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With our Pandemic Peregrinations we’ve driven our 2020 Bolt EV far more during its first year of operation than we did our previous 2017 Bolt during its first year. We drove the 2020 Bolt about 50% more during its first year (~15,000 miles) than we did the first year of our 2017 Bolt (~10,000...

Recently I fielded a query from friend seeking comment on a widely circulated article by Recurrent on winter range loss in EVs. The implication of the query was that this somehow implies that EVs are not suitable in the winter. Worse, that if you like to hike and explore the outdoors, you can’t...

Caltrans' District 9 office has announced that five new DC Fast Charge stations for electric vehicles have gone live. District 9 serves Inyo, Mono and eastern Kern County on the east side of the Sierra Nevada. The DCFC stations are located along US 395 that runs north and south through the...

This is the way fast charging a non-Tesla EV should be. Pull up, plug in, tap a few numbers on an easily readable screen and start charging. Easy peasy. No RFID card, no credit card, no app. Plug in and go. That’s what we found on one of our recent Covid-19 escapes when we needed to charge at a...

One of the concerns about battery electric vehicles is the amount of degradation the battery suffers during normal use. We drove a Chevy Bolt for three years, clocking nearly 30,000 miles on the odometer. We tracked the car’s performance during this time, including changes in the battery’s...

2020 Chevy Bolt EV Battery Capacity Anecdotal Observation After two months of driving a 2020 Chevy Bolt for some 2,000 miles we've found that the traction battery of our car has a capacity of 64 kWh, not the 66 kWh advertised. More interestingly, the 2020 battery pack of our car has only 2.5...

I am looking for drivers of 2020 Bolts who have kept records of consumption and State-of-Charge. What I am looking for are records of Odometer reading; State-of-Charge; kWh consumed If you have such records, please send them to me, [email protected]. Note: do not send me anything confidential...

It's an EV driver's nightmare. We were stuck in the middle of nowhere with an Electrify America charging station that wouldn't charge our car. It could have been worse. It was only 100 °F (38 °C) and not 120 °F (49 °C). The wind was only blowing at 15-20 mph (7-9 m/s) and not 20-40 mph (9-18...

We're a one-car family and our vehicle is a Chevy Bolt EV. So when friends decided to go backpacking in the Golden Trout Wilderness during the Covid-19 pandemic, social distancing required that we each drive separately to and from the trailhead. In a conventional vehicle--a gasser--that can...

In the fall of 2018 I published a surprisingly controversial article ranking states and provinces by their non-Tesla, DC fast-charging station density relative to population. The article, California Lags in DC Fast-Charging Station Density for Electric Vehicles, was based on data from the...

In a region of California with a dearth of DC fast-charging stations, the owner of Love Truck Stops plans to install three 50 kW DCFC stations at a new truck stop in Boron, California. The station on Hwy 58 will serve a major east-west corridor that connects I-5 with I-15 and I-40. There are...

Electrify America, a Volkswagen subsidiary, is building hundreds of charging stations across North America as part of its settlements for the Diesel-Gate pollution scandal. Each EA station includes four to six DC Fast-Charging kiosks. However, EA's deployment favors the charging standard used by...

Sometime in the past week PG&E has installed the transformer for the Electrify America station in Bakersfield, California. The four-kiosk station has stood nearly complete--less the transformer--for months at Panera Bread. The station remains offline and the protective plastic wrap, what...

Recargo's California Energy Commission contract to build eight DC fast-charging stations from Buellton, California to the San Francisco Bay Area on Hwy 101 has "expired." According to CEC staff, the contract expired after the CEC issued a stop work order on the contract. Recargo is the...

We are approaching the two-year anniversary of leasing a 2017 Chevy Bolt EV. This is a good time to take stock of any degradation in the Bolt's traction battery capacity and how that compares with a 2015 Nissan Leaf we leased previously. Everyone who uses a smartphone understands that...

Is "A Better Routeplanner" Better? A Review for the Bolt There are four route planners I've used for planning trips in our Chevy Bolt. I've reported on my experience with EV Trip Planner, Green Race, and Chevy's own Energy Assist App. The first two are found on the web, the latter is available...

Our 2017 Chevy Bolt EV is about 18 months old. The windshield wipers were beginning to streak so I decided to replace the wipers. Despite that the replacement wipers for the windshield were not exactly the same size as the originals, they were easy to replace. However, the rear wiper looked more...

Proposition 6, the measure to roll back an increase in gasoline taxes, failed in California's midterm election. Projects that depended upon the tax increase, such as CalTrans' 30-30 program, will now have their funding stream restored. CalTrans 30-30 program was proposed by the Jerry Brown...

While a friend was visiting from Canada, we took her on a road trip from Bakersfield, California to the coast via Mount Pinos in the San Emigdio Range. This is an easy trip in a gasoline-powered car. But we drive electric and therein lay the problem, or as we think of it, the challenge. As I've...

On our way to Santa Cruz, California we stopped in Madera to charge our Chevy Bolt EV. Just a few miles north Electrify America--the VW subsidiary ordered to do penance for its dieselgate scandal--is building a much larger fast charging station. So we stopped by to see its progress. The EA site...