jdunmyer wrote:For someone wanting to buy a used Bolt, is there a way to guage battery health? Mileage alone wouldn't necessarily be a good indication; i recently watched a U-Tube video of a fella with a Bolt that has 100,000 miles on it. He claimed that his battery had lost only 9% of its original capacity. Simply charging to 100% and reading the GOM mileage would be highly dependent on how it's been driven recently.
You're exactly right by pointing out that the car's range estimate has no strong correlation to battery health. The way to judge battery capacity is to fully charge the battery, drive it until it's empty, and check the energy information screen to see how many kWh you were able to draw.
If you don't have the opportunity to drive that far, a bit of a shortcut method is to use the MyChevy app, which reports the battery's state of charge as a percentage. Check the SOC and the kWh used at the start of the drive, drive as far as you can, and check them both at the end. This lets you compute a very approximate battery capacity. For example:
40 kWh used at the end of the drive minus 30 kWh used at start of drive = 10 kWh used.
70% capacity at the start of the drive minus 50% capacity at the end of the drive = 20% capacity used.
100% / 20% x 10kWh =
approximately 50kWh battery capacity.