But in practical terms, we generally use the car to run errands around town using nothing but the battery, and then fall back on the regular ‘ol internal combustion engine for longer trips. Conversely, if you only ever took short trips and charged it regularly, you might never need to put gas in it. In theory, you never need to plug in the car and charge the battery – you could just use it like a normal gas-powered car. When the battery is out of juice, a four-cylinder gas engine kicks in to power the electric motor. Our first-generation model has an electric battery that gets us 30 to 40 miles of gasoline-free locomotion. It’s classified as a PHEV, or a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, which was a fairly new concept when the first Volts rolled out of the factory in late 2010. Chevy did a horrible job of marketing it, and they stopped making new models in February 2019. If you’re not familiar with the Volt, that’s pretty normal. Laura strikes a pose on the ferry from the Olympic Peninsula to Seattle. We’re a single-car household, and while there was some talk about borrowing a beefier ride from generous family members, we wound up taking our only set of wheels: a white 2013 Chevrolet Volt with more than 100,000 miles on it. (Laura’s written a statistical summary of the first half of our trip, but the second half recap is still coming. Because of the pandemic, we opted to take a couple of epic road trips to primo backcountry destinations that had long been on our to-do list. We’re in the fortunate position of getting to travel a lot these days, and we took full advantage of the opportunity last year.
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