturers say you don’t need it.  Mostly.  But in the end, I realized the internal inconsistency of stocking a car with disaster preparedness supplies (Post #1628), and then not having any functioning spare.  So I spent a bit of money to fix that.

Case closed.

Post #1932: The death of my electric vehicle has been greatly exaggerated.

 

I bought a 2020 Chevy Bolt about two weeks back. It’s an electric vehicle with a roughly 250-mile range.  I did my research. Waited for prices to drop.  Got a pretty good deal on a low-mileage car. I think.  Post #1924 summarizes that.

Post #1924: I bought a Chevy Bolt.

And wouldn’t you know it, the very next week the news was full of horror stories about what a bad idea EVs are, owing to poor performance in the cold.  Long lines at public chargers, people being stranded, people getting towed.  The whole nine yards.  This, accompanied by the usual sneering comments from John Q Public.

OMG, did I just make a huge mistake? Continue reading Post #1932: The death of my electric vehicle has been greatly exaggerated.

Post #1926: A Prius driver takes a pass on Chevy Bolt “one-pedal driving”.

 

Do electric vehicles (EVs) get rear-ended more often than conventional cars do?

They certainly should.

That’s my conclusion after trying out the “one-pedal driving” mode on my new (used) 2020 Chevy Bolt.   And working through the logical consequences of it.

The practical bottom line of this post is that you should think twice before you tailgate an EV in traffic.  Because the chances are good that they can stop a whole lot faster than you can.   And may give you less warning when they do.

Not convinced?  Keep reading the parts in red, below.

Words do not do it justice: An accurate description of one-pedal driving mode.

Source:  Yeah, I know it’s a front-wheel-drive car.  The Gencraft AI doesn’t, though.  Almost all pictures here are courtesy of Gencraft.

Here’s your typical bland one-sentence description of one-pedal driving mode:  “With one-pedal driving, the car has enhanced regenerative braking, and will begin to slow as soon as you ease up on the gas (accelerator).”

Before I bought a Bolt, my reaction to that was, big deal.  Almost all modern cars do that, to a degree.  Anything with an automatic transmission slows when you take your foot off the gas.  All hybrids use regenerative braking, that is, they slow down by generating and storing electricity, reserving the friction brakes (pads pressing on rotors) as a last resort.

Some EVs can now do it more?  Whoop-te-doo.

Now that I own a Bolt, I know that description is missing a key word:  Abruptly.  Or, rapidly. Or, with great force.  Take your pick.

Taking your foot off the gas in “one-pedal” mode is nothing like taking your foot off the gas in a normal or hybrid car.  You don’t coast, at all.  You stop, pronto.  Not quite a wheels-locked panic stop.  But far faster than I normally stop, and far faster than anyone would reasonably expect me to stop in traffic.  In the Bolt, in one-pedal model, take your foot off the accelerator and you pull a few tenths of a G worth of deceleration.  Enough to pull you forward in your seat.  Enough that there’s no way I would engage that mode in snowy or icy roads.  Enough that I’d think hard about it before I turned one-pedal driving on in a driving rain.

Enough, already.  You get the point.  Here’s a more accurate description of one-pedal driving mode:

The act of lifting up on the accelerator, in one-pedal driving mode, is equivalent to pushing the brake pedal.  Hard.  Your (lack of) accelerator pedal is your brake pedal.  It’s not 100% as much force as you can get, if you actually do mash down the brakes.  But it’s an appreciable fraction of it.

You may again think, so what?  So you can, in effect, actuate the brakes, without hitting the brake pedal.  What’s the big deal?

Keep reading.

Brake lights?  We don’t need no stinkin’ brake lights.

But wait, it gets better.

Prior to mid-2023, some EVs would do that — stop fairly abruptly, in one-pedal mode — without turning on the brake lights.  And no, I’m not kidding about that.  (Reference).

The worst of those were fixed via software update, so now, all EVs on U.S. roads will now show brake lights, at some point, during some level of deceleration, in one-pedal driving mode.

As an afterthought.  Does that make you feel better about it?

But even now, an EV manufacturer’s decision on when, exactly, to show brake lights, during rapid braking in one-pedal driving mode, is entirely voluntary, and entirely up to the manufacturer, here in the U.S.A.  And for all of them, those lights turn on after the car has started slowing down.

Oddly enough, if you see this brought up on-line, you’ll see nothing but apologists for it.  Ah, cars have always had ways of slowing down without showing brake lights.  Let off the gas, in an automatic-transmission car.  Downshift in a manual.  Or, if you’re a jerk, hit the parking brake to stop, to fake out the folks behind you.

But those events were either mild in nature (automatic transmission), or rare and mild (nobody in the U.S. drives a manual these days, and nobody in the last 50 years has been dumb enough to wear out their clutch rather than brake pads by routinely slowing the car by downshifting).  Or required outright malice, like using a hand brake to stop.

