The New Car

My new 2023 Chevy Bolt EUV.

My 2012 Toyota Prius has served me well for the past 11 years. Its gas mileage has been astonishingly good as I had regularly been getting around 50 MPG. But thinking as green as possible, I wanted to cut the gasoline bill to zero. After plenty of research on electric cars, I elected to go with the Chevrolet Bolt EUV. I had a specific color choice, features, and options picked out, and after a bit of a wait finally got it.

Going EV

The dream of course is to have a completely automated driving vehicle that I can get into, tell it where I want to go, and it automatically and safely drives me there. It could seek out charging stations, keep an eye on the time and remind me when to take my meds or eat, even find a Starbucks and order ahead. We’re not quite there, so I figured I would at least get something that could do self-driving on the highway, was electric, and has a decent amount of tech to get me partway to my dream.

Besides in keeping with the solar panels and batteries, having an electric car seems to be the next logical step.

Why a Chevy Bolt EUV?

On the list of features I wanted, I was leaning towards something that was reasonably priced and could handle the self-driving thing - even if only partially. This significantly reduced the list. I also wanted something that was somewhat popular and had been around for at least 3-4 years. While the Chevy Bolt EUV I ended up with has only been around since 2021, it is largely based upon the Chevy Bolt EV which has been around since late 2016. Yes it is been subject to a few recalls - some serious. But I deem this to be a good thing - I wanted something that sold plenty of units and had already worked out some of the rough spots.

The Bolt EUV has a feature called Super Cruise which is the driver-assist technology. This is not available on the Bolt EV - yet another plus for EUV.

Acquisition

As a general rule in the Loveless household, if a car is paid off, the amount of money that would normally go to a car payment is instead put into a separate account referred to as the “Car Fund”. The purpose of this is to make sure there is money available to cover major car repairs, and potentially a down payment on a new car. As my late wife’s 2001 Miata had been paid off ages ago, and the 2012 Prius as well, the Car Fund had accumulated a lot of money, and after my wife had passed and I sold her car (to her mechanic, he had a massive love affair with that car) the money was added into the Car Fund.

I really thought this would give me a distinct advantage at the car dealership. It didn’t.

I approached three local Chevrolet dealers in the DFW area where I live with my list of features and offer to pay cash. The first dealer seemed promising, however the sales person I was working went completely quiet, basically ghosting me. The second dealer immediately said no - they needed to sell me the dealer add-on package and it had to be installed. The third dealer agreed to most of what I wanted, but insisted on a huge amount of extras. Some of them were like cold weather car treatments (not needed in Texas), “luxury” floor mats, and so on. They heavily tried to talk me into financing, to the point of utter annoyance, and flooded my inbox with complete crap.

Out of the blue the first dealer’s “Internet Sales Manager” reached out (my first inquiry to them was Internet-based). It seems the sales person I had been working with was either fired or quit, and while they did pass on the request for the vehicle it was not conveyed that I was ready to buy. Since I had an interest in a particular color with certain features, they had ordered one, and as they were popular cars they expected to sell it quickly anyway. Since I was associated with the original request, I was contacted when it came in.

A quick negotiation via text messages commenced, and I showed up a couple hours later with a cashier’s check from the bank and now the vehicle is mine. They even did the odd requests, like no window tinting and no dealer branding, with no questions.

Initial Impressions

Moving from a car I’ve had for 11 years to a new car was quite a change. It handles better and is much quieter, but these are the types of things one expects when getting a new car. But there were a few things I was not expecting.

I seemed to think I would be living in fear of potentially running out of juice and being stranded, and it would take a while to get over that. This notion was quickly abandoned. Charging is easy, and since the vast majority of my excursions out involve my home as the eventual endpoint, I quickly realized it was no different that gasoline and a gas car. In fact I seem to worry about it even less.

There is a feature one can turn on which is referred to as regenerative braking. This allows for one pedal driving. Basically if you take your foot off of the accelerator the brakes are automatically applied with the rear lights actually coming on. During this action, energy generated by the braking action is actually fed back into the batteries. There is even a paddle that’s mounted on the steering wheel that does the same thing. Yes it was a bit weird at first, but it has become second nature at this point.

After reaching 40 mph the vehicle is “ready” for Super Cruise. Now Super Cruise only works on highways, but there is this extra thing where if you are driving on a residential street, the steering wheel will try to keep you in your lane via “lane-centering”. So if you are slowly changing lanes without signaling you will notice the resistance. Using a turn signal to indicate you’re changing lanes overrides this, and is of course safer anyway. On many of the major streets away from the center of town the speed limit is 45 MPH so this quite a nice little bonus.

There is blind-spot lane detection and obstacle detection via the same sensors, LiDAR, and cameras that Super Cruise uses, in case you are trying to change into an occupied lane or coming up too fast on a vehicle in front of you. And when backing up there is detection as well, to prevent hitting something or someone.

Speaking of backing up, when you put it in reverse the large console display will switch to the wide-angle back camera. Additionally it takes data from other cameras to create a 360 degree overhead view of the vehicle with everything around it, and places that image next to the backup camera image. After you’re done backing up and put it in drive, it switches to the front camera until you’ve sped up a bit and then the display returns to normal. A simple thing I like to do is if I am pulling forward in a tight spot (such as a drive-thru) I will click on the reverse briefly then click back into drive, and this gives me that front and overhead view on the display, allowing for extreme precision getting around objects. I can park perfectly straight and between the lines or get extremely close to that drive-thru window without clipping a mirror.

Conclusion

This is better than I hoped for, and with my charging schedule happening during the day to take advantage of the solar panels, I am thrilled as this is essentially a car powered by the sun. In a future blog post I will go into details of my level 2 charger, and how much I am able to “automate” the entire charging process.