Since we’re nearing 2000 miles, a nice round number, I decided to pull out the excel spreadsheet and answer for myself the second most asked question we get about the Volt…..”so how much does it cost to operate the Volt on the battery?”
The assumptions:
- We get 40 miles on a charge, or, better said, 40 miles, no matter how we charge the vehicle, is equivalent to the maximum charge it would take to fill up the battery, 12.9 kwH (we hardly ever drain the battery completely, so…..)
- We pay, roughly, $0.11 per kwH consumed in this household. This is probably on the high end of things….in January/February it will be more like a dime or less…
- We’ll say $3.75 is the average for a gallon of gas over the 10 weeks we’ve had the Volt.
A lot of math later….and converting the dollars spent on electricity miles back to gallons of gas…..we got roughly 100 mpg for the 2000 miles driven to date.
As we always rush to say when asked this question; the Volt is not the only vehicle that consumes miles (and gas) by this family. But even if we say the Odyssey went 1000 miles in the last 10 weeks and the CR-V went 250 miles….the family is still running at about 70 mpg.
We’ll take that.
The long-awaited 240V charger will be installed today. Now we can completely charge the Volt in 3 hours, not 15.