Now, by contrast, you’re putting out a whole fleet of cars, for Joe and Jane Driver, all of which are designed to be driven without touching the brakes.  Designed to allow for substantial rates of deceleration without using the actual brake pedal.  And for which the decision about whether, or when, to turn on the brake lights at some point during that one-pedal deceleration, is an option for the manufacturer to decide. 

Let me offer a clear contrast to what you are used to, in a traditional gas car.  There, the brake lights are designed to light the instant you rest your foot on the brake pedal.  Brake lights are actuated by a switch that typically sits directly above the metal bar holding the brake pedal.  That switch has a fine adjustment on it.  You literally fine-tune-it so that the tiniest movement of the brake pedal closes the switch.  Even the lightest possible braking pressure will turn on your brake lights.  Properly adjusted, you literally turn on the brake lights before the brake pads make contact with the rotors.

So we now have a mixed fleet of cars on the road.  For 99% of them, the brake lights illuminate as soon as the driver puts on the brakes.  For the remaining 1%, the lights may come on at some point, after the driver has “put on the brakes”, assuming the rate of deceleration exceeds the manufacturer-specified threshold.

Yeah, what could possibly go wrong with that?

Braking distance versus stopping distance.

Definitions:  Both terms apply to panic stops.  Braking distance is how far your car travels, from the moment that you’ve firmly stomped on the brakes, until you reach a complete stop.  Stopping distance, by contrast, is that, plus the distance you travel during your “reaction time”, that is, the time it takes to say “oh shit”, move your foot off the gas, and hit the brakes.

Honking the horn is optional, but highly recommended here in Northern Virginia.

Now for just a bit of math.

1:  It takes about three-quarters of a second to lift your foot off the gas, and put it on the brake, in a panic stop.  That’s in addition to the initial reaction time — the time it takes you to realize you need to stop quickly.  (Estimates vary, that’s my reading of the literature on the subject.)

2:  At 30 miles per hour, in that amount of time, a car moves about two car lengths.  (Calculated as (30 MPH *5280 FT/MI *(0.75/(60*60) HOURS) = ) 33 feet.

3:  EVs in one-pedal driving mode can initiate an abrupt stop without moving their foot to the brake pedal.

My takeaway from all that is that EVs in one-pedal driving mode should be able to panic-stop somewhere around a couple of car lengths shorter than traditional cars.  That’s not due to better brakes, or better drivers.  That occurs because they begin to brake rapidly before they even move their foot to the brake pedal.

Yeah, what could possibly go wrong with that?

Summary

Shorter stopping distance is just dandy if you’re driving an EV in one-pedal mode.  But maybe isn’t such a plus for the person in a standard vehicle, tailgating an EV in one-pedal mode.

If you are in traffic, behind an EV in one-pedal mode, and the EV in front of you makes a panic stop, you need to be aware that, compared to a conventional car or hybrid:

1: That EV is inherently capable of stopping faster.

2: That EV will give you less time to realize it is stopping.

And nothing about that car will give you the faintest hint that those two factors are in play.

You’ve been warned.

Background:  Regenerative braking the Toyota way, or why Bolt one-pedal mode does me more harm than good.

We changed the brake pads on my wife’s 2005 Toyota Prius sometime around 140,000 miles.  Up to that point, the brakes hadn’t needed any attention.

The crazy thing is, that’s not even brag-worthy.  Going 100K miles between brake jobs is normal for any car with regenerative braking.

The Prius has regenerative braking.  To the greatest extent possible, the car slows down by turning itself into an electric generator.  It converts the forward momentum of the car to electricity, which then charges the traction battery.  Cars with regenerative braking routinely go 100,000 miles between brake jobs.  So says the U.S. DOE.

No material efficiency gains — for me.

The reason for the low brake wear in a Prius is that almost all the braking energy is done electrically.  In an ideal gentle stop, the friction brakes only kick in below about 5 MPH.  (If your rotors have surface rust, and your windows are open, you can hear that happen until you knock the rust off the rotors.)

In an idealized stop from 30 MPH to zero, you can easily calculate the fraction of braking “power dissipation” accounted for by electrical generation versus friction brakes.  Kinetic energy goes as the square of the speed, so, in a hypothetical gentle stop from 30 MPH to 0 MPH, where the friction brakes only handle the part below 5 MPH, the fraction of braking energy is:

Friction fraction of braking energy = 5-squared/30-squared = 25/900 = ~3%

Electrical Fraction of braking energy = 1 – friction fraction = 97%.

In other words, with a reasonably gentle stop, in typical suburban traffic, regenerative braking (Toyota-style) converts about 97% of the car’s forward momentum to electricity.  You don’t get to keep all of that, because there are losses in the electric motor/generators, the wires and charging electronics, and in charging the battery.  Maybe you keep 80% of that, or so.

