Chevy Bolt EV Fast Charging Analysis

I fully drain the battery of a 2022 Chevrolet Bolt EV and then record the entire charging session on a 150 kW Electrify America DC fast charge station. I then analyze the results to show how good – or bad, the Bolt EV is when it comes to DC fast charging.

Foreign with a 2022 chevy bolt ev we’re going to do a complete zero to 100 dc fast charge recording and as always make some charts we’ll analyze the heck out of it and see just how good or how bad of a dc fest charging electric vehicle the chevy bolt is but first please don’t forget click that subscribe button and ring the notification bell so you don’t miss any

Upcoming content here on state of charge okay so before we jump into the dc fast charge recording i want to talk a little bit about the bolt dc fast charging capability the bolt is limited to 55 kilowatt of dc fast charging power it actually is one of the slowest charging electric vehicles you can get today now there’s a few evs that accept less than 55 kilowatt

But they have small battery packs the bolt has a large 66 kilowatt hour battery pack the battery of that size you really should have faster dc fast charging i really do like the ball tv i’ve recommended it to friends of mine but i wouldn’t recommend it to somebody that does frequent long road trips because it’s going to take a long time to dc fast charge whereas

There are other evs that are similarly priced that can charge much faster so if you’re going to be getting an ev and you think you’re going to need to do a lot of road trips that cover hundreds of miles you might not want to look at the bolt the bolts are great ev if you’re primarily going to be charging at home and quite honestly home charging is really the

Most convenient way to recharge your ev and it’s the least expensive when you charge it home you’re going to pay less than what you will when you charge on the road most people only want to charge at dc fast chargers when they have to when they’re on long road trips now when you do charge your ev at home you want to make sure that you have good charging equipment

And that it’s installed properly the bolt ev the 2022 bolt ev and euv comes with free standard installation of your home charging equipment it comes with the car knots for a limited time chevrolet hasn’t announced exactly how long this special is going to run for but if you get a bolts or evie or euv now it comes with complementary installation of your home

Charging equipment standard installation if you have a very complex job you’ll have to pay the difference of what a standard installation is compared to what your particular home uses and general motors has partnered with q merit for this home installation offer cameras also a sponsor of my channel here and i partnered with them recently because they really are

The installation professionals for home charging equipment home energy storage solar electric whatever you really need in your home electric wise q merit is there to do the installation and i bring this up because i know a lot of people like to do their own installation of home electric charging equipment there’s a lot of people that are do-it-yourselfers i’m

A do-it-yourselfer i like to do whatever i can myself at home but the one thing i urge people not to do is install your home electric vehicle charging equipment and that’s because your ev charging equipment is going to draw a lot of power more power than the rest of your house is actually consuming and it does that for many continuous hours and quite often it’s

Overnight when you’re sleeping the worst time to have some kind of a problem so if you are getting an electric vehicle i urge you to get a qualified licensed electrician to have your home electric vehicle equipment installed and you can start with qmerit the link is in the description of this video they’ll give you a free estimate to install your home charging

Equipment of course if you get a 2022 bolt ev or ev you don’t have to pay anything because it comes with the car so anyway let’s jump now into the dc fast charge recording and we’ll see just how long it takes to charge the bolt ev on a dc fast charger after one minute the bolt is pulling 40 kilowatt a fair amount less than its maximum charge rate of 55 kilowatt

But the pack voltage is very low so it may actually be calling the maximum amount of amps or close to it the charge rate slowly begins to climb and after 10 minutes of charging we’re at 10 percent state of charge in fact the bolt ev continues to add about one percent state of charge for every minute of charging all the way up to 70 minutes of charging and 70

Percent state of charge now after 33 minutes of charging the bolt has now reached the highest charging power we’re going to see in this charging session which is 49 kilowatt now it holds a 49 kilowatt power draw until the bolt is about at 41 state of charge and that’s when it begins the long gradual decrease in power throughout the rest of this charging session

