Don't get me wrong, I love my Volt and wouldn't give it up, but there are a couple things that I miss from driving a regular car. They include:
No penalty for heat. After 3 min, my previous car was like a sauna. Even with preconditioning (while plugged in), my Volt is not cold, the chill is gone but not really warm. I know that I could use multiple precondition cycles but that is not the point. Havent experienced ERDTT yet, ill bet that makes good heat.
Revving the engine, banging through the gears, hammering the clutch, etc. Im a little bit of a gear head and every now and then, get the urge to rev and cycle through gears.
The blond at the gas station. Nuff said. (Ive had the car for almost a month now and have yet to buy any gas)
How about everyone else, what do you miss most?
I have a rough plan to scratch any such itch by buying either a Camaro or Corvette convertible in 2018, manual tranny of course, to add to the garage. This would be just a fun cruiser. When I've had similar in the past, it only gets driven about 2,000 miles a year so there's not too much to feel guilty about in terms of CO2 emissions. I will DEFINITELY be keeping the ELR.
As to the heat issue, which I certainly recall in my 2 gen-1 Volts, interestingly the ELR does not have any such shortcoming when left in MAX auto mode. 72 is usually just fine for warmth (and I like it COMFY!), maybe 73 or 74 if you really want to warm up. Heated seats and heated steering wheel (especially) are the icing on the cake. So what did Cadillac do differently? In part the answer is, "I don't know". But they obviously did not want any Cadillac customer to suffer the hair shirt climate discomfort that so many Chevy Volt buyers seem to almost crave in the name of their MPG number! (insanity) Part of that solution that I do know is they set the ERDTT threshold at 32. You cannot change it.
If people had any good sense at all, they would realize that ERDTT is actually a good thing (unless you're just like a mile from home and the outside temp just clicks below the threshold), is not the same as Hold mode (it barely gets above idle), doesn't use much gas, and takes advantage of a Voltec *feature* in that we have an engine that can make HEAT! Warming the whole system might even be a net gain for the battery efficiency, but I don't know that for sure. The only thing I'd like to see on ERDTT is a "wait 5 minutes" option to delay it coming on, in that mile or two from home scenario. This could work with the nav system if it sees you're close to your set destination.
The same thing I miss about using inefficient incandescent light bulbs: nothing.
We're almost all LED in our house now. They have become quite good, but IMO they are still not the equal of the warm light from incandescent bulbs. And they especially suck when dimmed, because rather than getting a warmer and warmer glow, they get cold, grey and lifeless. I half suspect their alien spectra are partly sucking the life out of people.
