EV Ramblings - Used Chevy Volt Buyer's Guide

everybody thanks for watching my name is Austin I'm here to talk about my twin Island Chevy Volt this is going to be a general buyer's guide so if you're looking for a used Chevy Volt which there will be many on the market there are right now especially due to the new model coming out this is going to kind of go over a few things that you should look out for because a lot of people don't really know much about electric vehicles especially people sounding as well they're usually aren't very helpful this is a 2011 Chevy Volt which I bought a year ago in the states used I've been extremely pleased with it and I also have a Nissan Leaf so I had electric vehicle going into it but this is a really good replacement for most people who are looking for a new car and to replace them maybe their one primary vehicle which it can do just a brief overview the vehicle itself is a full electric drive vehicle but it also has a gas generator so once the electricity runs out in the batteries the gas generator will come on and make electricity this has a bunch of advantages in that the gas motor itself it's a lot simpler than a regular gasoline motor running this typical car I have a lot less load on it all the accessories are running electric not running on the gas motor and you can also what you can get insane mileage especially if you don't drive that far your typical driving range of all battery I'm going to say on the first generation it's about 60 kilometers driving and this is pretty true for most weather so to talk about the vehicle itself there's a few things when you're looking at a used vehicle first off the struts on the trunk itself this hatch is really heavy so you want to make sure that they have good action that they'll actually lift it up I don't think it's that expensive to replace but if it is a little bit loose you will want to get that replaced you don't want that falling on you now in the back itself underneath the hatch there's a full charger that comes with this charger you want to make sure is with the car it's used for charging 100 110 volt and with this car you can get by with just using this charger at night in your garage or in your your carport it'll charge the whole you going about eight hours which is typically what you're going to be sleeping for there's also a tire repair kit most electric vehicles don't come with a spare anymore they come with a repair kit you need this repair kit if you ever get a flat you'll want to make sure that it is in good order below here is the battery it's a 12-volt battery which runs all your accessories it's not super accessible this is just something that is with any car except it has a lot less load as there's no starter or anything to turn there's also a little cargo cover this is highly recommended that and I believe most cars came with that so if it's missing you can maybe ask if it's a private seller if they have it if it's a used-car lot you might just be out of luck or maybe they could take it out of another one that I was strong suggest you get that so underneath here is actually the exhaust system this exhaust system will be just like any regular car catalytic converter piping usually these are the first things to kind of rust out you'll want to inspect that make sure it's in good condition of course being an electric vehicle with a gas generator backup this will not this exhaust pipe shouldn't be used as much so maybe it would be in better condition I'm not really sure about that mine is still looks like new brakes the brakes on this car they should last ages the electric motor does most of the braking for you you actually rarely use physical brakes so this has a couple of big benefits first off maintenance wise the brakes should last a really long time but also I've noticed that there's a lot less brake dust accumulating on the wheels I do clean my vehicle quite often so it's never been an issue with brake dust causing the finish and the wheels of to fall apart but this happens to a lot of people and this could be a big advantage you could give you reals looking a lot nicer on that the wheels themselves that came in like a painted finish or chrome they're pretty easy to wash except there is a gap behind it on a ridge behind each one of these spoke codifies a little bit difficult to to clean you might want to just like run your finger through there and see if there's any weird bumps or anything from the finish coming off so moving to the front of the car there's a few things that are quite important here when looking at a used Chevy Volt and these were things that I didn't know when I bought the car and I kind of wish I did which I figured out later so underneath the car is a air down this air dam is really low and does tend to scrape on a lot of things this is a 2011 Volt I think on the newer model probably 13 2014 actually made this a little shorter to prevent that but it does get beat up quite a bit and there's three main pieces to it make sure that they're still connected if they're not you might want to find out how much that part cost from your local dealership and maybe haggle the price a little bit because this does add a lot of fuel efficiency to the vehicle now the other main issue though that I had when buying a car was the battery was charged so therefore I couldn't actually get the electric or the gas motor to start to find out if the gas motor was in good working condition as his cars designed the gas motor will not come on until the batteries run out so I wasn't going to go out and drive 50 60 kilometers and it's house tried to get it started so I just kind of hoped that everything was alright with that gas motor I drove the car from Oregon to Victoria British Columbia and it was kind of a stressful experience when I was on the i-5 and the battery finally ran out and just to see what the gas motor would do if a bunch of blue would blow at the back or follow the bottom of the car of course everything worked out fine but I found the trick now is we basically have to turn the car on so I'm getting and power it up alright so the car is fully powered on right now so my understanding is you open the hood live it the car on this forces the gas motor to start at this point you can then inspect everything this is done as a dealership thing to try to make so so technicians could do an oil change or check things out so this forces everything on you could then look at the exhaust make sure it's running clean and yeah it's that's an awesome trick and tip and I recommend you do that so now I'm going to turn the car off because I really don't want to waste gas if I don't have to besides that I have noticed that there do you get quite a few little scrapes sometimes on the front lip here from someone hitting things I look up for that there are rock chips which are standard with any car exterior wise though that's about it there's not too much else to look for I guess one suggest if you are looking to import a Chevy Volt into Canada the 2011 is a little bit more difficult because 2011 is only sold in the United States of America it wasn't available to Canada so that 2012 or newer and you can take your Dan GM dealership and they'll program the daytime running lights to Canadian standards the 2011 they can't they don't actually have a program for it because because the car was never intended for the Canadian market there is a fix for that what I had to do was kind of take apart the center contour the steering wheel column here find the electrical wire