Sparky the Chevy Bolt - Part 1

I've had a PT Cruiser for many years. I loved that little car. But, alas, it developed electrical problems, and needed to be replaced. After driving such a cute little car for 16 years, it was depressing to look at newer used cars. Cars are expense, they all look alike, and are uninteresting, except for the rare hybrid. But then I stumbled across a 2017 Chevy Bolt.

First, the price was under budget. Second, I could actually plug it into a wall socket for a slow trickle charge. Third, while the lithium batterys are a bit tricky to deal with, my house is full of lithium battery devices. I have a friend who works with automotive tech, and he was very positive about EV cars. And most importantly, I'd been watching Chevy experiment with electric cars since the 1990's. Unlike a certain Tech Guru's brand, Chevy tech is tried and true.

After 24 hours of research, I closed the deal on the Chevy Bolt and brought it home.

Serious reflection on my first week with Sparky.

I knew going into this that getting charged was gonna be interesting. And it has been. Swope Toyota in E'town has been gracious about us charging there. Bob bought his RAV4 there. We have breakfast and charge Sparky at the same time. This time it was 12 hours, but there's a software switch I can throw to charge faster.

McDonalds in Radcliff was not so gracious. They said their charging station was exclusively for the Manager's car. Interesting...

Freddy's Custard stand has a Tesla Charger, which is likely why their manager keeps his Tesla Cyber Truck parked there. Handy, that.

Next week I'm going to look on Fort Knox to see what kind of charging stations they have. There are 8 stations at one location and 4 stations at another.

Toyota has a ChargePoint charger, so I have that on my phone. So right now, I'm gonna keep to that one software.

Sparky's software claimed that a full charge is 250 miles. This is about 2 weeks travel for me. So if we charge every Monday, I should always have about 200 miles of range.

There are several Blink chargers listed on Google, Kayla Anderson found them, but I haven't figured out where they are physically yet. So this is what I've learned in my first week of owning Sparky, the Chevy Bolt.

Let's see what next week brings.