2020 Chevrolet Bolt EV Cold Weather Test Results
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We’re currently spending the week driving the 2020 Chevrolet Bolt EV Premier – the top-spec variant painted in the Oasis Blue exterior color and equipped with leather seating surfaces, 17-inch Ultra-Bright machined aluminum wheels, roof-mounted side rails and a new 360-degree Surround View Camera. This is also the mildly refreshed model powered by an updated 66-kWh battery (up from 60 kWh) which, according to GM, boosts maximum range from 238 to 259 miles in ideal conditions.
GM also claims the 2020 Chevrolet Bolt EV adds up to 100 miles during the first 30 minutes of charging at mild temperatures from a depleted battery, and up to 150 percent more miles during the first 30 minutes at cold temperatures. We took the car out during cold-to-mild early March Canadian weather to find out if this is true. Here’s how the car performed.
It’s important to underline that since we wanted to observe the behavior of GM’s battery in the cold, all our charging cycles were performed outside on public level 2 (240-volt) and level 3 (400-volt) charging stations.
Had our Bolt EV been sitting inside a heated garage during charging times, our results could have been different. Average outdoor temperatures ranged between -5 degrees Celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit) at night and 5 degrees Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit) during the day.
After the first charging cycle, the Bolt EV’s onboard computer told us the car had 263 km of range (163 miles) available, with up to 310 km (192 miles) of max range – 67 miles less than what GM advertises.
However, the Bolt EV’s onboard computer, or what many EV drivers call the guessometer (GOM), predicts how much range you’ll get according to outdoor temperature and past driving habits. Many EVs have this feature as well, but offer the option of resetting the car’s GOM. The Bolt EV does not.
We then took off on a 204-km (127-mile) trek, which included both highway and urban driving. The heater was on occasionally, as well as the heated seats. In total, we consumed an average of 26.4 kWh/100 km of electricity during our trip.
At our arrival, the car’s onboard computer predicted that it had 40 km (25 miles) of range left, suggesting a grand total of 152 miles. This is not only far less than what GM advertises for the 2020 Chevrolet Bolt EV, but also under what the car’s GOM had originally predicted. We performed the same test on our way back with similar results.
As for GM’s claim that the 2020 Chevrolet Bolt EV’s updated battery gets 150 percent more miles during the first 30 minutes of charging, we were never able to actually observe these benefits during our charging cycles. Total charging times on a level 2 (240-volt) charger would take us nine hours, which is exactly the same as with the previous model-year Bolts. Level 3 (400-volt) chargers required a 45-minute wait for an 80% charge.
To the Bolt’s defense, we noticed the same results driving other EVs in similar conditions. Cars powered by a 60- to 66-kWh battery – like the Hyundai Kona EV, Nissan LEAF Plus, Kia Soul EV and Niro EV, will get you about 186 miles of total range at best during the freezing winter months.
Keeping the batteries warm during charging will indeed give help, but expect them to lose anywhere between 30% to 50% of total range anyway once you venture out on winter roads.
Do you own a 2020 Chevrolet Bolt EV? Let us know in the comments below what your real-world driving range is.
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Imagine how it could be living in the North of Quebec province! Montreal is quite warmer than where I live. I test drived a Bolt last year during cold, windy weather (usual winter weather where I live) without charging and I’ve had problem making 100 km (60 miles) on a 80% charge! And the “check engine” light appeared 2-3 times during the weekend, apparently because the car’s battery was too cold, so I’d have to wait for the battery to get used to the cold weather every time I’d have to use the car, I guess? Not very useful… If you get to plug it at home anytime you use it, it could be ok, but if you can’t plug it at work, or elsewhere, I’m not even sure that you could get back home on colder days…
In very cold places in the US like Minnesota, there are commonly provisions for fossil cars with engine block heaters. IE garages and such have regular outlets to plug in and keep things warmish. I would think anywhere that an ICE would struggle should have these and you would be able to also plug in an EV for a similar improvement. Regardless of how its powered, no vehicle does well in -40° temps.
EVs make no sense to me. They cost more and offer less capability. Other than the irrational Tesla hype I can’t understand why anyone would want one.
This report is very useful for the public and for prospective car shoppers.Thank you, GM Authority and Eric.
And now you know why you should have bought a Volt.
I live in Frozen northern Alberta. We spend at least 3 months a year below -15°C, and it is not uncommon to hit -40°C for a couple weeks.
My cell phone battery will die completely while in my pocket on days like that, so I don’t give much hope for electric cars in the immediate future where I am.
