Last week, Chevy delivered Bolt EVs to its first three customers in Fremont, California, home of Tesla.  The rest of the Bolts pictured at left were not destined for customers; they went to local Bay Area dealers as test drive vehicles. Scott Jobe, GM of Capital Chevrolet left the announcement event and drove a fully loaded orange Premier Bolt (complete with Infotainment Package, Driver Confidence II Package, and Fast Charging) to his dealership in San Jose.  Within minutes of his arrival, Kevin Rodriguez, our incredibly responsive sales rep, called us to offer a test drive.  Yesterday we took the Bolt out for 30+ minutes of varied driving.  

I'll be posting at least two more blogs about the Bolt after we receive ours (hopefully this coming week), but here are our first impressions including very preliminary pros and cons.  For more information on the Bolt, check out ​We Ordered a Chevy Bolt.  Pricing, Features, and Availability, my previous post about the Bolt.  

Also, you should know that we are no strangers to EVs.  We have owned a Ford Focus EV for the past three years and have learned quite a bit about the advantages and disadvantages of driving an EV.  For more on our Ford Focus EV, see Our #EV (Electric Vehicle), Pros and Cons.

The Test Drive

Karen manually adjusted the driver's seat and declared it quite comfortable.  I rode shotgun.  

Anxious to get driving, we only took a few minutes to explore the 8" driver information panel and the 10 inch center console display, but at first glance, they seemed intuitive.  It was easy to navigate between phone, entertainment, camera, and other features on the console.   While the console, phone and infotainment systems are far superior to the Focus, I must admit to prefering the analog speedometer of the Focus.  

We were very curious about the surround vision feature.  I'd read that it gives you a virtual bird's-eye view of the car from above but I didn't see how that was possible.  But in fact, looking at the image, it does indeed appear that there's a camera placed 30 feet above the car.  You see the car and everything around it.  It operates while backing up and while going forward at low speeds - 8mph or less according to Kevin.  It will certainly be useful when parking or maneuvering in tight spaces where you might not see objects to the front or side.  

Of course, there isn't really a camera 30' above the car - no personal drone yet.  Instead, the Bolt has cameras on the front, sides, and rear of the car which it combines to create a virtual image. The giveaway was that the car in the image appeared white while ours was that beautiful orange color (not my favorite).

Another feature we were excited to see was the rear view mirror camera.  While the Bolt does have a back-up camera, the Premier edition's rear view mirror itself optionally displays what's behind you via the rear camera while you are driving.  This could be useful when the car is loaded and you can't see out the back, and perhaps during daytime driving since it shows more than the standard mirror can. Karen felt that it needed to be positioned correctly to avoid reflections from the back seat and glare.  For me, it was a bit disconcerting, but I think I could get used to it.

Before leaving the dealership, I noted that the driver information display indicated 192 miles of range, 150 miles on the odometer, and an average energy consumption of 3kWH per mile.  That seemed a bit low (238 mile range on a 60kWH battery should yield closer to 4kWh per mile).  But we didn't know how the car had been driven and didn't spend any time on this.  

Karen pulled out of the dealership and we were pleased to discover that unlike the Focus, whose front wheels spin easily because of omni-present 100% torque and placement of the battery (under and behind the rear seats), the Bolt started smoothly.  We headed towards the freeway and Karen tried to get used to the regen braking in Low mode as we stopped at lights.  The Focus didn't give the driver any control over regen.  If you were coasting, it regened.  I suspect that although the Bolt is less intuitive in this regard, this is how they get such great range on a 60kWH battery.

Reaching the onramp, the Bolt accelerated smoothly, merging into traffic as easily as our Audi Allroad - the 0-60 acceleration times are comparable.  The ride on the highway was smooth and the car handled well.  Our only concern was that the wind noise was louder than we expected.  

Karen left the highway after a few miles, parked in a shopping center, and we switched places. The rear camera gives you optional parking assist lines and warnings as people and vehicles pass behind you.  Maneuvering around the busy parking lot was quick and responsive as we avoided holiday shoppers who weren't paying attention.  

