cts | Volt a Day | "Luuuuuuucy! You forgot to plug in the car." September 16, 2010

True story. In the first month that we had our GM EV1 we were excited to show it to my wife's old boss, who was enough of a car nut to have a fancy Porsche and a four car garage. He's not Jay Leno, but he had heard about the EV1 and wanted to see it.

The original EV1 had a sixty mile range. Plenty for the sort of back-and-forth to the studio that my wife was doing at the time. She had already done that once, though, and then I had driven the car a little, and before our dinner up at Barry's neither of us had thought to plug in the car.

And then it was rush hour, so the seven mile drive from Brentwood to the Hollywood Hills was a lot of stop and go traffic. And a lot of uphill. We watched as the range slowly dropped more and more, until we were below the return mileage to our home.

With that first EV1 there was a "convenience charger" in the trunk which plugged into 120v and could bring the batteries back up to 80% in a couple hours. Barry made a few jokes about the car needing a few AA's for these occasions, but he ran a long extension cord out for us and we charged the car while we had dinner. And it got us home just fine.

This article about the Nissan Leaf made me think of it because apparently the car will call and email you if you have forgotten to plug it in. Even now with the Rav4 Electric, there are times when that would have come in handy.

The Volt looks to be even more advanced, with a schedule of departure times for each day of the week and an OnStar application for your iPhone so that you can tell the car when to charge and when to pre-heat the interior of the car for you (or pre-cool it in the summer). More details about that in the next post on the blog, since Chevy just released some images of the user interface on the little screens in the Volt.