How hard will it be to learn to drive the Volt?

[jrigg]

The Volt, with it's EV drive, is a totally different animal than the average manual or automatic transmission car.

I know that varying torque is built into my brain. I drive a chevrolet metro (2000) to and from work each day (rpm and torque is everything in this little go-cart of a car... even merging onto the freeway is a challenge). On the weekends, I drive a chevrolet caprice claccic (1994)... with this car, I have to be careful not to burn rubber every time I start out from a red light.

The Volt will have always on torque. I'm wondering, how much of a transition that is going to be for an experienced driver? I'm also wondering what effect this will have on younger drivers when they start out with an EV as their very first car, or switch between a volt and a regular car... I work for an insurance company, so I guess I like to worry about frequencies, that meaning the rate of accident occurrences.

[silvercorvette]

It shouldn't take more than a few seconds to adapt to the car. I have driven everything from motorcycles to huge diesel trucks and it never takes more than a few seconds for me to adjust

[GearheadGeek]

You have to remember that modern cars have advanced control systems. If the engineers have done their work well, it will "feel" like a reasonably powerful normal car as you tip into the "torque request pedal" (the actual service-manual term for the accelerator in a Saab, according to a Saab technician friend of mine.)

The car will certainly have traction control systems, so it won't be hard to prevent it from spinning the tires. For a general-consumer car, they won't put in a twitchy accelerator, they'll make the application of torque fairly linear as you move the pedal forward. I think the real challenge will be for the braking feel, since they need to "tell" your foot that you're applying a bit of braking pressure, but for easy deceleration you won't be applying any mechanical braking force, it'll be all-regen braking unless you're doing a panic stop or for the last few feet before coming to a full stop, or if the battery pack is at its maximum allowable state of charge (and even then, they could have resistors dumping regen-braking energy out as heat.)

[Joshua Bretz]

I always found that when I switched to driving my EV, I would get speeding tickets. I think it was because I was used to limiting my speed based on the sound of the engine.