More Electric Car Storage Tips – The Chevy Volt

We’ve stored a few Chevrolet Volts in the past. This is our first one of the new generation though…a very nice improvement over the outgoing first gen. You can watch all sorts of reviews here.

But I wanted to make light of some of the storage modes on the car…yes it actually has modes for storage…

The volt is a great in-between solution for the aspiring electric car owner with a bit of range anxiety: the car is driven by the electric motor, but when the car depletes its battery, there is a gas engine that kicks on and charges the battery that drives the wheels. This is great because it also eliminates the need to have a garage or car port to accommodate a charger.

However this brings a whole new set of problems to the table. The one related to storage being bad gas. Whether the car sits for a long time or is charged so frequently that it doesn’t use its gas reserves, the fuel within that tank is at risk of going bad. Bad gas damages fuel systems and this damage can be very expensive to repair.

The volt solves this by a) burning fuel at a regular interval per the car’s computer and b) offering a few ways to store the car long term.

There is an actual transport mode, in fact…however you can read about all of the modes in this blog post.

Ultimately we decided to disconnect the battery and fire the car up frequently. This is what I also recommend for most owners if they are storing the car for more than a month.