Wesley's Tool-Box

Since June 2018, I've been trying to drive my Bolt EV at every opportunity to personally confirm that an electric vehicle can rack up a lot of distance without much issues. One milestone I targeted is 100,000 miles (160,934.4 km) or just 160,000 km, since this is where all the car warranties expire. While I'm sure to reach that point this year, a more round number in terms of metric measurement - 150,000 km (93,206 miles) - has come to pass recently.

I know that there are already several instances of other electric vehicles surpassing two hundred thousand or more kilometers without major problems, so I had no worries about mine holding up. Still, I saw this as a good time to check up on the condition of the car before the government mandated biennial vehicle check-up is done in the May-July time frame.

On the battery front, things had been going really well. The current one is a 64 kWh version that was replaced for free due to the recall back in July 2022. So it's been in use for nearly two years. On one hand, it was disappointing to lose an opportunity to use the original battery up to its warranty limit of 160,000 km. On the other hand, this gave me a chance to compare the characteristics between the old and new battery packs.

And as it turns out, the new version seems to hold the capacity better than the old one. It started out at 60.61 kWh and the reported capacity hovered around between 59 and 62 kWh throughout all these months. With the car cruising past the 150,000 km mark, the capacity was at 61.19 kWh, which indicates almost no significant degradation. The old pack had a steady degradation of about 2 to 3 kWh at a similar time span and distance traveled, so that's a notable improvement in terms of capacity retention. A more detailed analysis of this might be prepared for either the 6-year anniversary or the 160,000 km mark.

My Bolt EV has turned five this month, as it racked up more than 130 thousand kilometers on its odometer. It's fairly efficient and low maintenance, so I'll keep driving it as the primary vehicle for several more years. It definitely has some downsides like the poor fast charging performance, but I've gotten used to it. Let's see how it's been doing all this time. You can watch the YouTube video or keep reading below.

As you can see here, I generally drive about 1,500 to 2,500 km every month, for an average of 2,179.3 km. Lifetime efficiency is at 7.72 km/kWh, but it can get as high as 9 km/kWh in summer or drop to about 6.5 km/kWh in winter. As for the battery, it had been degrading stably for the first four years, then it was replaced with a new one. Interestingly enough, not only is the usable capacity larger by about 3 kWh, it's maintaining its capacity better than the original one. I'm going to be looking into this further at at later time.

When I have to charge my Bolt EV in the dark, such as outdoor charging in the middle of the night, the lack of illumination on the charging port makes it hard to plug the charging cable correctly. I saw a video about fixing this with an LED strip, so I decided to try it myself as well. I bought an LED dog collar online for about six bucks (KRW 6,900) that would get the job done.


The collar had a Micro-USB port for charging, and came with a short cable to facilitate it. After I finished charging it (the indicator turned green, from red) I went down to the parking lot.

Up until now, I’ve been driving the car my parents used to drive, and I had been putting off on buying my own until something that could satiate my fondness for technology would come along. And I finally found that car - Chevrolet Bolt EV, a fully battery powered electric vehicle. I pre-ordered this year’s version in January, and was expected to get it by late July, but I got lucky and I picked it up today. The car is very responsive, which I like.


The car wasn’t fully charged at the time of the handover - it only had enough charge for about 150km of driving. So I’m charging it at a service area as I write this after driving about 50km. I still have more than 300km to go, so hopefully it’ll get charged enough for me to return home.