I quickly fell in love with driving electric on a daily basis. There were so many little perks and conveniences to me. Even without a level 2 charger at home I could recharge overnight from my daily commute. That meant that during a normal week I was able to ditch the all-to-common experience of starting the car up in the morning or after a long day of work and realizing I’d have to stop for gas.

During the Texas summer, the ability to run the AC while stopped without feeling guilty about idling an engine was a godsend. I loved setting it to cool down when I got out of work, leaving it on while I went into the store and coming back to a comfortable cabin; or even being able to drive to a quiet place at lunch and comfortably eat in my car when I needed some solitude. I recognize that this is still not environmentally friendly, but in an area where people regularly leave their 3/4-tons idling while they run an errand, it feels negligible. 

I immediately took to one-pedal driving and even after now having driven probably 8-10 EVs I still feel like the Bolt has one of the best. It is pretty strong, very smooth, and makes it easy to come to a complete stop exactly where you want to; and it’ll hold you there. There is also the regen paddle, which increases the stopping power, given you another way to modulate your stopping distance. I also found it to be a really handy way to quickly and smoothly disengage cruise control.

Then there is the level of connectivity to your phone, even for the ’20 Bolt, which pales in comparison to newer EVs. Sure you can lock/unlock, start engine, etc. for newer gas cars, but the addition of being able to check battery percentage from wherever you are, or make changes to charging settings without being in the car is so convenient.

Public Charging

The really pleasant surprise to me was how easy I found it to charge in public. The disclaimers here are that I didn’t have a lot of public charging experiences with the Bolt, I think I got pretty lucky with the ones I did have, and I had low expectations from the outset. That said, it was more than enough to really sell me on EVs and my experience since hasn’t made those early experiences seem like outliers.

A couple of quick examples: I drove the Bolt to San Antonio for a weekend trip and one of our first stops was the Quarry (which is a large shopping center) where I easily found a couple of level 2 chargers in a free parking garage. Not only that, but the chargers were located in primo spots right at the entrance, there were several spots available, and I had no issues getting it to charge. I am also very fortunate that my small town happens to have a fast charger, which made us rare even compared to several larger towns around us that are even closer to major metros. This charger is regularly available, very reliable, and even at 65kW can charge as fast as my car can handle – and is somehow free!

I do need to mention that the charging experience would not have been nearly so smooth if I had not put in work myself. The Bolt did not have built-in maps/navigation, let alone advanced route-planning for plotting out charging stops. All of that I had to do manually through apps on my phone. To ensure as smooth a trip as possible I would always look at the areas I was visiting ahead of time to find possible chargers and plan out a route if charging was required.

Home Charging

I do not have charging at work, so most of my charging happened at home. I rent a townhouse with a one car garage, which allows me to park where I can easily access an outlet. As a renter, I was not planning on installing a level 2 charger and I never even really considered plugging into the dryer outlet. As I mentioned, plugging into a regular 3-prong, 120v wall outlet gave me enough juice overnight to more than make up for my daily commute and the EVSE that came with the Bolt only had a regular 3-prong plug. Any time I took longer trips during the week I was able to recharge over the weekend, if I stayed in, or I would charge in public wherever I went. I never really ran into an issue with this. My townhouse was built in the mid-80s, so the wiring is kind of old. The Bolt had two amperage settings for level 1 charging, so to be safe I initially charged on the lower setting (I think it was somewhere around 5-8 amps), but I eventually I bumped it up to the higher setting (12 or 15) and did not notice any issues. I did notice a slight increase in charging speed. All in all I found it very easy to charge at home.