Exhausting and Juicing Electrons, by Dean Adams Curtis
I exhausted all my electrons three times during my week test driving the Volt. And two of the three times that I ran out of voltage I was on the freeway.
Is this any way for General Motors' Chevrolet Division to treat drivers of its electric cars? They would answer yes. What do I say?
The first time I lost battery power I was going 65 miles an hour on Interstate 10 through downtown Los Angeles. On the display in front of me, single digit numbers counted down, 4, 3, 2, 1...
What would happen? I was uncertain. I carefully moved the Volt over to the right-hand-most lane. Unfortunately there was no shoulder alongside it. I hoped fervently for an exit ramp to appear. None did. Then it came, the moment I had feared...Zero!
Animation on the Volt's screen, that serves instead of an instrument cluster, smoothly swapped out the picture of a battery with a similar looking image of a full gas tank.
Strangely, the gas tank graphic looks more like a full gas pump, but I'm not complaining, the Volt kept moving at 65 miles per hour and the "Miles remaining" was up over 140.
That evening I searched through the Volt for a way to charge it. Pop. I opened the trunk, then lifted the cover over the spare tire.
It was protecting a pair of devices, one of which was an emergency charger that gives you 10 or so miles when plugged into what used to be known as a cigarette lighter.
The other wild thing found under the spare tire cover was a strangely elegant device with two electrical connections. The male connector was familiar, begging for the female end of a standard extension cord. The other end was a female electrical connector, an J1772.
You may want to remember this new and strange code word for your EV plug-in future, it may be on the test that life will be handing out to you soon.
At 10:00 PM I plugged the elegant adapter into a standard wall socket and green lights illuminaed onthe device. I then plugged the J1772 into the Volt's input and a green happy charging light illuminated in the center of the dashboad.
Seven hours later, when I unplugged the J1772, the Volt was fully charged, having pulled its electrons from the same standard 110 volt current that you would plug a light or a hair dryer into.
Thirty-two miles later, while commuting from the east side to the west side of Los Angeles on the 10 freeway, I ran out of Volts again. This time I didn't pull toward the side of the highway or search for an exit ramp. I knew this Volt would take care of me. And it did, moving seamlessly into "gas assist" mode.
The Volt's four cylinder engine kicked in, unheard. The ICE (intenal combusion engine) was not cranking out revolutions per minute to the Volt's drive shaft. The task of turning the Volt's drive shaft, and thus the wheels, was still being done by the electric motor. The ICE was being used to generate the supply of electrons to the Volt.
Later, I went to the Santa Monica Place mall parking structure where the ChargePoint web site had shown me that could find a J1772 charging station.
I found myself a parking space in the "Electric Vehicles Only" area conveniently located next to the handicapped parking spaces and also right next to a blue Nissan Leaf.
I went shopping for one hour and returned hoping to have a full charge. Nope. I had a achieved just less than one- third of a charge, 10 miles, from my one hour of time investment. So with the Volt's J1772 plugged into a max power charger, loading up on electrons would take a little over three hours to fully charge.
On the sheet of descriptive details about the Volt, GM notes that it takes 4 hours to charge using 240 volts, which is the type of power that modern washers and dryers are plugged into. Unless I missed it, the 240 volt adapter doesn't come with the Volt. But this is not a big deal compared to the innovative and thoroughly pleasant experience of test driving GM's latest electric car breakthrough.
Yes, I ran out of electrons twice on the freeway while I was driving on the freeway in the new Volt, and it didn't matter one watt.
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