2016 Volt: remade into a sporty city car that happens to have a plug

The original Chevrolet Volt was an intriguing, progressive, thoughtful and wonderfully utilitarian plug-in hybrid. It truly was a ground-breaking vehicle and it should have had a profound impact on the market.

If the 2016 Volt is any indication, GM is no longer a broken hulk.

But it didn’t. The Volt that went on sale in the United States in late 2010 fizzled. It failed to capture the imagination of early adopters for three reasons:

General Motors’ bankruptcy and bailout.

A slipshod marketing campaign that had GM types promoting the Volt as an “extended range electric vehicle,” rather than a save-the-planet product for wealthy, image-conscious and socially-aware early adopters (see Tesla).
Design. The wedge shape made the car look like a door-stopper with wheels.

The “extended range blah, blah, blah” label was a mouthful and misleading – as if GM were trying to hide the fact that the plug-in hybrid Volt is not a pure battery electric vehicle (BEV). Fact-checkers did

The Volt, looks and feels livelier than any of its key rivals, and the technology package is more user-friendly.

cartwheels, painting the Volt as another empty promise from a GM stripped of all credibility after decades of over-promising and under-delivering.

The timing could not have been worse. In 2011, GM was wobbling back from epic failure during a horrific recession. Much of the public resented the government bailout. The Volt was mired in all this muck.

GM has since righted the ship. GM quality is now leading the industry and the company itself is a cash-flow monster earning grudging plaudits for its technologies and designs. No car company can ever be “fixed,” – the business is too complicated for that — but if the 2016 Volt is any indication, GM is no longer a broken hulk.

GM resorted to mind-boggling drivetrain complexity in order to maximize electric-only driving.

The latest Volt is a sporty city car that just happens to be a plug-in hybrid. It’s fast, stylish and has a battery pack that gives it enough range (up to 85 km) to function as an all-electric city car. The Chevrolet MyLink infotainment interface is easier to use than the smartest smartphone. And the cabin is not only stylish, but luxurious – a delightful blend of materials and shapes.

The heart of the whole thing — and the reason you might be willing to spend a minimum of $38,390 on a Volt that’s about the size of a Chevy Cruze compact car — is what GM calls its Voltec system. (Note: my tester came in at $46,845 including destination charge and options.)

Voltec? This Volt has a lighter LG Chem battery (by 9.8 kg) with better chemistry and a lower centre of gravity. A lighter drive unit (by 45 kg) is not nearly as noisy and clunky as the original. A range-extending 1.5-litre gas engine still works as a generator to re-charge the battery pack, though it can also help drive the wheels. Regardless, it’s not the rough compromise engine GM threw in originally because the company was broke.

The Chevrolet MyLink infotainment interface is easier to use than the smartest smartphone. And the cabin is not only stylish, but luxurious.

Then we have the two-motor electric drive unit, one or both of which can power the wheels. Until the battery is drained, the Volt is all-electric, all the time.

What’s important here is that the gas engine and the electric motors can work together; you might end up with some gasoline-engine input combined with the high-torque electric drive. What the electric motors and the gas engine are doing depends on the driving situation and the state of the battery’s charge.

GM resorted to this level of mind-boggling drivetrain complexity in order to maximize electric-only driving. Of course, this symphony of motors, engine, battery pack, transaxle and various other bits and pieces forced GM to completely update the electronic hardware and software.

This Volt has a lighter LG Chem battery (by 9.8 kg) with better chemistry and a lower centre of gravity.

GM says the battery pack might give you a range of 85 km in the best-case scenario, but that’s optimistic. Regardless, a pile of studies show that the typical driver runs about no more than 65 or 70 km a day. You could quite conceivably stay something close to all-electric all the time. A 120V re-charge at 12 amps takes 13 hours; 240V, 4.5 hours.

For the record: 0-30 km/hour in 2.6 seconds and 0-96 km/hour in 8.4 seconds. Power delivery is seamless. This Volt drives like a slightly heavy sports sedan.

As for re-charging, GM has done its homework. Owners can program detailed charging preferences for “home” or elsewhere and the system recognizes the car’s location using the GPS.

For instance, if you want to have the charging start at home using eight amps during off-peak hours, with your departure time at 7:15 a.m., you can input all those parameters and monitor things on your smartphone. The car comes standard with a 120V portable cord stowed out of sight in the hatchback’s cargo area.

Unfortunately, GM hasn’t found a way to give the Volt a big pricing advantage over its rivals. I did a comparison of similar-sized and uniformly equipped plug-ins and found a base Volt is $2,055 less than an Audi A3 e-tron and $2,549 cheaper than a Hyundai Sonata plug-in. That’s the good news.

On the other hand, a Ford C-Max Energi runs about $6,000 cheaper than the Volt and a Ford Fusion Energi is about $2,000 less.

The Volt, however, looks and feels livelier than any of its key rivals, and the technology package is more user-friendly. Perhaps all of this will be enough to create the sort of buzz that eluded the first-gen Volt.

Price as tested: $46,845 (including $1,600 destination charge).

Gas engine: 1.5-litre four-cylinder (101 hp/103 lb-ft of torque).

Transmission: one-speed automatic transmission.

Electric drive: two-motor, two-wheel, front-wheel drive.

Transaxle: continuously variable.

Combined output: 149 hp/294 lb-ft torque.

Fuel economy (litres/100 km) equivalent: 2.3 city/2.5 highway using regular fuel.

Comparables: Toyota Prius Prime, Audi A3 e-tron, Ford C-Max Energi, Ford Fusion Energi, Hyundai Sonata Plug-In Hybrid, Ford Fusion Energi.