Every car in Alberta has a engine block heater or oilpan heater, or there will be a few weeks your car won’t start.
I’ve had my all electric 2019 Chevrolet Bolt premier for just over a year. I have enjoyed two winters where we had many weeks of -40 and -30 in January of last year and this year. When I go to work downtown it sits in an open parking lot and not plugged in for nine hours. Every time I came back to it and started it from about a block away it would be so hot inside I’d have to turn everything down. The best part is I never had to worry about the car starting. No starter, no oil, no crankshaft, it just goes. Not a worry. All my fellow workers with their cars we’re just praying that they would start. At -40 I had 200 km on the dial and in summer nearly 400 km. I thoroughly love my car, will never buy another gas card again.
Nobody that owns a GM EV refer to the range estimator as a GOM. It has been proven to be very accurate across all generations of their EVs and PHEVs. 10 miles off the estimate. That’s only 6% off and you fail to mention that the “GOM” continually updates the driver with the remaining estimated range as well as how your instantaneous behavior (and other variables) are affecting that estimate. It is very robust. My bet is that the range estimate immediately projected less than the original nominal projection, giving you (the driver) plenty of advanced notice to modify speed or driving behavior if needed. I’ve taken many cold weather trips in my Bolt and though winter range ain’t great, the estimates are realistic.
Now we need a report from hot humid environment. Batteries lose performance in extreme temperatures hot or cold. Will be interesting to see where the price of gas goes with all this Virus scare.
I spend the winter in South Texas. Yes the heat will kill batteries. I’ll keep my Impala with V-6 and get 600 miles on a Tank of gas on my trip south of 1900 miles from the U.P. of Michigan
GM:
I’m aware of your recent advertising campaign about the push for electric vehicles in the next few years.
Please do not waste precious capital and time producing Vehicles without meeting the following requirements:
Minimum 300 mile range with average use of accessories in the car – keeping in mind that drivers do need to keep the heat on especially in colder climates
Be able to charge the vehicle to 100% within 10 minutes at any gas station in the United States
High reliability
Guaranteed 7-year battery life
The public will not accept electric vehicles unless the driving experience and the day to day livability of the vehicle does not match that of internal combustion vehicles
And don’t forget it should cost the same or less than the equivalent gas car. No such EV exists and it’s unlikely any such EV will ever exist. This push for electric cars is not coming from consumers and it will fail spectacularly.
Rakesh: At the risk of my being repetitive. you could have all that while enjoying “Driving Electric” 95% of the time for typical suburban use, if only you could still buy a Volt. Why did GM kill the only practical electric car it had or possibly will have for the foreseeable future?
The Volt/Bolt are ugly
How about something the size and shape of a Blazer?
I just read an article about Samsung developing an all-new solid-state battery using silver carbon instead of lithium. 500-mile range, 1000 charge cycles
I can wait until they make things the way I hope they should be
If we would have started investing in batteries, wind, and solar in the 70’s we’d be in a much better spot today. Despite plenty of lobbying to hold these technologies back, solar energy is not cheaper than coal for electricity production due to innovations in collector efficiency and manufacturing. Imagine if we had the push for good batteries 20 years ago, that we’re seeing today. So much has happened, just in the last 10 years. Regarding the Samsung announcement…well, maybe. It takes a lot more than a small-scale lab test to validate a new battery chemistry for OEM use. There are many of variables to consider, and some can’t be tested in an accelerated environment easily (calendar aging for example).
Suzy,
I have a friend with the second generation Volt, and he loves it. And this is in Vermont, with real winters (and some very hot summer days too.) So just what was the downside of the Volt? I recall being surprised when I first heard it was to be discontinued.
Cadillac had a version of Volt for a while — the ELR (2014 and 2016)- which was expensive and perhaps not a great car. But it was the most attractively-styled car they had made in a long time, a stunning coupe.
Rakesh, eventually we will have EVs (including from GM) that meet all the “requirements” you mentioned. I’d guess that is AT LEAST three years away and possibly five or six.
I have a Bolt. It’s great as a second car. Calif’s winters are mostly high 30’s to 60. Ranges does suffer. The Bolt is great as a second car. When my gas car goes, will probably get a Toyota Hybrid. They don’t make Volts any longer, GM wants is giving that market niche to other manufacturers. A Volt might have worked. I drive coast to coast a couple times a year. It won’t be the Bolt I drive. But I still like it.
The Bolt would be a great commuter and or second Car for many folks if it started at 25K
It would be a great way for people to dip their toes in the EV World.
