A New Magical Space Car (part 3)

So, as you may recall from the earlier magical space car posts, the 2013 Chevrolet Volt was starting to struggle in 2025, the charge port gave out and needed to be re-assembled with cobbled-together bits that were not warranty-able, and it took almost 3 months for them to get placed… and it HAD to be fixed because without them, the check engine light would stay on and I wouldn’t be able to register it in my Metro (read: Clean Air Bound) county in Georgia.

In early 2026, I went out to go to work and had a REALLY hard time getting the charge plug to pull out of the charge port. When I finally managed to work it free, part of the charge plug stayed on the charge port, and a bunch of the cobbled together housing had cracked apart. The joke I made is that the charge plug and port had Romeo and Juliet’ed themselves (both died simultaneously and dramatically). It was a bummer, but I figured my car had become a mitch hedberg joke: “Your Plug In Hybrid is now just a Hybrid. Sorry for the convenience”.

The problem is for most of 2025, the battery had been acting Real Weird: You’d be tooting along at highway speeds with supposedly 25 miles of EV range left, and it would suddenly jump over to battery depleted mode and kick on the gas engine. The volt had essentially been behaving like just a hybrid more and more and more. And when I stopped charging it for a couple of weeks because I couldn’t in 2026… the problem exacerbated. I started having to choose different highway onramps on the way home because I might have “propulsion reduced” mode and wouldn’t be able to dart out and accelerate into traffic.

So in February 2026, a friend came to visit and borrowed the Volt (the same friend who had the faulty charge port strand him in 2025), and he was visiting a different friend when suddenly the car refused to “Start”. The gear lever would shift, but the little “ready” light never turned on and the motor/engine wouldn’t spin up to actually move the car. He had it towed to my house and plopped into my driveway. Over the next couple of days we tried all the things the Internet suggested for reviving a sluggish Volt: disconnecting and reconnecting the 12v battery in the trunk, attaching other 12v systems, getting a friend with a Really Nice code-reader to see about connecting to the traction battery bits and clearing/resetting internal codes… nothing was working.

But at this point, trying to get the Volt to at least start was just trying to up the value of a trade-in, because we had already been looking at a new-used car, and after discussions with The Significant Other, we had decided it was Okay to get a Battery Electric Vehicle and just use it as a commuter, so it didn’t even need to be a long range BEV.

So now we have a new-to-us 2022 Nissan LEAF SV not-plus. In keeping with the tradition of “American’s don’t actually realize how nice these things are”, it was about $15,500 for what I presume is an old fleet car with just under 40,000 miles, a few scratches and dings and a clean battery bill-of-health. It can go about 150 miles on a full charge, which means on the ~110 miles at 80% charge, I can get to work and home about twice with a few errands in between before level 1 charging it again for 16 hours… It has the technology package which brings 360-degree camera overhead view, pro pilot assist radar guided cruise control with lane keeping (so it basically drives itself in slow-n-go traffic without me having to do much). It also has RIDICULOUSLY powerful air conditioning, and doesn’t need any maintenance other than tire rotations/replacement and cabin-air-filters… and it’s a wager on whether the battery outlasts the transmission gear oil or motor coolant.

The plus model would have given us more power and range, but it basically added a grand or took a year… and with the very-out-of-favor ChaDEMo high-speed charging used on LEAFs (The high speed charging equivalent of LaserDisc), I didn’t want to tempt myself to try and take long out-of-metro road trips. To enforce the “No DC Fast Charging this little shuttlecraft” is an open recall on the 2022 models that basically says “if you high speed charge these things, the battery may overheat before the software detects it and slows which could damage the battery or worse cause a fire” that hasn’t been resolved yet. It also never needs to be emissions inspected because it’s an emissions free vehicle… and since I mostly charge it overnight (plugging it in right before bed) in the Atlanta Metro area, it’s essentially Nuclear Powered with a LIIIIITTLE bit of Hydro Power from Bull Sluice Dam.

To buy the car I used Carvana which did good on the promise of essentially letting me get everything done online, and I found the little AI chatbot to be useful when I asked it things like “How do I transfer registration so I can keep my vanity License Plate” and it told me the process, telling me I would need to upload a picture of my current registration on my outgoing vehicle, and then got a Live Customer Service Rep to handle the document ingest (I took a picture after being given a website link) when I had everything ready. They also have the 7-day money-back guarantee, which I let run out before I took it to my local Nissan Dealer for a “Put this up on a lift and make sure a wheel isn’t about to fall off in 5 months” who advised me in the future to be more immediate as Carvana is willing to do/pay-for a LOT of things to keep the car from coming back if you find issues.

Alas, the Volt was persistent in not persisting. We couldn’t do anything to get it started and figured that the Traction battery had reached a self-reported voltage drop that kept it from being able to provide enough power to kick over the gas motor. And since “It won’t run” means everyone has to send a different kind of tow-truck, trade in and sales offers weren’t coming. Thus, I found that a similarly Online company called “Peddle” would accept rollers and gave me a pretty good offer (within spitting distance of what I would have gotten if it would start). I accepted and they gave me a LOT of information about how to make sure the title was ready. The driver that they reached contacted me ahead of time and asked for me to show a picture of the title (to confirm that it was in a state that it wouldn’t need to be re-issued for sale/transfer) and showed up with the check… and then when he got in and pressed the start button… it booted right up and drove itself onto the tow-truck, no doubt giggling as I quietly cursed behind it.