Just got in for a week long trip and was scrolling through the rental car options on the app while waiting for luggage to come out. I was interested to see free upgrades listed for a Bolt or Bolt EUV. Having never driven an electric car (outside of a Nissan Leaf in a parking lot at a OEM display), I went ahead and got the EUV (as Im with my family) to give it a try. I partly blame this on peer pressure as probably 20% of my work now drives Tesla and several folks give me a bunch of grief for being a car guy and having never driven "the future of the automobile"-electric.

Figured I'd share some initial impressions now and then circle back at the end of the trip.


My first impression is that I was let down quite a bit on power. Everyone with an EV brags about the 100% instant torque from 0 that makes it feel like a rocket ship for the power. No doubt, this has far more torque down low than a comparable car with a small, NA 4 cylinder. But I honestly think it would struggle to keep up with any modern turbo I4 (much less any v6/v8) when you factor in flash rpm of the torque converter.

I do think this is specific to this car and is software regulated. Flooring it in standard mode has a definite ramp in of power - very similar to an ICE engine (minus the shifting of course) and frankly feels like it takes away from that electric benefit. It absolutely pulls harder once up to 35 or 40 than it does down at 10 or 15. I did find a sport button (just a checkered flag), and that does seem to speed the ramp in of power substantially although it does sound very traction limited. But I still liken it to driving a modern car with a fast spooling ICE turbo 4. I don't get anywhere near the instant torque hit I was expecting.

So the upside is at least its not as dog slow as a typical compact rental would be, but honestly its very far from the exhilarating experience I was expecting from "instant torque". I will say the one place I do like it more is a place I wouldn't expect- on the highway. With an ICE engine at 50-60, if you have to shoot for an opening quickly the transmision needs to come down several gears to get you up on power. Whereas with this electric motor, it makes power as fast as you can hit the gas.


The car itself is ok. Feels almost identical to an Equinox (VERY tight inside, and very cheap). I can't really fault them much for that as the target was to be one of the cheapest EVs, so thats to be expected. I'll admit that cheap econobox commuters aren't my thing, so I certainly won't judge.

One neat thing I played with thats unique to EVs is the 1 pedal driving. Took a bit of getting used to, but I'll admit its kind of cool. I don't really see it as a major benefit, but it is something different to play with.

Another thing I was surprised about was the frunk (actually the lack thereof). I had a misconception that all EVs had some form of trunk up front since there was no need for a huge ICE engine + transmisison. Popped the hood and was surprised to see it chock full of EV stuff. Ive got no idea what Im looking at (buried under the orange loom everywhere that looks straight out of early 00s autozone) - but that engine bay is surprising packed pretty full of stuff. I was a bit disappointed as the actual hatch is incredibly small, so we had to stuff most of the luggage in the backseat with my daughter. I think this just boiled down to me not realizing how small of a size class the Bolt/ euv were.


The one part I didn't think through at all was charging (as it was a spur of the moment selection). The area we're visiting is a couple hours from the airport and is a very rural area. I did find a few 1&2 bay 3rd party fast chargers located at malls and such, so hopefully they aren't being used when we try them.

Id assumed Id just plug it into 110 at the people we're visiting (luckily all cords + adapters came in the trunk as its only got 1100 mi on it). But some reading on the forums looks like it takes 88 hours for a full charge on standard mode, and 62 hours on the higher 12 amp mode (which they say should be on a 15+ amp breaker with nothing else running). I obviously haven't run it dead from the initial drive from the airport, but in the low amp mode, it still looks like it'll take 2 full days to get me back to full just from our initial driving around.

Luckily we don't have a ton of driving to do over the week, so I should be able to leave it plugged in most of the time (and will probably visit the mall with the fast charger if its not keeping up with our use. I was just surprised at how long it takes. The posts from the forums seem to show 10 hours to charge from dead at the type of charging station we found locally.

I may be forced to return it partially drained though. We've got to make the same trip back to the airport at the end, and I don't really want to leave half a day early to make sure we've got time to top it off.


I'll post back in a week with more impressions. No regrets so far; if nothing else it's been a great learning experience. Although I will say as a rental car, I don't think the added charging hassle is worth saving the $50 in gas (although I will be interested to see how much fast charging actually costs).

 

This is going to be interesting to hear the end of this experiment.

