cts | Volt a Day | Dodger Stadium September 09, 2010

I'm not a baseball fan. I've lived in Los Angeles for over a decade and I still haven't made it to Dodger Stadium, which is a little sad for my boys because their shouldn't really have their life experiences narrowed by their father's inability to enjoy spectator sports. But there it is. I haven't even been in the parking lot. Until last April 12.

I got a call from an EV enthusiast, who sometimes helped GM with their EV evangelism. She said that there were a very few regular people (not journalists) being invited to try out the Volt, was I interested in doing a short test drive. Well, since I had been reading about the car for almost two years, yes. Definitely yes.

It was very, very early for me. We were meant to be there at 7am. At least the traffic along Sunset was tolerable at that hour. When I got there a couple people were hanging out by an RV with some tables set up. I signed an agreement about getting filmed. They explained that there were about a dozen people there for test drives. They had a track set up, a loop defined by orange cones. Each drive would be with a full car, with the GM representative in the passenger seat. Two other test drive participants would be riding in the back seat.

That sounded great, since it was a real world test of the car's comfort and capabilities. We'd each get three laps of the track, and the maintenance team would make sure the car was capable of doing that on just the battery (so without the on-board, fuel-powered generator kicking in).

I sat in the back for the first two laps, since my experience learning to fly told me I would get more out of the experience if I first watched a few other students first. I learned that there was a great regenerative mode where the Volt would pull energy from the motor unless you had your foot on the accelerator. It turned out that you could drive through even the slalom portion of the test track without touching the brake if you were in this mode. Obviously, staying in that mode meant a lot more range.

When it was my turn I was shocked. We had a chance to crawl through the car while it was stopped, and I had sat in the back for six laps around the track, but I wasn't ready. It's not a GM car. I say that having rented GM cars in the past ten years frequently enough to know what one is. Even recent models feel loose, plasticky, and like the people designing them didn't really drive them. Or didn't pay full price for them. It's hard to say. The difference between a low-end Japanese car like a Mazda and a similarly priced GM car was so startling. And I was expecting a GM car.

Actually, there are no GM cars. The EV1 was the only car that ever got a badge that said GM on it. The rest come out under Saturn (not any more), Chevy, Pontiac (not any more), Cadillac and so on. The Volt will be a Chevy, which is a shame because it is as stunning as the Volt and should really get the same sort of badge that the EV1 did.

The car feels like someone's pet project. Something made by hand out in a twenty-car garage in the Mojave somewhere. If they told me there were only three of these and Burt Rutan put the final twist on the last bolt on each one I would have believed them. Things were really tight, smoothly fitted together, and looked like they had been through a bunch of iterations. And that's just the feel when you climb in. The moment you drop it into "gear" and press the pedal down, it's a whole new ball game.

That should be their tag. The car goes shooting past, not a sound being made, and it says, "Volt, a whole new ballgame."

Okay, maybe I'll stick to architecture.

The car is fantastic, from three laps around a half mile course. Peppy, solid, go-kart cornering and stop-everything-on-a-dime brakes. I would like a third person to fit in the back, but I understand the design limitations and, since I think of this as the EV2+, I am just really happy to have two more people in the car. If we need to drive five we'll use the Rav4.

It was really like driving a concept car. I read about that in car magazines on occasion, but I've never had the privilege. The user interface was not something you would see in a car down at the dealership, it was all Jetson-like. And I think the GM representative said something like, "We've opened the torque up on this car, it might not be quite this zippy in the production version."

You can see a little of my reaction on an official GM site, apparently mostly for internal use. I'm at about one minute twenty seconds in, but you can watch the whole thing in less than three minutes.