With the Chevrolet Volt on the road nearly a year we decided to give it another close look.

It’s been a year since TheDetroitBureau.com reported first driving the innovative Chevrolet Volt, the first fully developed gas-electric plug-in hybrid.  In the months since there has been a lot written about the Volt, its rivalry with the pure battery-electric Leaf and the slow market acceptance of battery vehicles.  So, we thought, it might be time to go back and take another look to see if that initial, positive review still held.

In a few words, I liked it. A lot. It neatly solves the problem of range anxiety suffered by pure electrics. The Volt switches back-and-forth effortlessly from stored electric juice to its 1.4-liter
Austrian-made gasoline engine. Altogether, it is a very pleasant, quiet, easily handling, smooth performing and riding car.

The biggest problem I could discern was the nameplate. At a sticker price of nearly $44,000 as delivered from GM’s media test fleet and quipped with premium options of navigation system and sunroof—but before the federal tax credits — General Motors should have branded it a Cadillac.

Normally, new car buyers would not consider entering a Chevrolet dealership to cough up that kind of money, whereas they’d expect it at a Cadillac store. Still, whatever the brand name, this kind of car does not attract normal buyers, as witness the Toyota’s experience with the Prius. People don’t buy hybrids and electrics to save money on fuel costs. They do it because they like new, high-tech toys, because they want to help the environment, because they want to stick a thumb in the eye of Middle East (or Texas) oil barons, or just because they’re show-offs.

The basic platform is shared with the Chevy Cruze but there are significant tweaks, including Volt's hatchback configuration.

Over the last decade, I’ve had the opportunity to drive GM’s EV-1 “pure” electric like those leased to customers in Californian and Arizona, an experimental battery-powered Ford Ranger, a second-generation 2003 Toyota Prius hybrid and a same vintage Honda Civic hybrid. Funny thing is, other auto writers rarely seemed to mention these vehicles’ most outstanding attribute: absolutely quiet operation.

Indeed they are so silent that Federal auto safety watchdogs have suggested electrics and hybrids must be noisier so as to protect unwary pedestrians and cyclers. Thus the Volt includes a cartoon road-runner-like “beep-beep” horn at the tip of the lamps stalk. This reminds me of 1939 Chevrolets, which offered optional, toggle- switch-operated “city” horns with lower noise-output than regular “country” horns.

This horn feature is just one example of how completely developed the Voltage is. Every detail of the car seems exceptionally well-thought- out and executed, unlike some other contemporary GM and competitive cars which, no matter how advanced in concept, still seem to suffer from annoying execution flaws.

Chevy shows up at the author's house with the 2012 version of the Volt.

When the Volt was delivered to my driveway for a week’s test drive, it had consumed about nine of the +/- 40 miles of battery-driving available. Immediately I had to depart for a meeting in midtown Detroit some 11 miles distant. By the time I got home, the operating battery was close to needing a charge: the instrument cluster readout promised a range of 321 miles, 309 from the gas engine but just 12 from the battery. Thus arose an opportunity to try the Volt’s notable plug-in feature.

Circumstances compelled me to undertake this experiment outdoors at night in pouring-down rain, what one might call an acid test. With no opportunity to study the Owner Manual, I “fearlessly” fetched the charging package from under the hatchback floor, unwound its three-prong “Out” and unfamiliar “In” cords, and proceeded to plug the Out into a regular household 110-Volt wall outlet just inside my garage door. I’d already flipped the switch in the driver’s door to open the fuel-filler-like panel over the plug-in socket, located hip-high in the front left fender forward of the driver door. To my surprise, I found the In cord had a squeeze-handle like the safety grip on a Model 1911 A1 .45 pistol, illuminating a light at the end of the cord so that I could see how to plug it into the car’s receptacle in the pitch dark. It all worked seamlessly.

The all-important LCD screen reveals the mode the Volt is operating in and how much range you have on electric or gas power.

The next morning, after 12-13 hours being plugged in, I found the Volt fully charged, promising 40 miles on juice, and headed off for another meeting on the other side of metro Detroit. This time, on my way home, I noticed a low engine noise hum just as I turned onto a freeway, indicating the juice had all been drawn down and the small gas engine had kicked in. Normally, it is supposed to take 10 hours to fully recharge the operating battery on a 110-volt line but only 3.5 hours on 240V.