One rationale offered for EV one-pedal driving is that it improves efficiency by recapturing more of the potentially available energy from braking the car.  That’s because you can literally bring the car to a full stop, and so, in theory, capture 100% of the car’s forward momentum and convert it to electricity.  Of which, again, you might be able to keep and use maybe 80%, after all the relevant losses are factored in.

And that’s the main reason that Bolt one-pedal driving does more-or-less nothing for my driving efficiency.  Because, despite what you may read, the Bolt’s regenerative braking does more-or-less the exact same thing as the Prius, during moderate stops.  In normal (not one-pedal) driving, when I take my foot off the gas, the car begins to recapture energy through regeneration.  And when I push gently on the brake, it begins to capture even more energy through regeneration.  Just like a Prius.  (All you have to do is look at the dashboard, as you brake, to see that this is true.)  And in a normal, gentle stop, with rusty rotors, you can hear the Bolt friction brakes engage at about the same speed as the Prius — about 5 MPH.

I guess if you drive like a bat out of hell, regenerative braking can improve your efficiency somewhat.  Plausibly, those who routinely make quick stops can benefit from converting more of the stop to electricity, before the friction brakes kick in.

But my driving habits were formed during the Arab Oil Embargoes/energy crises of the 1970s.  And I’m cheap, to boot.  So I try to avoid rapid stops.

My gut reaction, from reading about this, is that the real fan-boys for one-pedal driving are, in fact, those who want to drive like a bat out of hell.  They like it for the “sporty” feel, and how it lets them zip around all that much faster.  Which, to me, makes the whole “efficiency” argument kind of silly.  If you drive that way, clearly efficiency isn’t your goal.  You’d get more miles per KWH by not trying to drive the Bolt like a sports car.

So, from my perspective, as far as efficiency goes, one-pedal driving provides a marginal improvement in efficiency, for those with habitually inefficient driving styles.  Turning that around, if you’re a laid-back driver by nature, you ain’t going to get much additional efficiency out of one-pedal driving, beyond what you get from regenerative braking in “normal” driving mode.

Extras for experts, 1:  There is one weird final twist on this, in that, in a hybrid, regenerative braking doesn’t much matter.  It might typically add just 2% to the vehicle’s overall efficiency.  That’s from a combination of factors.  First, even with the efficient Atkinson-cycle engine of a Prius, you start off by wasting 60% of the energy in the gasoline.  Second, with relatively small electric motor/generators, and most importantly a relatively small battery, the amount of regenerative braking force — the amount of current you can safely generate and squeeze into the battery, without damaging anything — is highly limited.   So for the U.S. EPA drive cycle, with its extended periods of fast stop-and-go driving, you tend to show only a modest amount of energy recapture, as a fraction of the total energy used by the vehicle.

In an EV, by contrast, regenerative braking is a much higher contributor to overall vehicle efficiency, as the Federal government measures it.  First, unlike a hybrid, all the inefficiency in converting fossil fuels to electricity is “off the books”, so to speak.  That occurs at your local utility, not in your car.  The calculation of overall car efficiency starts with charging it, so as a whole the vehicle appears to have vastly less total wasted energy, than a hybrid does.  Second, with large motors and much larger battery, you can safely put more current into the battery.  Thus, in a hard stop, an EV can likely capture more of the energy than an hybrid can, prior to applying the friction brakes.

Old dog, new trick — look ma, no brakes!

The first thing about Toyota-style regenerative braking is that it’s absolutely seamless.  In the best case, you wouldn’t even guess that the car had this feature.  Only if you listen very closely, and brake very slowly, can you discern the point at which the friction brakes are engaged.

The second thing about Toyota-style regenerative braking is that hybrids with regenerative braking behave exactly the same as any non-hybrid car with automatic transmission.  Take your foot off the gas, and the car begins to slow just a little bit, just like any other automatic-transmission car (then) on the road.  The harder you push on the brake pedal, the more braking force you get.

Regeneration in the Bolt, by contrast, feels nothing like a normal car in this regard.  It is far more aggressive, even in normal (not one-pedal) mode.  Take your foot off the gas in a Bolt, and you slow much faster than you would in a standard car with automatic transmission, or in a typical hybrid.  I have already had to break myself of the long-learned habit of lifting my foot from the gas when I see a red light ahead.  On the roads around here, If I were to do that in a Bolt, I’d come to a dead stop long before I make it to the light.

But I can live with that.  I lift my foot, eyeball the dash, and look for the something close to zero KW going into or out the battery.  It’s hardly a life-changing difference in driving technique.  Not after I had to re-learn driving for the Prius Prime, and its preference for constant-power (instead of constant-force) acceleration (Post #1618:  There ain’t no disputin’ Sir Isaac Newton).

But switching to one-pedal driving has one potentially life-changing difference:  You may lose the instinct to put your foot on the brake.  If you never need to panic stop, you can literally drive the car in one-pedal mode and never touch the brake.   (Some one-pedal fans brag about doing exactly that.)