 

Thanks for the great post bumpin. All the things that surprised you are a surprise to me too. Especially that long charge time. I remember having a loaner hybrid Fusion once from the Ford dealer when my ICE Fusion was in for an extended service and I couldn't get it to take a charge at home. Maybe I was supposed to wait 88 hours? Without the charge, the hybrid was getting worse mileage than my Fusion did. I drive a non-plug in hybrid Hyundai Tucson now and I like it - turbo and electric boost with pretty good mileage

That rental you have sounds like a real piece of crap.

 

Lots of thoughts after this last week. I'll break it up into a few posts to make it more coherent. This post is about an EV as a rental in general.


TLDR - it's 100% a complete non-starter unless you're certain you'll have access to a higher level charger.

In my case, I only had 1 good charging option - the 110v plug it came with. We kept it plugged in 100% of the time we were at our 'home base' (the people we were staying with). Luckily they've got an accessible garage outlet on a dedicated circuit (to allow the higher rater 12 amp charging - 60+ hours to charge from dead). If we'd have been limited to the base 8 amp, we'd have had to return the car early. Frustratingly, the car defaults to 8 amps and must be manually swapped to 12 each time - so there were 2 nights early on that it sat all night on the low 110 setting.

Unfortunately, since that wasnt keeping up some days, we did drag the cord along in case the people we were visiting that day had an accessible plug. We did plug it in at 2 peoples houses (although I felt goofy even having to ask that), but most people didn't have a plug in range without dragging out a bunch of extension cords.

Unfortunately (at least for our trip - plugged in all night, but unplugged most of the day making short local trips) we had several days where we were net negative on charge. We ended up borrowing a relatives car for one day to get the charge as close to full as we could since our last full day included a longer day trip - 90 mi each way.

However, that didn't quite cut it. Although it seemed like we had plenty of juice for that drive based on the mileage estimate, highway mileage is so much worse that we were running on E making it back home. Pulled up with just 24 miles to go. Oddly enough, we ran into an odd error where it wouldn't start charging at all (that luckily resolved itself after an hour of screwing with it - as I didn't have a plan B and we didn't have enough mileage left to go anywhere else).



That did become problematic as we had to return the car to the airport (about 70 mile trip from the last spot we were leaving) first thing the following morning. Checking on the car just before going to sleep, I realized it wasn't going to physically make it to the airport. So we found an ultra fast charger up in the area around the airport that it should make it to.

That was a real nail-biter of a final trip. Setting off, we had just 5 miles of projected buffer to make it to that ultra-fast charger Id found. We did make it with a bit more room to spare - but we did it in an absurd way. We kept to a max of 55 on the highway, no HVAC, no electrical usage besides just driving. It was incredibly frustrating.

Then I found another surprise I didn't realize - the charge speed is set by the car, not the charger. So even though Id found a 150 kw charger, the car can only do about 50kw (1.25 hrs from dead to 80%). But the car needs to be over 70% on arrival to avoid a $35 charge (and the charger was a 20 min drive from the airport still as it was a bit out of the way), so I ran it up to 85% and we pulled into the rental place just a hair over 70%. Frustratingly, the car further limits charge speed over 80% full - it cuts it down to about 22 kw. Id planned to fill it more, but at that pace - we were getting tight to our flight.


I know a lot of people are probably thinking- why didn't we ever use a local "fast charger" to top off during our trip? Well, the bottom line is that there wasn't a practical one. The small cluster of towns we were in only had a handful of "fast chargers", sprinkled around and they were very slow 7.2 kw chargers (est +18 mi / hr charged). None were in an area where I could spend 5+ hours topping off, and I felt bad asking for a ride to drop this off. We certainly could've headed back to the major metro for a fast charger there, but it was at least 40/50 mi to get to one, so Id burn a good chunk of my fresh fill up getting back (especially since hwy use burns so much higher).

In the end, it didn't even really save any appreciable money. That fast charge I did at the end was nearly $30. Ive got no idea what it'll add to the electric bill of the people we stayed with - a week of charging every night and several partial days at constant 8-12 amps. They were generous enough to not accept money for it, but it still comes out of someone's pocket.

I'm also thankful I tried this on a personal trip instead of a work trip. Id have had no choice but to take it back to the rental place for a gas car as there is nowhere on site to plug in at the businesses / hotels I frequent.

 

This post is on thoughts for the Bolt EUV itself.