Out on the surface streets, it was my turn to try to get used to the single-pedal driving.  I'm sure we'll get there with more practice.  I found the Bolt to handle extremely well around corners - much better than the Focus, and was very pleased with its turning radius (we often had to do three-point turns in the Focus).  

We headed back to the dealership and upon arriving, while we had probably driven 7 or 8 miles, I noted that the range still indicated 192 miles.  

​We asked Kevin about Navigation, and he said that Chevy had told him the Bolt would not have Nav in the future.  People prefer to use their phones (which connect to the console through Android Auto or Apple Car Play).  And while it's true that we often use Google Maps instead of our Nav systems.  When we're out of cell range (which happens often for us), we rely on our cars' Nav systems.  I admit to being disappointed that the Bolt would not add Nav as a software upgrade in the future.

People were waiting to test drive the Bolt so we didn't get to spend any time with the console and information display.  I would have liked to see what the configuration options were like for energy consumption tracking.    

Here are a few very preliminary pros and cons compared to the Ford Focus EV based solely on our test drive experience:

Pros
Smooth start - the torque does not cause spinning wheels.
Comfortable ride.
Very good handling - tight, solid, but comfortable.
Excellent turning radius.
Intuitive controls and displays.
Cool surround vision.
Great visibility.
Clever headrest adjustments.
Extremely roomy for passengers and cargo, excellent legroom and leg width, excellent headroom, front and back.
Convenient place for purse  under the dash, in front of the shifter.  

Cons
Not quite as luxurious as you might expect for a Premier model.
A bit louder than expected on the highway.
No Navigation system (must use Android Auto, Apple Car Play, or Onstar)
Rear view mirror camera will take some getting used to.

We haven't said anything about range, charging, etc., because we really didn't get  to test these aspects of the Bolt.  That will wait until we get our own Bolt.  According to Kevin, the dealership is expecting 55 Bolts in the next week or so and we're number 11 on the list.  I'll do a post on our full impressions after we get ours and will follow it with another post about our experiences on our first 'long range' trip which we're planning for January.  

We loved our Focus.  For us, in spite of its range limitations and handling issues, it was a great first step into the world of EVs.  We saved a lot of money on gas, only filling the Audi when we had longer trips to take.

Three years later, we're excited that the Bolt has leaped into the next generation of affordable EVs.  We hope we're well on our way to a zero emissions future and elimination of our dependence on gasoline.  

Update - here are blogs about our new Chevy Bolt:

We Love our Chevy Bolt!
Our Bolt EV's First Longer Trip and Fast Charging Surprises​
​Can a #BoltEV be your Primary Vehicle?
BoltEV from California to Oregon for the eclipse with mi/kWh between I-5 charging stations

The media has been going crazy recently talking about fake news, conspiracy theories, lies, and damnable lies.  With the advent of Social Media, how does anyone know what's true anymore?  Has truth become relative? Has it always been so?  Do facts exist?  

The credibility of the mainstream media has been called into question.   Is there any difference between what mainstream media says and what the average person says?  After all, much of our news today comes from real time video by people who happen to be on the scene, not professional reporters.   We see much more unfiltered reality this way than we ever did before.  Whether it's natural disasters or a police shooting caught on video,  we don't rely on mainstream media as much as we used to.   

Adding to their credibility problem, the mainstream media has demonstrated strong biases in their reporting.  This has become more pronounced as print media has suffered from the onslaught of online information. Budgets have been cut, and formerly reliable print media sources have been purchased by large corporations focused on profits, not truth.  Many of the large corporate owners demand that these once reilable sources slant their coverage or  sensationalize it in ways that were never done before.  

But if news can come from anyone, and people have their own agendas too, who can you trust?

Fake news has made headlines lately with the election.  Was it the Russians, teenagers looking to make some fast cash by getting lots of hits on their nascent sponsored sites or posts, or political operatives trying to sway people?  Will the Internet always be susceptible to these types of 'schemes'?  Will we see more incidents of people so convinced that falsehoods are true that they resort to violence in order to right imagined wrongs?  Will propaganda become the currency of our modern internet age?  Or has it already?