So do I, as a 65-year-old guy, now want to train myself to drive in one-pedal mode?  This, when the approach to driving is so different from our other car (a Prius).  And this, where driving in this new style means basically to ignore the brake pedal.

Short answer, no.  Sooner or later, in NoVA traffic, I’m going to have to do a panic stop.  And when that happens, that panic stop happens on instinct.  It took me close to 20 years to get used to ABS, and to lose the instinct to release the brakes in response to a skid, and just keep my foot mashed to the floor.  I really, really don’t want to lose the instinct that tells me to hit the brakes in an emergency-stop situation.

So, it’s not that I couldn’t learn this new trick.  It’s that I probably shouldn’t.  Not with driving two different cars.  And not with my recent entry into geezerhood.  Better to leave sleeping dogs lie.

The Prius Gene

This is a true story.  We bought our first Prius in 2005.  The same week that we bought ours, hundreds of miles away, with no communication between us, one of my brothers also bought his first Prius.

We’re now a two-Prius family.  I think my brother and his wife have been a three-Prius family, with one going off to Prius heaven as a result of a freak highway accident.

My brother says the exact same thing about his Prius, as I say about ours:  It pushes all my buttons, in just the right way.  From the super-smooth acceleration with no gear shifts, to the dashboard feedback on mileage, pretty much everything about the car says “relax, chill, enjoy the drive”.

Maybe we both like that because that’s pretty much the way my dad drove.  Maybe we inherited the genes that give us that bent.  In any case, it seems to run in the family.

It takes some work to drive a Bolt as if you were puttering along in a Prius.  But for whatever reason, by golly, that’s how I choose to drive it.

So, no one-pedal mode for me.  It’s insufficiently Prius-like.

Post #1924: I bought a Chevy Bolt.

This morning I bought a three-year-old used car with just over 5,000 miles on the odometer.

Net cost, all in, just under $15K.  That’s ~$19K, out the door, at the dealer (including taxes, tags, and fees).  Less a $4K Federal tax credit.  For which I am depending on the dealer to file the critical paperwork with the IRS.

That’s a pretty good deal for any used car, these days.

The fact that it runs on electricity is a bonus.

The only thing missing is new car smell.  And for that, if I really want it, I can just buy some.

Note:  On that tax credit, you have to have sufficiently low income ($150K for married filing jointly).  Not every used EV qualifies.   Not every sale qualifies. Read the details before you even think of factoring that into your purchase decision. 

Continue reading Post #1924: I bought a Chevy Bolt.

Post #1919: Salted Leafs and Bolts, an unexpected twist in my search for a used EV.

 

I’m in the process of narrowing down the used EVs I want to look at.

I just got a rude, but entirely logical, surprise.  It turns out that a lot of the late-model used EVs for sale in this area are salt-belt refugees.  That is, they were sold new in northern states, where they salt the roads heavily all winter long.  But were shipped south for re-sale as used vehicles.

The story.

Based on the ratings of car dealers on-line, I’ve focused on a couple of independent used car dealers in my area.  (FWIW, Kingstowne and Eastern’s Sterling).  I think maybe the phrase in italics is key, because these aren’t new-car dealers accepting trade-ins.  These are used-car dealers.

As I was doing my on-line due diligence, seeing what I can see about these cars by VIN, I happened to notice that one car I’m interested in — a 2021 low-mileage Bolt — was originally sold in Michigan.

Hmm.  Funny that this car ended up in Virginia.  But people move, and so on.  And yet …

I tracked down the original state of sale for the other two I’m focused on — 2020 and later, relatively low mileage.  Those were originally sold in Upstate New York, and Vermont.

One salt-belt car might be by chance.  But every car I’m looking at?  Highly unlikely that’s a coincidence.

I can guess what’s driving this.

EVs lose a lot of range in cold weather.  That’s a fact.  None of these cars has an efficient (heat-pump) heating system.   Also a fact.

I have to guess that:

  1. You have a lot more dissatisfied owners in cold-climate states.
  2. You get a much better resale price on these vehicles, in warm-climate states.
  3. So there’s a steady trade in shipping used EVs south for resale.

The issue isn’t that these were driven in the cold.  The battery management systems on these cars will all prevent the owners from damaging the batteries permanently by (e.g.) charging when the batteries are below 32F.

The issue is that all of these cars are salt-belt refugees.  That is, they were driven in the states where roads are heavily salted, for a significant fraction of the year.

After a few months of watching YouTube auto mechanics in salt-belt states (Watch Wes Work, from Illinois, and South Main Auto Channel, from upstate New York), one thing that comes through loud and clear is that salt is incredibly destructive.  Among the things I learned from those videos is the term “rust jacking”, which is when the accumulation of rust literally bends and breaks metal parts of the car.  Never seen that around here, and I’ve owned a lot of crappy old cars.