Now i’m going to speed up the recording now even more because of how slow the bolt ev charges from this point on it takes 47 minutes of charging for the bolt to reach 50 state of charge and we’ve now added back 130 miles of driving range after one hour of charging the bolt is at 63 percent state of charge and is now charging at a poultry 37 kilowatt seriously

Gm 37 kilowatt and the bolt isn’t even at 65 percent state of charge that’s terrible for a 65 kilowatt hour battery pack the bmw i3 for instance has a much smaller battery pack and can charge at just under 50 kilowatt all the way up to 80 state of charge jim is really being ultra conservative with the bolts dc fast charging rate and that hurts when both customers

Want to go on a long road trip it takes a staggering hour and 20 minutes to hit 80 percent state of charge which adds back a little over 200 miles of driving range and 100 minutes to reach 90 state of charge and the full zero to one hundred percent charging session takes two hours and 13 minutes to complete and the electrify america a charging station has dispensed

Just under 70 kilowatt hour to replenish the 65 kilowatt hour battery pack with the additional five kilowatt hour lost to charging inefficiencies well thank god for time lapse that you guys got to watch that really quickly i had a stand there for over two hours and press the reset button on the electrify america dc fast charge station every 60 seconds to refresh

The screen so i could capture all of the data of that charging session so one thing that’s interesting you notice that the most we reached was 49 kilowatts of power even though the bolt ev is supposed to max out at 55 kilowatt and i actually got close to 55 i think 54 is what i maxed out with when i did a dc fast charging session on my friend’s 2017 bolt ev that

Just had the battery pack replacement under warranty with gm i had that recording here on state of charge it’s still available if you want to watch it and the interesting thing about that is in that recording we actually pulled higher power earlier on but then it tapered off sooner so we actually finished up a little bit quicker in this charge record reporting

Even though we only drew 49 kilowatt as the maximum power and in the other recording we pulled well over 50 kilowatt for a long time so it’s interesting how these charge curves work every dc fast charging session you do is going to be slightly different but the overall time should be relatively close to what you experience unless the charging station has derated

Power or maybe the battery pack’s too cold to accept the full power and that’s going to make it longer that evs are going to take a little bit longer to charge in the winter months if you live in a northern state because when the battery pack’s colder it does take longer to get those electrons pumped into there so what we’re going to do now is take a look at this

Charging session on paper first we’re going to take a look at the charging power chart which has the full charging curve of the vehicle we’re going to take a look at how that looks before we jump into the time to charge chart but for now let’s take a look at the charging power power chart all right so as you can see right after we plug in it jumps up to a little

Over 40 kilowatt and it starts to creep up but then we have a little dip here and it kind of regains but then for another couple of minutes the charge rate lowers again until about the 17 state of charge point then it starts that gradual climb all the way up to the highest power it draws which we saw was 49 kilowatt and that happened somewhere around 41 state of

Charge and at that point it starts that long gradual almost perfectly linear slope down until about 92 percent state of charge when it really starts to ramp down the charging power i mean this is you know clearly a very conservative dc fast charging strategy for general motors and it may be because of the problems they’ve had with the lg cam battery packs i think

They’ve adjusted the charging curve they’ve actually made it even more conservative i’ve charged bolt evs before when they first came out and the charging was a little bit better than this i i remember finishing up probably 20 minutes sooner than what it takes now so i think they massage this charging curve a little bit now and uh you know our airing on the side

Of caution and being a little bit more conservative it doesn’t bode well for bolt owners that want to go on road trips but as we’ve said before that the bolts are great ev it’s just not a great road tripping ev because as you can see here it just does not take in power fast enough to really you know get off the highway charge for a little bit and continue your

Road trip you’re there for a really long time you know well more than an hour and if you really want to get the thing close to being fully charged you’re going to be at nearly two hours and that’s just not convenient on a long road trip and uh well you know it is what it is but it’s a great little run around ev just doesn’t do road tripping very well because of

Its inability to take in a lot of power in a short period of time like most other evs today they can well it didn’t look any better on paper than it did watching the time lapse video did it you know the ball tv isn’t a great dc fast charging electric vehicle but i guess i don’t have to continue to say that the video you get the point uh now we’re going to take

