Skip to main content

Why I Got a Chevy Volt

Why I chose the Volkswagen "Buy Back"


Last month, I sold my VW Golf TDI back to Volkswagen.  It was included in the emissions scandal, and I had the option to sell it back for more than I paid for it.  Even though I mostly loved the car, I had my reasons for choosing to sell it back. Here are some of the reasons which tipped the scales for me:

  • There were quirks that drove me nuts (3 sec. delay in acceleration, always complaining about my key not being in range, bluetooth microphone not working for media audio, worthless voice recognition feature, many more)
  • The mileage and age of the vehicle were getting to the point where things start getting expensive to maintain (90K).  
  • The fuel mileage was averaging about 35 mpg, which is not hard to beat using even a NON-hybrid modern gas vehicle.
  • To further this issue, a gallon of diesel comes at about a $.50 premium over gas, negating any fuel mileage advantages.
  • Also furthering this issue, is the relative difficulty of finding good sources of diesel (vs. good sources of gasoline).  

Why I chose the Chevy Volt

I have wanted an EV for a long time now, but at least once a week, I have a 140 mile round-trip commute with no access to a charging station.  The Tesla 3 is out my price range (and, although they are neat-o, the value proposition is just not there for what they are offering).  So I knew I needed a plugin hybrid. Sadly, Volkswagen does not have anything right now.  I considered the Prius Prime and the Chevy Volt.  I settled on the Volt because:
  • It has twice the range of the Prius (50 miles vs 25 miles)
  • It looks better
  • It has more torque and better handling
  • The trunk of the Prius Prime is compromised by a massive bump-up of the floor, whereas the Volt is like a regular hatchback.
Those are the main reasons.  After some searching, I was able to find a used 2016 Volt (2nd Gen) that is fully loaded.  It was tricky, because the used market on these cars is still pretty sparse.  I had to get it with Carmax and have it shipped.  Next year, these will really start coming off leases and the market will pick up.

In future posts, I will describe my experiences and thoughts associated with practical use, but so far I have not been the least bit disappointed.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reaper, Linux, and the Behringer X-Air - Complete Studio Solution, Part 1

Introduction and Rationale This is part one of a major effort to document my experiences with recreating my home studio, entirely using Linux.  Without getting into too many of the specifics, a few months ago I decided that I was unhappy with Windows' shenanigans - to the point that I was ready to make a serious attempt to leave it behind.  For most in this situation, the obvious choice is to switch to Mac OS.  With its proven track record, support, and options for multimedia production, it is naturally the first alternative to consider if your goal is to simply use something other than Windows. For me the choice was not so simple. I despise Mac OS and, in general, the goals and philosophies put forth by Apple in an effort to ostensibly provide users with an "easy" working environment.  It does not help that I have also failed to find any aspect of the Mac OS UI intuitive, but I realize that this is a subjective matter. With my IT background and user-control* favori
Post a Comment
Read more

An Alternative Take on AI Doom and Gloom

 I've purposely held my tongue until now on commenting about "AI" (or, more specifically as has come to be known, GAN or Generative Adversarial Networks).  It seems like it is very in-style to complain about how it has made a real mess of things, it is displacing jobs, the product it creates lacks soul, it's going to get smart and kill us all, etc. etc.  But I'm not here to do any of that. Rather I am going to remind everyone of how amazing a phenomenon it is to watch a disruptive technology becoming democratized From the time of its (seeming) introduction to the public at large, around November of 2022, to late 2023, the growth and adoption rate has been nothing short of explosive. It features the fastest adoption rate of any new technology ever, by a broad margin.  To give a reference, the adoption rate for AI image and text generation, real-world uses, in just 12 months is comparable to all of that of the another disruptive technology, the World Wide Web, takin
Post a Comment
Read more

RANT TIME: Why do replies to a message I sent go to my spam folder?

Despite what one would think/hope, sending a message to a given address does not inherently give Google a high confidence that a reply from this address is expected (and, for example, that it should bypass spam checks). I have confirmed with Google's tech support that there is no way to automatically have this happen. The user can do the following: 1. Add the address to your contacts list in Gmail. 2. Check spam folder for replies, and mark it as "not spam" if something ends up there, which should influence the fate of future replies received. I can also approve an address at the domain level, i.e. if it is a big vendor or similar. I've had to do this with several of our Chinese vendors. I regularly ask engineering and purchasing to give me a list of the supplies we deal with, so I can approve them as a preventative measure. For what it's worth, all of the false positive instances of reply -> spam we have experienced have involved the sender's email server
Post a Comment
Read more