Chevrolet Volt Propulsion Power Reduced: Thursday 19th September

Back round the start of August I started this blog to keep track of range and charge on my Volt because strange things were happening when the battery ran low. I gave the garage a copy of my observations, and they passed them on to Chevrolet who suggested they should try updating the software, so last week they applied updates to 9 of the control modules. Now I'm going to record the battery behaviour again and see if the updated software has helped.

Thursday 19th September

The garage say they updated software in 9 control modules. When I collect the car, the only visible change I can see is that the estimated mileage on a full charge has gone down to 38 miles. I think that must be the default range that it estimates when reset, so some of the figures might look a bit strange while it re-adjusts. 9 miles home only drops the range estimate down to 35 miles, but I don't run the battery down far enough to draw any conclusions.

Friday 20th September

The morning range estimate was still 38 miles, 12 miles to work and the range dropped by 8 miles. The only remotely strange behaviour today was that I stopped off at the shops on the way home and 4 miles later when I reached home the estimate had gone up by 2 miles. I assume that the system is still sorting itself out.

Saturday 21st September

The morning range estimate has gone up to 40 miles. After driving 29 miles I still have 18 miles estimated range remaining.

When we return to the car that has dropped to 17 miles estimated range. 9 miles later with 38 miles done it is down to 7 miles range, so maybe we're heading for a 45 total range.

When we return to the car 20 minutes later the estimate is 6 miles remaining.

but at this point the range starts dropping rapidly, and 1.3 miles later we're running on petrol. According to the display we used 1.4kWh in 1.3 miles. That sounds decidedly strange:

For a bit of variety, we stopped off at a public charger on the way home, charged 2.07kWh (according to the chargevision website) and got another 9.6 miles of range.