And so, once again, I need to stop and cool my jets, as I give this a re-think.  And look at what’s available as a used vehicle, from local new-car dealers.

Post #1918: Falling Leafs, fallen Bolts: The trend in used EV prices in my area.

 

I don’t drive much.  I haven’t had a car for a couple of years now, and have gotten along  by borrowing my wife’s car, when convenient.

I’d like to get my hands on a nice, used EV.   That’s a good choice, given that I’m going to use this for a grocery-getter and little else.

Depending on the price, of course.  And I’m clearly in no hurry to buy one.

Back in July I looked at my local market for used EVs and narrowed my best option down to a 2018 or later Nissan Leaf.  That’s laid out in a series of posts around Post #1837, and the posts just prior to that.  The year cutoff was due to a change in the Leaf battery chemistry that year, to a much more stable (long-lived) battery.

I have been checking back occasionally ever since.

And I’ve been reading articles suggesting a steep decline in the price of used EVs.  I see talk about price declines on order of 30% per year.   This is almost always attributed to the fact that most used EVs are Teslas, and Tesla made some steep price cuts to their models this past year.

In other words, a falling tide sinks all boats.  Those Tesla price cuts are rippling through the entire used EV market.

But in addition, Chevy cut the price on the Bolt last year.  Both to spur sales, and maybe because the Bolt was plagued by a significant recall due to battery fire issues in a handful of vehicles.  Chevy claims that’s taken care of, but they ended up replacing the batteries in tens of thousands of cars.

In any case, when I went back to re-assess my local market for used EVs, it sure did seem like prices were down.  So I did my best apples-to-apples comparison between what I looked at back in August, and now.  As shown above.

By my estimate, asking prices for a used late-model Nissan Leaf fell 14% in the last five months of 2023.  Or … on-order-of a 30%/year rate of decline. 

More interestingly, I can now get a used Chevy Bolt for about the same price as a used Nissan Leaf.  This is a change from the prior analysis, where my back-of-the-envelope on a Bolt of this vintage, five months ago, put the average asking price at $21,000.

But now, consistent with the decline in the Leaf price, there’s been an even steeper decline in the Bolt price.

Objectively, the Bolt looks like a lot more utility for the money.

  • The Bolt has about 90 more miles of range than the leaf (about 250, versus about 160 for the base Leaf)
  • It uses a standard (J1772) plug, instead of the soon-to-be-obsolete CHADMO plug on the Leaf.
  • It has active battery temperature management, compared to the Leaf’s passively air-cooled battery.

The sole drawback from my perspective is that the Bolt looks like a tiny little car, where the Leaf does not.  To me.  They have roughly the same interior volume, and the Bolt actually has a higher curb weight than the base Leaf.  But the Bolt is shorter by about a foot-and-a-half.  Just enough that I notice how small it is, compared to (say) the 2021 Prius that my wife drives.

For either car, if you had little enough income in the year of purchase, Uncle Sugar will give you a $4K tax rebate for purchasing that used US-made EV.  (Yep, for purchasing a used US-made EV.  Part of the Biden Administration’s buy-American industrial policy intersecting with its global warming initiatives. So, thanks, Joe Biden. I guess.)

Rumor has it that the big drop in the Bolt price is due to Chevy rehabbing and re-selling a lot of those recalled vehicles.  I’m not sure how much that is true.  What I am sure is that the Bolt looks like a pretty good option, if you trust Chevy to have fixed that rare battery issue.  If you pick and choose, you can plausibly pick up a three- or four-year-old car, with about 10K miles on it, for a net $13K or so.

This, where the only expensive component — the battery — comes with a mandatory eight-year/100,000 mile manufacturer’s warranty. Which should, in theory, take a whole lot of the risk out of this used-car transaction.  Roughly speaking, you pretty much have to get at least five years of driving out of the car, or the manufacturer (not the seller!) has to replace your battery.

As used cars go, that seems like a pretty decent deal, regardless of the fuel source.  The fact that this is the low-carbon alternative is almost gravy, at this point.   To me, based on what I’ve been looking at, this now looks like it’s just a pretty good deal on a used car.  Period.

I have to confess that the first and last Chevrolet product that I ever bought was a Chevy Vega.  It was a traumatizing experience in many regards, as those of you familiar with the history of the Chevy Vega will understand.

I guess, going on 40 years later, maybe I can find it in my heart to forgive, and give Chevy another try.

Post #1834: EV market, the missing middle: Used $10K to $20K

 

So far, I’ve looked at the bottom end of the used EV market (under $10K).  I’ve looked at the bottom end of the new EV market (under $51K).  The leading candidate for my EV purchase seems to be the Chevy Bolt.  New, those have a ridiculous markup.  Used, they seem to fall in line with competitors’ prices.

This post looks at the used EV market $10K to $20K.

