One family’s decision to lease a Chevy Volt: Plug-in hybrids expand fuel-efficient options for families

January 6, 2013

One familys decision to lease a Chevy Volt: Plug-in hybrids expand fuel-efficient options for families

The Chevy Volt can go up to 40 miles on battery power alone when fully charged.


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The decision to buy an electric vehicle or not is usually a pretty easy one for most families. Would it be driven every day, on mostly short trips, and is there a way to charge the vehicle when out and about? If the answer to any of these questions is no, the 80-100-miles-or-less range of an all-electric vehicle rules it out.

But how should one weigh the pros and cons of a plug-in hybrid? It’s not as easy a choice over a traditional hybrid or an electric vehicle because there’s a fairly confounding way that the electric charge factors into the vehicles’ fuel economy and a variety of ranges that the vehicles get per charge.

The EPA’s rating for plug-in hybrids is expressed as MPGe, for “miles per gallon equivalent.” It represents the number of miles the vehicle can go using a quantity of fuel with the same energy content as a gallon of gasoline.

The Chevrolet Volt can go up to 40 miles on battery power alone when fully charged. Then, rather than stranding you at the side of the road like an all-electric model, it turns to its gasoline engine to run a generator. The EPA says the Volt gets 98 MPGe when it’s using only electricity and 37 mpg when it’s using gas only (and it requires premium).

I drove the Toyota Prius plug-in about 800 miles last summer and loved the fuel economy, which was 95 MPGe when gas and battery were working together. I was just disappointed that I could barely do my errands in the beach town I was visiting without using gas. It has a rating of only 11 miles on a charge, according to the EPA.

Toyota spokesman Wade Hoyt says that “is partly a function of the size, weight and cost of the lithium-ion battery pack, all of which we wanted to keep within reasonable limits.”

Hoyt says his 84-mile round trip commute into New York includes the hilly, twisting parkways and congested Manhattan traffic. With a full charge in the Prius plug-in, Hoyt says he got 74 mpg going into Manhattan.

“That's what those early gas-free miles did for me,” he says.

He can’t charge the car at his parking garage, so he only got 49 mpg going home. Still, it was a round-trip average of 61.5 mpg -- a 24 percent improvement over the traditional Prius hybrid on his roundtrip, he notes.

Another hurdle is falling away. Charging stations are becoming more common. If you haven’t seen them anywhere, it may just be because you weren’t looking. I noticed a couple in the parking garage at the Georgetown waterfront in Washington, D.C., the other day.

Wonder where they are near you? Plug your ZIP code into the map at Some McDonald’s and Walgreens have them now. They are also at some Cracker Barrels in Tennessee. Murphy Oil USA is testing them at some of its gas stations. Charging at Murphy’s, however, would feel too much like the old days to me. I’d sure rather shop than sit at a gas station while my car’s charging.

Ultimately, I found there was something psychologically gratifying to being able to do up to 40 miles worth of driving without spending a dime on gas in the Volt.

Considering all these factors, we ended up leasing a Volt. With it, my husband can get to work and back on one charge, so we’re spending less time and money at the pump.

By Jayne O’Donnell