Once I reset my expectations to what this car is - the cheapest EV on sale and a compact commuter car, I will agree that its a good car for its intended audience.

As noted before, performance is better than NA I4/I3 compacts - but its blah in the grand scheme (its absolutely slower than our daily driver Traverse at home). Even in sport mode, hard acceleration is 100% traction limited by the garbage "high mpg" tires to boring levels unless you're already rolling pretty quickly. Similarly, it also greatly dampens handling performance between heavy (for its size) weight and narrow / low traction tires.

Its far smaller than Id thought too for the EUV name- we compared directly with a 23 Equinox and found this is actually down at the Spark / Sonic / Versa / Mirage kind of size range. Its really not any bigger than the base Bolt besides a little height + a stretched backseat. IMO thats a miss for Chevy - on top of the added rear seat room, if they could've a few inches of width thoughout (to not have a commercial airliner width arm rest) and another foot to the (extremely small) cargo area - they could've covered a much wider base of buyers.

My big complaint about EVs is always the up front price. They try to shove it down the public's throat, but in many cases they're almost double the sticker price of a similar size gas car (not including adding a charger to the house). I actually found that the 23 Bolt bucks that trend though. The latest major price cut drops these to high $20s msrp, plus they're one of the EVs that still qualifies for the $7500 tax credit. So it really puts this down closer to $20 flat - certainly within feasibility for someone considering a compact car (and calculating the cost savings on electric vs gas over its life) given you're $15k+ msrp to get into any new vehicle today.

IMO, ultra cheap EVs like this are what needs to be produced to continue to fuel mass adoption. Not everyone can afford a $50k+ Tesla or a $100k+ Hummer. But then, the bad news. Despite good sales, they're already cancelled. GM is moving to its new battery architecture and it will be replaced by new EVs - Equinox, Blazer, etc - all of which appear to be in a higher price bracket than the Bolt. That's disappointing for people who truly wanted to try out this market. I think it'd a move in the wrong direction, but I also feel that way about the vehicle market as a whole as the average new car price continues to creep up to astronomical levels.


After having driven it for a week, I do agree that an average person could make this work as a daily driver/ work commuter as long as they installed a nice charger at home. Its not the best car, but it is the cheapest. Its certainly not for me (bare bones compact cars aren't our preferred vehicle for my wife or myself), but there are certainly plenty of people that do prefer that for a local work car. Especially if a 2 car family had a gas car for their other vehicle for longer trips, this would be just fine.

 

Last post on EVs in general.

I will admit that this greatly changed my perspective. My previous experience was limited to a 1G Leaf that was physically impossible for us to buy as a full battery just had enough juice when new to make the round trip to work. So its refreshing to try something that is an affordable option for us (even if its not our cup of tea). I definitely can understand why some people are choosing to take that option (and love the fact that we have such a wide variety of choices in vehicles today).


On the flip side though, I haven't changed my mindset for my personal vehicles going forward. There is no affordable option for the size class of my wife's Traverse (as its starting msrp is similar to a loaded Bolt), and with some of the spurts of driving she has to do for work, it would be impractical from a charging perspective- especially since I can't physically install a fast charger in our current garage.

For my daily driver, I still enjoy the experience of an ICE too much to consider a switch. I went from a modded GTP (daily dose of blower whine) to a GP GXP (fun v8 rumble noises) to now the GTO (v8 rumble + manual shifting coupled with a little bit of slip slidey action here and there). We've had some soul-less gas cars for my wife's commute before that I've driven here and there, and it just makes me dread the drive. I actually really enjoy driving when the car is something fun - even if its just back and forth to work. I'll now admit that I could probably enjoy a P100 / plaid / etc quite a bit as well, but the prices of those sporty EVs are still several multiples out of the budget for my daily drivers.


Unless something truly catastrophic happens with gas prices over the next 20-30 years though, I don't think we'll ever own one though. I know the push is hard to transition over (not to get too political), but I dont think the reality will be as fast + seamless as some like to think - especially for those that don't live in a major metro.

 

Jeeez man, sounds like a horrible experience overall. At least you learned something from it tho. As much as I already hated the idea of electric cars, this just makes me dislike them even more. Like you, I wont get political but I have some very strong opinions on them...

 

TBH my overly negative first post (due to my lofty expectations) makes it seem worse than it was. Once I accepted that this was just a cheap, small econobox like any other bottom end rental, it did its job OK. I will say, other than the last day, we didn't adjust our trip at all as concession for having an EV - we did 100% of the things we planned just like if we had a gas car.