Upshot:  Nothing to see here.  Or, at least, nothing new and actionable, for me.    In this post, I skim over this used EV segment and more-or-less dismiss what I find, relative to a new or lightly used Bolt.

In this segment of the market, I see …

  • Nissan Leaf, later model years, higher original range.
  • Chevy Bolt, earlier model years, not much discount compared to 2021.
  • The occasional Ford, Fiat, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes, Mitsubishi
  • And the VW e-Golf.

The Leaf, of that generation (say 2016-2020 or so), not a bad car.  You can get them with original EPA range around 150, I think.  But the more I look at it, the more the basic design of the Leaf just has issues.  Between the lack of battery cooling and the obsolete fast-charge socket, it really seems that it never was intended to be anything but an around-town car.

Nothing wrong with it, but given what’s available, nothing that makes it stand out as a must-have.  Particularly as Virginia is hot in the summertime, and these vehicles have a hard time charging in the heat.

The Chevy Bolt is the leader so far.  You don’t seem to get a huge discount by rolling back to (say) a 2017 or 2018 model year.  So I don’t see these older Bolts as standing out, relative to a new-ish Bolt.

There are some stray other makes and models.  I just don’t feel like it’s worth the effort to research each one.  Do I really want to own one of the 100 Kia Soul EVs sold in this area, six years ago?

The there’s the VW e-Golf.  The e-Golf deserves a closer look, because those are available in large numbers as used cars in this price range.

Unfortunately,

  • The earlier model years had just 83miles EPA range
  • The 2017 and later, with 125 miles EPA range, cost $19 and up.

Absent some way to know that these are phenomenal cars, I don’t much see the point of looking at them further.  I don’t want the ones with short original range, and the ones with longer original EPA range cost about as much as a used Bolt.

To sum it up, there’s really nothing here that jumps up and says “buy me”, to me.  New Bolt for $26K net of tax credit, used low-mileage Bolt for $16 net of tax credit, for me, those seem to dominate.

What about used PHEVs?

PHEVs (plug-in hybrid electric vehicles) are hard to search for, for a variety of reasons.

One, they fall through the cracks.  They aren’t EVs, but the health of the traction battery matters greatly, like EVs.  Unlike EVs, most manufacturers offer absolutely no guarantee on the electrical range.  There’s absolutely zero indication about the state of health of the battery, in ads for PHEVs.

Two, these also have internal combustion engines, with all the complications that implies, for buying a used car.

Three, Edmunds apparently does not maintain PHEVs as a separate category of cars.  So I have to search for individual models.

Typical asking prices in this area:

  • Volt, 2018 or so, 40K miles, $25K
  • Prius Prime, 2018, 100K miles, $20K
  • Kia Niro, 2018, 40K miles, $26K

There are some larger SUVs that were not of interest to me.  Those mostly seemed to be at $30K and up.

I’m not sure how to proceed in this segment, as I have no way yet to assess the state of the battery in these cars, short of showing up and driving them.

Post #1833: Used EV rethink

I’m about a week into trying to buy a used EV.  I’m typically working from the listings provided by Edmunds.com, for a 25-mile radius around my ZIP code, here in Vienna VA.

It has been an education. 

Good news is, I haven’t spent any money yet.  Bad news is, I’m not sure I’m any closer to getting a used EV.

Maybe a change of focus is in order.

As of this last round, my best candidate is a two-year-old Chevy Bolt, with 20K miles on it, for a net $16K. 

 

First stop:  Used EVs, $10K and under.  What did I learn?

1:  The Leaf dominates this market segment.  By that I mean, most of the vehicles for sale are used Leafs, 2011-2016 models.  Never saw a 2017 listed.  And, on paper, the Leaf SV has better specs than the common alternatives in this market segment (Chevy Spark, Smart for Two, and Ford Focus).

2:  A used Leaf will tell you how much range it has lost, right on the “gas gauge”.   The same gauge will give you a snapshot of the range, subject to a lot of random variation.  But the bottom line is that if the seller posted a picture of the dash, showing that gauge, you can immediately weed out the ones with a lot of range loss.  I went through this in detail in recent posts on this topic.

3:  That’s handy, because the “Recharge.com” estimates of battery range provided in used car ads can be wildly inaccurate.  I got interested in a car because it had a Recharge.com range of about 110 miles.  Until I saw a picture of the dashboard, and found that the actual range was closer to 60 miles.

4: There’s a real “market for lemons” aspect to the used EV market.   By that I mean that used Leafs offered for sale around here had experienced an average of 8 percent per year range loss.  That’s about twice the typical range loss for this make/model/age.

Not that the used gas car market doesn’t suffer from the same thing.  But here, you can quantify the degree of adverse selection with a single, objective number.

Two things brought my search in this market area to a screeching halt.

