We drove to Los Angeles from Bakersfield to meet a friend for lunch Sunday. That may not sound like much to those driving a gasser or a long-range, big battery EV, but it’s significant to us. We drive a 2027 Chevy Bolt, the least expensive EV in the US.
We drove the 215-mile round trip without stopping to charge and arrived home with 23% of the battery remaining or about 16 kWh of the ~70 kWh traction battery. The car estimates there were 68 miles of range remaining.
That’s truly incredible.
The Old Days
When we began driving electric 11 years ago with a first generation Nissan Leaf, we could barely get out of the San Joaquin Valley. To get to LA we would drive—slowly in the truck lane—to a Frazier Park truck stop just below the summit of the Tejon Pass. There we would park our little Leaf among the giant diesel trucks and plug into the “shorepower” kiosks there. To get our charge we would use our portable charge cable and a specially adapted extension cable. (This was a thick cable, not a “chord” as it carried a lot current at 208 volts.) Then we would entertain ourselves for the next four hours before we’d continue the trip—downhill—to the Los Angeles Basin.
To get back to Bakersfield, we’d have to do that in reverse, spending several hours on a Level 2 station somewhere in LA. There were very few fast chargers in those days—even in LA.
What may be surprising is that we had a lot fun doing that. Driving an EV then was a real adventure.
The Bolt is Born
GM beat Tesla’s Model 3 to market with the Chevy Bolt as the first mass-market EV in the country. We couldn’t wait to get one, a real EV with what was then a large, liquid-cooled battery.
We leased our first Bolt in the fall of 2017. At the end of the lease we bought a 2020 Bolt.
Range of First Generation Bolts
Officially, the range of the first generation Bolts were ~250 miles. However, on occasion we’d get a total range (miles driven plus miles remaining) approaching 300 miles. This was the exception and not the rule. Over the 8.5 years of driving the Bolts we got from less than 200 miles of range to around 280 miles on average.
2027 Bolt’s Range
So getting 280 to 300 miles of range on the new Bolt is not surprising. What is unusual is the consistency of the range.
It’s still early days. We’ve only charged the car ten times. This most recent trip was all freeway driving. And if you’ve ever been to LA, you know traffic moves as fast as it can. Even on a Sunday we did run into bumper-to-bumper traffic—for no apparent reason. But once we cleared that bottleneck traffic was sailing at 70 mph to 80 mph.
So this run to LA was no hypermiling trek in the truck lane. We drove like Angelenos and still got 4.0 mi/kWh with a range (actual plus estimate) of 280 miles.
