[khalfyard]

I live in Toronto, Ontario, which isn't quite as cold as Ottawa, but is a reasonable start for 'good data.'

If you can plug in at both work and home, you will avoid using almost any gasoline even if doing 120km per day (60 each way on commute). If you plug in after hours, electricity is easily 1/3 the cost of gas per kilometer, even with delivery, global adjust and taxes on electricity. When it is below -10C, you can expect the engine to turn on automatically to heat the cabin, this is baked into the VOLTs controls, and you will burn gas on those days. This can add up a bit. During Spring/Summer/Fall and the warmer stretches of Winter, you can likely avoid Gasoline entirely with your stated distances and a Gen2 Volt.

The Provincial Gov't is offering >$10000 instant rebate on new EVs vehicles, so a 2017 VOLT LT is ~$30-$32,000 out the door, if you negotiate even a little bit.

You can drive in HOV lanes on 417 with only the driver. But if you are stuck in traffic or doing city driving, you will get more electric miles anyway, so win-win.

Way Lower Maintenance Costs than your Mazda.

*Most Important*: Really fun, quiet, fast to drive. EV literature never stresses this enough, it's a totally different experience, very relaxing.

You can find my Total Cost of Ownership thread here in the forum if you are interested in hard Canadian numbers: http://gm-volt.com/forum/showthread...umbers-(4-Years-Comparison)&highlight=numbers

 

[khalfyard]

PLUS I can plug the car in at work so I will hardly be using the onboard gas generator at all. Being my daily commute is 53km each way. So with a full charge leaving home, when I get to work, there will still be some juice left in the battery. I can plug it in once I'm there, and it should be topped up by the end of the day. I say "should", because it's only a 120 Volt outlet. No 240 Volt plugs outside.

This should work. You will have to set your car to charge at 12Amps every day, or if you have a 240V at home, you can set a single location GPS to default to this 'faster' charge with the portable ESVE. (This is of course that your work outlet/circuit is not shared with any other heavy load plugs.) A quirk of the Volt is that it defaults to 8Amps when trickle charging, which takes 20 hours to charge from low. But it can be set in the car's computer to 12A charging, in that case you'd probably have enough juice after 8 hours to get home, 53km, without turning on the engine.

I'd get on the vehicle upgrade in a heartbeat.