I just leased my 2020 bolt i haven’t plugged it into a fast charger yet just my trickle charger at home. I have 222 mile range and it said it will finish charging by 6am 11 hours! 57 F and in my garage
I agree 100% with Susie Q a Volt was much more practical then the Bolt.
Probably too late to do this test but I would like to know how it does in the following scenario:
Fully charged
Drive 30 miles
Park it for two weeks in mostly freezing weather (similar to this driving test) without being plugged in
Drive it 30 miles
This is my “winter vacation, leave the car at the airport” scenario.
Thanks for the article. The results are not unexpected and are congruent with what aI have experienced myself. Seriously cold weather drastically cuts available driving range due to lower chemical efficiency of the battery plus the drain of energy used to heat the battery and heat the cabin air. I have noticed up to 4 KW of energy being used for heat in very cold conditions; that is almost as much as the electric traction motor uses on average for driving. Not surprisingly, driving range is approximately cut in half.
Lower cold efficiency certainly is not strictly the venue of electric vehicles. I have a gas powered Toyota Tacoma pickup as well. In the summer, the Tacoma ekes out about 20 MPG. If I take mostly short trips in very cold winter weather, the economy can drop to a paltry 16 MPG. Yes that is “only” a 25% drop versus a 50% loss of range for electric. On the other hand, there is much more energy waste all the time for the Tacoma, so the difference between winter and summer is less noticeable. Looking at efficiency equivalence, the Bolt drops from 100+ MPGe to around 50 MPGe in cold weather. That is still very good efficiency.
There are things to do that can help. If possible keep the Bolt plugged in when not driving. The battery can pre heat if the car is plugged in. Even better, if possible, keep the car inside when not in use so the battery does not get as cold. If the battery is kept warm, less energy will need to be expended to heat the battery while driving. Group trips or take longer trips. Once the cabin and battery warm up, the heater will consume less energy.
The Bolt owner’s manual encourages keeping the Bolt plugged in when not in use. That is in contrast to the 1st generation LEAF I had. The LEAF would not charge its 12 Volt battery while plugged in. That was not an issue as long as the LEAF were driven close to daily. If the LEAF stayed plugged in more than a few days, ironically the 12 Volt battery would go dead and need a jump start even though the main battery had a full charge. The LEAF is supposed to periodicallycharge the 12 Volt battery from the main battery, but only if left unplugged.
Leased a 2020 Bolt in June and I’ve by really happy with until it started getting cold thus month. I’ve lost anywhere from 80-100 miles of range per charge. When it was warm it would charge up to 275-280, now only 170-180. I still love the car but this needs to be resolved by GM.
There really isn’t a lot of resolving that GM can do short of adopting a heat pump system, which Kia and now Nissan have done. Heating the cabin with resistance heat is inefficient because you get one-to-one thermal output corresponding to electrical energy consumption. Adopting a refrigerant based heat pump can scavenge up to four calories of heat from outside the car for each calorie worth of electrical energy consumed. A heat pump is like getting a free lunch until the outside temperature is below 35 degrees Fahrenheit. Below 35, the refrigeration cycle does not absorb as much energy.
GM made a calculated design decision to keep the A/C simple by not including a four-way valve that would have allowed reversing the evaporator and condenser. Some of the plumbing can be lighter in the low pressure side if reversing is not required. The Bolt’s refrigeration circuit runs through a heat exchanger for the coolant loop of the high voltage battery. The Bolt would have needed two separate refrigeration circuits if the system had a reversible refrigerant circuit for the cabin. I haven’t seen a Kia Kona in person, but it must have two circuits because the Kona has a liquid cooled battery. The LEAF can do a heat pump more easily because the LEAF has an air cooled battery and thus no heat exchanger.
It is disappointing to lose winter driving range, but that points out how efficient an EV is otherwise. With the heat off, you get something about equivalent to 108 MPG if the Bolt were gas powered. Using direct electric power for heat has a marked effect. On the other hand, cabin heat of an internal combustion engine car is an almost free byproduct because the engine always wastes so much energy as heat that doesn’t move the car. Even gas powered cars lose range in winter due to lower efficiency, but unless you drive a fairly efficient gas powered car, the drop off is not so noticeable.
The Bolt is not alone, even the Tesla Model 3 has only resistance based cabin heat, no heat pump.