5:  The best range I could find, on a used Leaf in that market segment, was 60-ish miles.  And upon reflection, that doesn’t really cut it if you want an all-season, all-Metro-area car, that will last you some years.  Highway travel reduces range.  Cold (and for the Leaf) warm temperatures reduce range.  The Leaf uses an obsolete CHAdeMO fast-charging plug that will become increasingly hard to find as time passes.  And that range is going to continue to degrade.

I could  see myself owning a car that I would hesitate to take half-way around the DC beltway, in the winter.  At which point, it’s no longer a fully-functional car, and has started the slow slide to becoming a glorified neighborhood electric vehicle.

6:  But the biggest problem is that some Leafs get temperamental as they age.  After reading enough accounts, it’s pretty clear that some well-used Leafs  can no longer deal with high-power/high-current-flow events, such as highway speeds, long uphills, or regenerative braking.  For those, you have to “baby” the vehicle, and otherwise live within its limitations.  Understand, this is for a car in excellent repair.  It’s not something that’s fixable, short of replacing the battery pack.

In hindsight, I see hints that other used EVs suffer from the same current-limiting issue as they age.  I suspect the extreme examples I found in older Leafs are due to the small battery pack.  Cars with larger initial range (e.g., Tesla) seem to manifest the same issue as a pronounced “loss of oomph”, rather than a car that will shut down if you push it too hard.

 

A new focus:  New EV under $30K?

Near as I can tell, in this market segment, by MSRP, you’ve got the Chevy Bolt, and the Nissan Leaf.  Both cars are about the same size, and both cars are about the size and weight of a Prius Prime.  So I suspect I’d be comfortable driving either one.

Source:  Fueleconomy.gov

Of these, on paper, the Chevy Bolt appears to be a much better choice.  First, the Bolt has a much higher range (~260 miles) than the Nissan Leaf in this price range (~150 miles).  (You can get a Leaf with more range, but it costs another $8K or so.)  Second, the Bolt has the modern CCS fast-charging socket, while the Leaf retains the obsolete CHAdeMO plug.  Third, the Bolt has (I think) a battery temperature management system, while the Leaf (I think) remains passively cooled (which a certain E. Musk described, circa 2010, as “crude”).

All together, this makes the 150-mile Leaf close to unusable for long-distance driving, certainly in summer.  Charging heats the battery.  The car responds by slowing the rate of charge.  Apparently, a mid-summer highway trip in a Leaf is just an excruciating experience.  This, per a YouTube presentation of a West Virginia Leaf owner who filmed his three-day trip from West Virginia to Florida.

Whereas the Bolt, in theory, would get me from Vienna VA to (e.g.) Ocean City Maryland (174 miles) without a recharge.  Not possible in the Leaf.  Per the diagram below, the Leaf’s one-way range limit is just slightly larger than the Bolt’s round-trip range limit.

There are other functional differences.  For example, the Bolt only has resistance electric heating, not the more-efficient heat pump that can be had on the Leaf.

But the Bolt has two big problems.

Fire.

The first problem with the Bolt is its checkered history.  GM ended up recalling every Bolt ever made, 2017-2022. 

There were … not battery fires, per se, but fires in the high-voltage battery compartment.   (A lithium-ion battery fire is all-but-impossible to put out.  Once that starts to burn, the car (and whatever the car is parked in) is toast.  These were events that charred some of the interior, so, for sure, it wasn’t the Li-ion battery that outright caught fire.  But the batter was the source of the heat that charred the battery compartment.)

Per the NHTSA, there were two fires out of a population of 78,000 cars, up to 2020.  Three more such fires occurred after 2020, out of a larger population of vehicles.  In the end, GM recalled all of those (2017 to 2022).

Reading further across several sources, the problem arose in cars with bad battery modules, where the owners charged the car to 100%.  GM’s interim guidance was, in effect, don’t do that.  Don’t charge to 100% (and don’t run the battery down to zero).  Initially, GM agreed to replace all of those batteries, then they backtracked, and offered a software fix to monitor for the presence of those defective modules.  Basically, they modified the software so that the car’s software would raise a red flag if that car had one of the “bad” batteries.

FWIW, the used-car market appears unconcerned, as those Bolts sell on a par with the lower-range Leafs.  Here’s my crude summary, below.  With either car, accounting for the different tax credits for new and used cars, buying a two-year-old Bolt or a two-year-old Leaf would only save about $4500 off the new car MSRP.  (But see below, there are no Bolts available new MSRP).

FWIW, there appears to have been has only been one known Leaf battery fire in the U.S. in the entire history of the car.

That said, I’m not too concerned about the fire risk.  First, I avoid charging Li-ion batteries to 100%, because it shortens their life.  Two, this will be housed on an ancient detached garage, so if it burns, it’s not going to take my house with it.

Bolt:  Unobtainium near MSRP

Just to be sure I’m not hallucinating, this is what Chevy says:

Near as I can tell, those prices are a complete fiction.  At least in this area.

