I took a trip out to see Richard and Dianna today in my Volt. They are staying near the village of Congress, about 90 miles from my house. I was interested to see how the Volt did on a longer trip. Here are some numbers:<\/p>\n
First a summary:
\n— It cost the same to make the trip as if I was driving a pure gas car that got 52 miles\/gallon, figuring the cost of electricity and gas.
\n— I drove 53 miles on battery alone, and 127 on 3.27 gallons of gas.
\n— Pure gas mileage was 39 miles\/gallon
\n— Altogether, since buying the car I have driven 512 miles on 3.7 gallons of gas, leaving my tank still over half full.
\n— We ate a very good (and spicy!) homemade tomato soup and Mexican cornbread for lunch. Thanks Dianna!<\/p>\n
Some Details:
\nI made it about 38 miles from home before I ran out of battery and the car (automatically) switched over to gas. After charging at Richards, I added about 15 more miles coming home, so for the 180 mile round trip I did about 53 of them on electricity alone. The remaining 127 were done on 3.27 gallons of gas, for a pure gas mileage of 39 miles\/gallon.<\/p>\n
The pseudo mileage (total distance\/total gas) was 55 miles\/gallon, but that is calling the electric miles free, which isn’t quite accurate. To make it a little more complicated, since electricity costs about 1\/4 of gas for equivalent miles driven, the cost of driving on electricity is the same as the cost of gas at 155 miles\/gallon. So 155 miles\/gallon for 53 miles, and 39 miles\/gallon for 127 miles gives an equivalent to 52 miles\/gallon. In other words, if I had a car that got 52 miles\/gallon, it would have cost me the same to make the trip as it did in the Volt. It’s about how well a Prius would do.<\/p>\n
For shorter trips, especially where I never use gas, the cost is the same as a car that gets 155 miles\/gallon. As trips get longer, the cost approaches that of a car getting 39 miles\/gallon. So if you frequently drive long distances and your main goal is to save on fuel, get a Prius. If most of your driving is around town and you usually drive less than about 40 miles in a day, a Volt will be cheaper to operate (though not cheaper to buy). Having driven both I have to say that a Volt is more fun to drive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I took a trip out to see Richard and Dianna today in my Volt. They are staying near the village of Congress, about 90 miles from my house. I was interested to see how the Volt did on a longer trip. Here are some numbers: First a summary: — It cost the same to make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-family-updates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}