Life with Chevy Bolt EV

[ed5000]

Spring is fine with me too. Having a 2021 bolt I'm in no hurry either.

My wife's father has been in and out of the hospital to the point that my wife has been driving over daily to help out and he lives 50 miles away. The net result of this means our Bolt has over 12,000 miles in less than 6 months. We usually never exceed 15K in a year on our cars.

So getting a new battery may work out in our favor. I'm waiting as long as I can.

[acensor]

Just an update and checking in with old contacts.
Still happy with or 2021 Bolt. As with all EV owners, happiness increases as gasoline prices do.

Minor bitch... The lane-keeping-assistance is not as solid as the one in the new Subaru I test drove. In that (and some other cars AFAIK) you can on a well marked road let go of the wheel and it will drive solidly down the center of the lane. Yeah, I know that feature can be abused/misused, but nice to have it.
OTHO in the Bolt it will sort of wander left to right in the lane, usually keeping you from drifting out, and then put up a display saying essentially "Hey, dude, grab the steering wheel."

The single pedal driving feature is great. Initially I thought I might only use it if ever in stop and go traffic. But it gives such fine control, and removes the slight delay in reaction to a need to slow that happens when moving foot from accelerator to the brake. And at a light you don't need to keep a foot on the brake to keep from creeping.

Out of curiosity I checked Kelly Blue Book, and despite the bad PR from the battery issues according to KBB we could sell our Bolt for about $6000 more than we paid for it a year ago.

GM has purchased back a significant number of Bolts (owners annoyed by the fire risk are offered that option... often with surprisingly generous payments....sometimes full retail MSRP, more than the owner paid).
So at some point, after battery replacements finally take place, those cars are going to show up on the used car market. So at some unspecified future point there may be some really good deals on used Bolts with brand new battery packs.

Cheers,
Alex

[PV1]

Still have mine and drive it occasionally. I got my new battery a week ago. Not much difference in range yet, but I’ve only put one cycle on the pack so far.

Since my car has never received any software updates, I noticed a few things that have changed with the latest software.

1. Windshield washer added a second swipe to the wipers.
2. Slight gain in motor power, with more controlled acceleration. Full throttle used to be 144 kW, but is now 150 kW above half charge.
3. Pedal response is slightly different.
4. Launches are more controlled and don’t spin the wheels nearly as easily.

When the pack is changed, all energy history is wiped, so the instruments not only have to learn the new battery, they also re-learn the car’s energy usage. This is why reports of wild range numbers are prevalent. After driving about 50 miles, the numbers settle down. One of the biggest concerns I had with replacing the battery was that I’d lose my rock solid range estimates. It appears that I didn’t.

[ed5000]

My Bolt is waiting for it's battery but the car is working so well I almost hate to give it back to the dealer.

In the meantime the wife put 19k miles on it helping her dad as mentioned above but her dad passed away in late January and then we put another 1,000 miles on it driving to his funeral in San Diego.

So the car has 20k miles on it now but it mostly sits except for the weekends. It makes a good road trip car. I was thinking of driving it on my 3 mile commute but the I-Miev, I'm convinced, is like this perfect city car.