I don’t know whether my local Chevy dealers have figured out a way to collude on prices or not, but every one, in my area, has chosen to mark the up the Bolt by roughly the same amount, about $6000 over MSRP.

What a coincidence.

There’s one dealer within 250 miles that claims to have one, at a more reasonable markup over MSRP.  But upon investigation, that’s vaporware.  They’ve ordered one from Chevy and are pre-advertising it.

There’s a second dealer that claims to offer some at just over MSRP.  But upon inspection, that’s the price after you’ve paid them roughly a $5000 down-payment.

In short, the lowest actual asking price for the base-model Bolt, that I have run across, within a roughly 500-mile radius of my home, is about $33K.  Which translates to $25,500 after Federal tax credit.  Plus the usual fees, taxes, and so on.

The rest of the low-end new market.

To put a cap on it, per Tesla, today, the cheapest model available in my area is a Model 3 for $51K, with a range of just over 300 miles.

To put a floor on it, based on the cheapest hybrid:  A new Toyota Corolla hybrid gets 50 MPG (per EPA) and can be had around here for $25K asking price.  Buying that car, instead of an EV, would add about 0.4 tons C02 to my annual carbon footprint, assuming 3000 miles a year, and assuming Virginia’s electrical generation averages 0.65 pounds C02/KWH.  Around here, a new Toyota Prius looks like it’s almost unobtainable for anything near MSRP.  I’d probably be looking at $36K to buy a new Prius in this area.  At the very bottom end of new-car prices, a new Nissan Versa can be hand for $18K, and gets about 35 MPG.

What is the middle door for?  Only she knows.

Lightly used EV?  Leaf is a poor value.  Used Bolt avoids the current new-car-dealer surcharge.

For the Leaf S, if I were willing to roll the dice on a two-year-old used car with 20K miles, I could save a whopping $4.5K.  That small savings is due in part to the different tax credits for new ($7500) and used (up to $4000) cars.

For the Bolt, the used market appears to avoid the current high dealer markups on new Bolts.  There, under the same conditions (two years old, maybe 20K miles), I would save more like $10K, relative to actual current new Bolt asking prices.  I don’t know whether that reflects the fact that these cars were recalled.  But as far as I know, the 2023 is no different from the 2021, it’s just that GM installed the new software from the get-go.

To summarize

I’m making progress.  I think.

Looks like a new or lightly used Chevy Bolt is the sweet spot, so far, for me.

There’s probably nothing in the $10K-and-under used EV market that I want.  All the cars in that segment started out with small battery packs.  I believe that, as the car ages, those small batteries make the car sensitive to even a few weak battery modules.  There’s too high a chance that now, or in a few years, I’ll end up with a temperamental vehicle that can’t be trusted to do normal all-around driving.

The only new EV available for under $30K asking price, around here, is the Nissan Leaf S.  That has some known drawbacks (no battery cooling, obsolete fast-charging port), and apparently is really not practical for any sort of summertime road trip, due to the extreme charge times with a hot battery.

A Chevy Bolt, with the current ridiculous dealer markup, but after the Federal tax credit, costs about the same as the cheapest new hybrid cars.   For example, it’s about the same as the base model Toyota Corolla, which gets 50 MPG EPA.  So, in the sense of avoiding carbon footprint, it costs me nothing to choose the Bolt over a new hybrid.

(Not shown, there’s also the Ford Maverick hybrid truck which would, in theory, cost about that much.  But those are also more-or-less unobtainable at reasonable markup in my area.  Those get 37 MPG, and have all the the functionality of a pickup truck.)

Cheaper than that, and the only available new cars are non-hybrids, with what appears to be a maximum gas mileage of around 35 MPG.  Of which the Nissan Versa is an example.  But now, still in the early stages of our global warming disaster, I’d say that the last thing I want to do is cause yet another straight-gas car to be created. 

The upshot is that if I refuse to buy anything less efficient that a hybrid, I might as well get a Bolt EV.  With the tax credit, the Bolt costs about the same as the cheapest hybrid.

And then, the question is whether I want to save maybe $10K by gambling on a two-year-old used Bolt.

Go up another $10K to $15K, and you have your choice of new EVs.  But just as a matter of taste, I find none of them to be any more appealing than the Bolt.  Some are modestly larger.  Some have (I guess) more prestigious names than Chevy.  None materially exceeds the range of the bolt, until you hit the $50K bottom-end Tesla.

Das Bolt von Barbie, only available in Germany.

The Bolt is a risk, due to a history of rare battery overheating during full charge.  In theory, GM addressed that.  In practice, you aren’t going to know for sure.  Certainly, the market has not shied away from the Bolt.  Even used Bolts are pretty fully-priced.  And I don’t think GM fixed the issue at any basic level, they just installed the newer software on the new Bolts at the factory.