for the switch which allows you to turn the date harmony lights off and actually cut that wire that was a little bit nerve-wracking but it is possible and the one of the only reasons you'd want to buy a Tony 11 though is because it is fully equipped it's a really nice vehicle as soon as you get 2012 there's a lot of different builds and options and you might not be able to find your configuration is easy though when you're looking at 2012 models they did add a few things with a fully equipped the 2011 doesn't have little push buttons on the handles so like my Nissan Leaf I can go up and I hit any of the buttons and I can unlock it without touching the key with the 2011 Volt you still need the key to like lock and unlock the car but besides that that's pretty minor it's it's fully equipped otherwise so now there's a few other tricks inside the car which we're going to talk about which might help you decide to purchase the car or not so we're inside the vehicle right now and obviously when buying a used car you want to make sure that everything is good condition I have noticed that on the driver side seat here on the left there is a little bit of wear and the leather that could be from the previous owner maybe they slid over at a bunch but you know that's something that you can't really fix very easily you want to make sure the car came in 2012 and up with cloth interior as an option so if you prefer cloth or leather that is available to you but one of the main questions you're going to be asking yourself when you buy or when you want to buy you Chevy Volt is how much mileage is being driven on the battery and how much mileage is driven by the gasoline motor there is a way to look this up so I'm going to turn the car on foot on the brake power button the key just has to be in the vicinity and what this is going to do is car's going to be on now on the main center console here yeah there's all kinds of buttons and options but there's a little leaf carry per thought and that kind of takes you into the vehicle information system like under power flow you could kind of get a graphical view of if you're making electricity or use there's gas running you could also get charging information like how long it'll take for the vehicle to be charged and you could also go into charge modes as well so you can schedule them if you have electric electrical rates based on time of day the energy info is where you want to be and this will tell you the lifetime energy usage of the vehicle so on this vehicle itself it's average 1.8 liters per 100 kilometers and now if you go over here to the main dash display and the bottom right you'll see how much mileage might be lost sixty four thousand one hundred thirty three kilometers so averaging month one eight liters is really good it means this cars use a lot of electricity in its daily driving majority of it being on the battery now this is to kind of schools of thought in this respect so this car has had a lot of battery use there quite a few people worried about the lifetime of the battery these vehicles and so they might actually like that if anything though is if you look at all of those they're sold and some of the really high mileage ones the batteries have been incredibly resilient Chevy did some really smart things and that they put a much larger battery in the car and they only gave a smaller part for the user to use so if any battery degradation comes it just kind of balances out so you still have the same range but if for me so this means the gas motor has meanings very much if anything the gas motor in this car probably has 12,000 13,000 kilometers on it tops and so for a 4-year old car that's basically a new vehicle and I like that I have less faith in the gasoline motor than I do in the electric components I know from my research and in my Nissan Leaf that electric vehicles are just rock solid the batteries are fantastic they're far exceeding expectations the electric motors is really nothing to go wrong so I would much rather have the Volt driven a lot on battery and that's not a gasoline and now some others though like the other school of thought is that people want the battery as fresh as possible so a lot of government use both in the States very driven gasoline almost entirely and not the electrical portion of it was barely used the reason for this is that to go from what I read is when the bolts were first brought out and bought as like vehicles for government eight users they didn't actually have a way to measure compensation for electricity so when they went submitted their monthly reports for compensation they would only get paid for gasoline that they bought not for electricity these at their home so most of them decide at all I'm just not going to charge my car but so you could get ones that have they're quite a high fuel consumption and some people do see this as an advantage because the battery is basically fresh and new and it's you know they think that the gas motor is fine as well so it really depends on where you sit on that one issue I find with that kind of school of thought though is the electric motor is still used to push the wheels and the battery the gas generator isn't actually moving the wheels at all it's just making electricity so even on the batter the main component the battery is zero all the time the gas generators still charging the batteries are still taking electricity from the battery to drive the car so I would say look for a really good like low fuel consumption per 100 kilometers when you're buying a car or new miles per gallon it'll eventually it'll just stay 250 plus miles per gallon it won't go to in the detail that much now moving on other things you want to look out for the car in this main dash display here there's a little wheel over here where you can cycle through my car I was lucky that someone didn't actually reset or they reset the Adamo tur I guess right when they got the car so on the trip meter B it says 64,000 ninety point nine kilometers and the cars showing 64,000 133 so essentially when they drove the car off the lot they reset the odometer I didn't reset it again and we could see actually here is showing an average 1.7 liters per hundred kilometer so there's a slight variation between the two but we can see I've used 1130 litres of fuel so you could mathematically well basically how far you've gone on it now if you keep cycling through here though there's a picture of oil this is show you the oil life so yes this electric vehicle does have oil because it has a gas generator the service intervals are stretched wave like you don't have to do an oil change every two years I think it's once every twenty five thousand miles or two years I've had this car for a year already and I'm at 76% remaining in real life which i think is pretty fantastic yeah there's also tire pressure monitor sensors so you can go and see the air pressure I guess you want to make sure those are sink working if you're buying a used vehicle besides that there's not a lot else information in here that you can get you can switch between them yellow metric or us here so that's about it for the interior there is very little else in terms of where like you don't have to worry about like clutch play your transmission fluid or anything like that in like a vehicle like this you

Channel: Dustin Batchelor

Views: 75,096

Keywords: Electric Vehicle (Industry), Chevrolet (Business Operation), Used, EV, Chevy, buyers guide

Id: VaIrZowOUNY

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2015