By the time I got home, though, the operating battery—a huge T-shaped mass under the cabin floor between the seats (preventing a center rear seat)—had recharged itself somewhat due to coasting and braking

At this point, the instrument panel read-outs were telling me I had a puzzling choice of three different miles-per-gallon rates: 64, 91 and “lifetime” 110. By the time I had to give the car back, the well-executed instruments also told me that in 120 miles of “city-suburban” operation, the Volt had used 1.42 gallons of 91-octane (premium) gasoline from the 9.3 gallon tank and 10.2 kilowatts of electricity.

A built-in 220 V Level II charger is preferred, but Volt comes with a portable 110-v charger tucked under the cargo floor.

According to my last five electric bills, not covering the period of the Volt recharge, my kilowatt rate appears to average 14.6 cents; 91- octane gas as I write this is priced locally about $3.60 per. The arithmetic then suggests recharging boosted my electric bill by $1.49, plus topping the gas tank would have cost $5.11, for a total “fuel” cost of $6.60. A regular domestic car rated at 30 mpg would have taken four gallons of 87-octane regular at say, $3.40 each for a cost of $13.60.

So, yes, the Plug-in Volt is less expensive to operate—as long as you don’t include amortization of the capital cost versus, say, that for a well-equipped “normal” sedan half to two-thirds the sticker price. But the Volt only carries four occupants, versus five for most other sedans; thus if you counted the mileage costs on a per occupant, fully occupied basis, the Volt advantage would shrink proportionately.

The Volt Owner Manual plus an instructional read-out choice on the center stack instrument panel suggest extending juice range by minimizing use of electric-power-using options like the heater/defroster/air conditioning fan (but electric seats are OK—evidently powered by the storage battery mounted under the luggage compartment in the rear).

Aerodynamics are critical to the Chevy Volt, designers sealing off the grille to reduce wind drag - and improve battery range.

As noted earlier in this report, though, people don’t buy cars like the Volt to save money on operating costs, because you’d have to drive it forever to recover the initial cost—unless you had a Cadillac in mind in the first place, in which case, the Volt is a very nice Cadillac.

Though I believe the Volt is flawlessly conceived and executed, I did note a couple of off-puts. One, in order to minimize the drag effect of air flow, the car is lowered below normal standards plus it has an even lower front air dam; the result is the likelihood of scraping that air dam on the pavement in ordinary driving. Second, despite a huge glass backlite in the hatch, the Volt lacks a rear wiper. In some parts of the country, this won’t matter, but in the snow belt it matters a lot. Third, like a lot of other new models these days, there is no spare tire (saves weight and cost), but there is a neatly packaged pressure gage, sealer and pump to provide limp-home capability.

Bottom line: if I were in the market for a $40,000 four-place sedan, Volt would be at the top of my list. It is both a joy to drive and a technological wonder to appreciate.

There's a lot tucked under the hood of the Volt - though the 450-pound battery pack is hidden in the center hump and under the rear seats.

When Chevrolet first announced the Volt a little over a year ago with much fanfare, the foolish new GM CEO imported from Wall Street told the media he expected production to amount to 40,000 the first year. Ever since then, said media have been dogging GM to come up to that mark, an expectation that apparently was not in any realistic planning.

Through the end of September, Volt retail sales in the US have totaled 3,895 (only 723 in September proper), obviously far short of a 40k hope. Critics have beat up on GM for this number versus, say, Nissan’s plug-in pure electric Leaf, with sales for nine months 2011 of 7,199, including 1,031 in September.

However, Chevrolet PR tells The Detroit Bureau that all is rolling out according to plan. Up until now, Volts have been sold in only the District of Columbia and six states: California, Texas, Michigan, New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. Volt sales will be extended nationwide by the end of the year.

The size of the battery pack required Chevy to go with a 4-seat layout for Volt - but the hatchback has plenty of cargo space.

Thus the output is scheduled to total only about 16,000 Volts the first year, 10,000 for retail sale in the U.S., plus 2,600 to be demonstrators for each domestic Chevy dealer and another 3,500 tagged for export to Canada, Europe and China. This volume is not inconsistent with the 15,000 or so SSR pickup roadsters Chevy– a vehicle also priced in the $40s–produced annually at a Lansing facility, 2003-2006.

Further, while production has been ramped up at GM’s Hamtramck Assembly Plant (the infamous Poletown Plant once only for Cadillacs) it is still modest, about 150 per day on a 40-hour weekly schedule; the plant also is now assembling Chevrolet Malibu and produced Cadillac CTS and Buick Lucerne as well as Volt before the July changeover.

Parting thought: is the $7,500 Federal juicer rebate also IRS taxable income? Ouch!