2016 Vacationing with our Volt

One final thought. This was a nearly 2000 mile trip done almost entirely on gas because there was no opportunity to charge. I used Mountain Mode most of the time which kept two bars of electricity in the battery which made it available when I wanted to pass the occasional logging truck. The roads in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island are very different than in the US. The "highways" are mostly two lane, there are hardly any divided highways, and the backroads are much rougher then in the US. In the US I never have a need to put my foot down because on a divided highway you can pass gently and on backroads, which in the US are the same quality as the highways in the Maritimes, you never encounter slow moving trucks. On several occasions I had to pass trucks quickly because there was oncoming traffic in the distance. As long as there is enough electricity in the battery the Volt takes off like a rocket when you floor it. The one bug in the system is that the Volt forgets what mode it was in when you turn it off and always starts in Normal. After most of our stops I wouldn't notice that it was in Normal until the electricity was gone, at which point I put it back into Mountain Mode, I would have been happier if it had just remembered. BTW I absolutely wouldn't own a Volt if I lived in NB or PEI, especially NB which has worse roads than PEI. I'd want a vehicle that had much more ground clearance, in the US I think of SUVs as big unwieldy vehicles and I don't understand why they are so popular, but if I lived in the frozen North I'd want one.

I hear ya! I grew up in Manitoba in the 50's and 60's. We seldom traveled on paved roads unless we went on one of the rare trips to bigger towns to go to the dentist etc. It was gravel roads some quite washboard as they only got graded once or twice a year. In 1962 I went to Vancouver Island to spend the summer holidays at relatives. I was amazed that all the roads were paved, even small country roads and billiard smooth. Even to this day I would say our roads are better than those found in Washington, Oregon and California, especially their highways as the trucks ravage the roads and California has been teetering on the verge of bankruptcy for decades. Washington has spent some money on I-5 and Los Angeles started spending some money on roads. The sideroads are in much better shape because they don't get the truck traffic.