I probably could've gotten away without dragging along the 110 charger in all but one case (I just had range anxiety knowing I didn't have a way to ever quickly fill it). The only part that was a strong negative for me was not being able to make it back to the airport / having to get the charge rate up to avoid double penalties (one for being under 70%, another for being under 10%). It really made me nervous thinking that this thing could strand us on the side of the road if I wasn't careful. Id never run an unfamiliar gas rental car well past the low fuel light, yet here I was starting off our return trip with yellow (and eventually red) range.



Related to that, I do have major improvement for this car - I wish there were user adjustable settings for the remaining energy gauge. In addition to the standard bars like a gas car, they also give you a range estimate. The problem is there are numerous things that impact that range (in some cases by a large amount). Theyve got a screen on the radio dedicated to the + and - impacts of several key factors (driving technique, climate control, outside weather, etc), and it was common for us to be well into the negative double digits on mileage impact.

I wish I could force it to use certain items in its calculation, rather than miss by a large amount and just inform you by that tab as to why. AC was a good example. Over roughly the first "tank" we used, we lost just over 30 miles to climate control settings (ie AC, because its the middle of summer). Id like to force it to assume I'll continue to use full AC as I have the last 50, 100 miles when calculating my remaining range as I refuse to drive around sweltering in the daytime just because I rented an EV.

Another big example is highway use. I wish I could force it to use the higher highway consumption use in its calculation. Not just "highway" either - the gauge starts to turn yellow at anything over 55 indicating you're using too much energy. I mean actual highway (where the speed limit is 65/70 and the average flow of traffic is at least +5).

 

Interesting read. Certainly sounds like there was some stress.
But, the other part you hit on is size/performance/cost of this vs ICE vehicles you own. Not sure how much the electricity consumption vs gas consumption cost off sets the higher cost to buy an EV. But it is still a maturing platform. Today's EVs are a lot different from 10, 20 or 30 years ago. A friend of mine just got rid of his Scion TC with over 200K miles for a leased VW ID4. He wanted to take a plunge to try an electric vehicle, but not willing to commit to owning. He has only had it since July 4th, but so far happy with it. He made a trip to visit his parents with it (2 hours one way) and charged it and later went home. But, even before the events of 2020 pushing remote work, he was already working from home. He can easily go a week without needing a vehicle. He admits, if he still had to drive to the office, this would be a no-go. SO to your point, today's EV is going to heavily depend on your driving needs.

 

I think the key to making the #s work is avoiding 3rd party charging as much as possible.

On the ultra fast charger from practically dead to 85%, we were about $30 (and a bit over .50 cents per kwh). For direct comparison, it would've been about $35 had we had time to sit for it to go all the way to 100%. 100% would ideally give us 250 miles if you were doing mostly city with ideal conditions (not overly hot/cold, no AC, etc).

Comparatively, a gas Spark has a 9 gallon fuel tank (so roughly similar fill up cost) and supposedly can do 340 miles on that fill up (but with the inverse being true - only gets that on the highway, city is obviously much lower).

So for anyone doing mixed driving, its practically a wash between the two for filling up (which pushes it towards the EV being more expensive due to the significantly higher initial cost- especially if you got one without the tax credit). Looking at the much slower local 3rd party chargers, they were a bit cheaper at around 40 cents kwh - but you'd have to either live near it or work near it to be able to tolerate weekly or every other week 10 hour fill ups.


BUT - if you charge at home, your kwh rate is well under half that (in some cases even 1/4 of that). So it really turns the equation in favor of the EV (of course just with this one very specific scenario). Even better in Southern states if you pair an EV purchase with a solar setup.

Absolutely. This thing is night and day different from the Leaf I last drove. Certainly a viable option for a far wider market.

As shallow as it may sound, I think they also did a good thing by not making it as weird as many EVs + hybrids try to be. Inside it feels like any other cheap/base model GM - only the different fuel gauge / power meter let you know its a bit different. On the outside, it also looked fairly normal. Ours had the dark color grille (contrasting the light gray paint) that made it look like a regular gas car from the front (rather than the giant flat body colored panel up front like many EVs have).

So for those that don't like their car to scream "look I'm driving an EV / HYBRID", this certainly wins points.