A look at the time to charge chart which i think is actually the most important one because quite honestly people really don’t care if it’s pulling 50 kilowatts or 80 kilowatts or 100 kilowatts what they really care about is how long does it take me to add back miles how long do i have to stay at this charging station to get 100 miles or 200 miles or a full battery

Pack that’s what we’re going to take a look at now in the time to charge chart on the time to charge graph we have the time in minutes on the x-axis and the state of charge on the y-axis you can see we reach 100 state of charge in 133 minutes as depicted in the time lapse video shown earlier what you really like to see on this graph is an aggressive vertical

Climb up to about 80 percent state of charge at which time the carve tapers off and becomes more horizontal as the charging rate slows down from 80 percent to 100 but here with the bolt dv the vehicle charges so slowly that the entire charge curve advances more horizontally than it does vertically and the full 100 charging session takes more than two hours to

Complete now let’s look at how long it takes to add back 100 and 200 miles of driving range i typically use two different figures for this the epa range rating and also the results of my 70 mile an hour highway range test however with the bolt ev we have the rare occurrence of both of those numbers being the same the epa rated range for the 2022 bolt ev is 259

Miles per charge and i finished up my 70 mile an hour highway range test after driving 260 miles and unfortunately i ran out of charge one mile from the charging station and needed to be towed it was actually the first time that ever happened on one of my range tests if you want to check out that whole range test video it’s on the inside eevee’s youtube channel

So with the epa range figure basically being the same as my range test results let’s see how long it takes to replenish 100 and 200 miles during this charging session we needed to reach 38 state of charge to have added back 100 miles of driving range we did that in 36 minutes and then we added back 200 miles at the 70 a six percent state of charge point and the

Bolt ev needed one hour and 15 minutes or 75 minutes to accomplish that feat i should note that an hour and 15 minutes is the longest it’s ever taken me on any dc fast charge test to replenish 200 miles of range now for comparison the fastest charging time i’ve ever seen to add back 200 miles was with the 169 thousand dollar lucid air dream edition range and it

Was able to add back 200 miles in an incredible 12 and a half minutes now finally i like to talk about how many miles of range the vehicle adds back from zero to eighty percent and then also from 80 percent to a hundred percent really to demonstrate how ineffective it is to remain plugged into a dc fast charge station past 80 percent unless you really need to

Because the charging rate pretty much on all electric vehicles slows down dramatically after 80 percent now the bolt ev adds back 2.57 miles of range for every minute charging from zero to eighty percent and then from 80 to 100 the charging rate drops to exactly one mile of range added for every minute of charging all right so as you can see a little bit less

Than 40 minutes to add back a hundred miles of driving range and you know over an hour to add back 200 miles not great uh but it’s doable if you need to do a road trip every now and then with a ball tv it’s okay you know you could manage it’s just probably not advisable to get a bolt ev if you frequently have to do road trips that cover hundreds of miles you’re

Going to be sitting at dc fast charges for a long time two and a half miles of range added for every minute of charging that’s really slow in comparison to most electric vehicles out there today and geez when you get up over 80 percent it’s a mile a minute so it’s pretty pretty long but uh you know as i said earlier the bolti v is still a really good electric

Vehicle and the price point that it’s at with the plus uh general motors covers the installation of your home charging equipment it really is a good deal most people don’t need to drive hundreds of miles frequently and you know if it’s once every month or two you know you’re visiting grandma and she lives 500 miles away and you got to stop once or twice along

The way it’s not the end of the world it just you probably don’t want to have to do that frequently but for home charging if you have the ability to charge the bolt at home you plug in every night every morning you wake up with you know over 200 miles of driving range the the both ev can handle the driving needs of you know 95 plus percent of americans but in

Any event that’s a wrap on our dc fast charge video here for the 2022 chevy bolt ev if you like what we’re doing here on state of charge please don’t forget to click that subscribe button and ring that notification bell you can give us a like on this video too that helps youtube recommend the video to others and as always thanks for watching and hope to see you

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Transcribed from video
Chevy Bolt EV Fast Charging Analysis By State Of Charge