The Chevy Volt is still months away from hitting showrooms, but that hasn’t stopped people from speculating on the next generation of Chevy’s plug-in hybrid. Will it make the jump to a fully electric vehicle? Will they make a sportier SS version? Will anybody actually buy the Volt? These are just some of the questions people are asking.

Some of the focus has been on the range-extending engine, which as it stands is a smallish, 4 cylinder, 1.4 L Ecotec powerplant which can recharge the batteries on the fly. But will they stick with the conventional engine, or go with something… different. Like a rotary engine, or perhaps even a diesel?

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With the Nissan Leaf, the Chevy Volt and other plug-in cars entering the market, potential buyers wonder: How will recharging stations work? What will a “fill up” cost? To answer those questions, Popular Mechanics talked to dozens of experts and spent a day with a hypothetical EV driver from the future.

This is an excerpt of a post that originally appeared on the Popular Mechanics website, where you can read it in its entirety. Written by Erik Sofge. llustration by Dongyun Lee.

Santa Monica, California, 12 AM, August 4, 2020. At midnight, your car wakes up. The hefty, 15-pound charging cable tethering the front of the vehicle to a 220-volt outlet in your garage goes live, pulling 5 kilowatts of power from the grid. In just 5 hours, it will nearly double your home’s average daily electrical consumption. Across California, hundreds of thousands of plug-in hybrids and pure electric vehicles are doing the same, sipping electricity from a power network at rest. Some of those vehicles have different charging regimens, communicating more with the local utility, or even allowing that utility to actively control when and how to recharge their batteries. But yours follows a simple pricing scheme, automatically charging during what is typically the cheapest time of the day, between midnight and 5 am. That’s when the utilities have power to spare, when the office buildings in downtown Los Angeles have gone dark and sweltering. In the daily rhythm of the grid, this is off-peak.

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General Motors yesterday gave electric car enthusiasts and a handful of journalists an opportunity to spin the Chevy Volt around a parking lot next to San Francisco’s AT&T Park. HybridCars.com had its first two or three minutes behind the wheel, spoke with the Volt team, and came away with these insights.

1The EV miles are the easy ones. Charge sustaining mode is the tough part.

Tony Posawatz, Volt vehicle line director. (Photos: Bradley Berman. All rights reserved.)

The most widely known fact about the Volt is that it can travel for up to 40 miles using only electricity, before the engine comes on to maintain the battery pack’s state of charge. During those first 40 miles, the Volt behaves just like a pure electric car. There’s simply not much more to say about the driving experience and handling than it drives like an electric car: speedy, smooth, and whisper-quiet. (It will take some more time behind the wheel to determine if we like the dashboard instrumentation, which at first blush seemed slightly overwhelming.)

So, the unique proposition, and technical challenge, of the Volt is what happens after those 40 electric miles. “The EV mode was the easy thing,” said Tony Posawatz, vehicle line director for the Chevy Volt. The hard part, according to Posawatz, was using the vehicle’s sophisticated software to “blend and smooth out” how and when the engine is employed to extend the driving range.

“At low speeds, the engine almost never comes on in charge sustaining mode. At high speeds, we take advantage of running the RPMs a little bit higher, but never to a point where it affects the pleasability of the car. The engine is never roaring.”

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