If you have millions of social media contacts and can shout your message out to them, a large percentage will believe almost whatever you say.  The more contacts you have and the more people who propagate your claims, the more your message sounds true.  Fake news uses this, jihadists use it, political extremists use it, and now, it's becoming mainstream.  We're overloaded with propaganda.  How do we find the truth?

Many pundits claim that we just need to educate users to differentiate what's true from what's not.  Information consumers need to learn to take the time to look deeper into stories and their sources. Unfortunately, I don't think this could possibly work.  Some of the most intelligent people I know have shared misleading stories that have cherry-picked facts to appear more credible. Usually they've propagated these stories based on headlines that seem to support their own points of view. After all, we love it when we're proven to be right, don't we? 

If college-educated, internet-savvy people can do this, is there any hope for internet neophytes?

Is it really reasonable to expect us to fact-check everything we see on the Internet especially if it comes from our favorite, trusted social media sites and our friends?  

I don't think so.

We know that major players like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and others are now looking at how to protect their users from misleading and potentially damaging information without violating first amendment rights to free speech and freedom of expression.    But so far, interviews with their technologists seem to indicate that the problem may be intractable.  I'm not so sure.  It might not be that difficult.

I've noticed that some sites, like Yahoo News, offer a scoring mechanism for stories they publish. If you roll over the headline for the story, a meter pops up showing the number of people who liked the story versus the number who didn't or who were neutral about it.  This certainly doesn't address the problem at hand as it just indicates how popular a story (and its positions) might be. But it might be an idea that can be built upon.  What if we could roll over a story, post, tweet, search result, etc., and see a credibility meter instead?

As a technologist, I often look to working solutions to see if they can be applied to new problems. In this case, a proven model has been staring us in the face.  

A Proven Model We Can Start With
Not so long ago email spam was a major problem.  We'd receive hundreds or thousands of emails a day. The majority were just junk; some were dangerous (with viruses attached); many were scams; and then lost in the midst of all that junk, were the ones you really wanted to read. It was a disaster for most of us, causing lost productivity, wasted time, and in some cases damage to systems or pocket books.

And yet, in spite of the fact that there are a reported 400 BILLION spam messages per day on the internet,  you don't hear much about spam anymore.  It exists, but we now have spam filters that protect us.   

Spam filters work through a combination of software running on our Internet Service Providers' (ISPs) mail servers and on our own computers.  

At the highest level, these programs look at the email headers to track the path of the message back to its source.  They then validate the sources against blacklists that include known spammers.  Many compare against white lists (known and approved email servers).    Next, they apply content filtering using algorithms to recognize common content in known spam.  They assign a score to each email.  Based on that score, which is computed from a combination of the reliability of the source and the content, they decide whether to delete the message, to designate it as probably spam, or pass the message as valid.  If you look closely at your complete email headers, you can usually see each message's spam score.  It's not a perfect system, but it works well enough to spare us from being innundated by unidentified spam.   

Social media networks, search engines, news outlets, etc. could use a very similar method to validate posts.  It's not terribly hard to find the sources of posts, messages, or stories, and from that, to assign a credibility score based on the originator's history of reliability. When displaying the story, it could include a rollover  'Credibility Meter'.  Move your mouse over the search result, post, message, etc and a widget would appear giving you the score for this particular content.

A simple version of this filter could be developed and deployed very quickly. Later, as content dissecting algorithms become more sophisticated, so too can the accuracy of the reliability score.  

I note that even in its simplest form, a Credibility Meter of this sort would at least let us know if we should dig deeper into the source and credibility of the story.  At the same time, sources with low credibility scores would be motivated to create more factual posts to raise their scores.  Ultimately, we'd see more reliable information on the internet.

Clearly, I'm not advocating a right or wrong, absolute fact or lie approach here.  I'm just suggesting that news and social media assign scores to information we receive, based on the likelihood of it being reliable and on the credibility scores of the originator and the people who repost.  That way, we can decide if we need to dig deeper or just want to believe what we see on the Internet.

I mentioned this idea to my former team over lunch today and one of my engineers is already at work to create a prototype.  But as I told him, with such an obvious solution, I'd be surprised if someone else isn't already working on it.