I’m not even talking about losing miles because of using the heater to stay warm. The battery just does not charge to full capacity and allot of it is software because part of it’s based on your miles per killiwat hr used on your previous charge. So let’s say my battery at full charge reads 180, and I average 2.6 miles per killiwat hr for the next 3 days. When I plug it in again, it will probably will only charge up to 165 miles. The other day I plugged it in and it only charged up to 156. My point is, the car is rated at 259 per charge. It should charge to that point regardless of how you are driving between charges. Yes you may go through miles faster based on your driving habits, but that should never effect how it charges.
If the energy consumption has been averaging 2.6 KWH/mile and the battery is nominally 62 KWH capacity, then the expected range would be approximately 161 miles. The car computer projecting a range of 159 miles is close to what is expected.
In the US, the electric vehicles’ advertised driving range is based on a standardized EPA driving cycle test. Manufacturers can opt to perform the actual driving cycle test under specified conditions, or with certain constraints then extrapolate less extensive test results to the EPA rated range. Porsche apparently extrapolated results and came up with a surprisingly low EPA rated range for its Taycan model. Real world driving yields better than expected results for the Taycan.
Returning to the Bolt, you can look up the parameters for the EPA test on the Internet. The test environment is under warmer conditions. Winter range results will probably be less than the range computed from the EPA test value. It is not a case of GM lying, because GM is reporting a range number derived from a standardized test. The EPA test gives only a limited apples-to-apples comparison between vehicles, which are all tested against the same metrics. Roughly, if Ford advertises a longer range than Chevy that is probably true the Ford would go further under the same conditions. The exact range number the customer obtains may vary a lot from the EPA test number. The same is true for gasoline powered cars, however the difference in economy versus summer/winter, and driving style shows less variation because so much energy is lost to inefficiency regardless.
Remember the battery has a finite capacity which is around 60 KWH, exact size depending on model year. That is similar to the fact that a gas tank can only be 100% full regardless of the miles per gallon the driver achieves, thus miles per tank varies.
2020Bolt in S Carolina. 213 miles on GOM.
Not saying GM is misleading or anything like that. I’m just saying battery efficiency is not nearly as good in cold weather, almost 50% less, than warmer weather. Besides that, there should never be an adjustment in CHARGING characteristics based on how you drive. Charge rate and charge level, 160 vs 259 level, should stay the same. I understand that the batteries won’t charge as high due to the colder temperatures, as I already dealt with that on my 2017 Volt, but it was never to this extreme.
Some of the Bolt’s cold range loss might be the PTC heater turning on to warm the battery.
The Volt has the ability to run the engine to get supplemental heat. According to the Volt owners forum, the Volt uses the engine heat to warm the battery in cold conditions.
That is true, but it has nothing to do with your car charging in the garage on a level 2 charger.
Mark – I think some of the confusion is that you’re mistaking the “range” estimate as an indication of “state of charge”. Rest assured…..the battery is fully charged (~60 kWhrs of energy), even when the expected range indicates 160 miles.
The range estimate is based on the average driving efficiency of recent trips. During cold weather, the overall efficiency is lower. As previously discussed, this is due to the physics of battery chemical reactions but also significantly impacted by ancillary energy draws like cabin heating. If you have a week of cold weather driving and it suddenly warms to 80 F, the range estimate may only show 160 miles at the beginning of your trip…but you’ll notice that the range estimate steadily increases as the car starts achieving much greater efficiency. After a couple days of driving in warm temps, the range estimate will recalibrate.
I’m well aware of that part of the equation. Believe me, I’m not confused. It started doing this in even with the slightest drop in Temps and my driving habits did not change and I wasn’t using the cabin heat. So to lose 60 miles of estimated range based purely on outside temperature is a little extreme. It only got worse from there. Now if the temperature increased outside tomorrow by 40 degrees, I guarantee you that the battery would charge higher purely off of that. That I expect, but to have driving characteristics from your previous charge effect how high it charges should not be a factor. That is purely a software thing that they could fix if the choose to do so.
Your delusional because I’ve seen it happen time and time again. You’re confused, not me. I’m correcting you. Your wrong.
Mark. Just trying to help. Which part of what I said is wrong?
If you range doesn’t come back with warmer temperatures (like I’m suggesting that it will), then you should talk to your dealership. There is a rare possibility that you could have a bad cell somewhere. Note that a certain amount of battery degradation is normal. If you see 259 miles on average in year one…you might only see 250 the next year…so be prepared for that.
“Your delusional because I’ve seen it happen time and time again. You’re confused, not me. I’m correcting you. Your wrong.”
Mark, your spelling is delusional. I’m correcting you. You’re wrong.
Believe me.