This month marked the 1-year anniversary since I got it and despite having a half-tank of gas left (which I got from the dealer when I bought it) it brought up a message saying the gas had gone stale and that it would burn the gas rather than use battery until I filled the gas tank up with fresh gas.
That’s a little annoying since I had thought that gas in a largely sealed container (gas tank) would last a lot longer, especially since the Volt churns the gas on occasion and I had hoped I could use it purely as an electrical car (I had 3000+ miles on it and had only used 6 gallons of gas total).
That is pretty cool, that you have a Volt that is :). I was strongly considering buying one, but they are still priced a bit out of my price range. Growing up with my dad and almost our entire neighborhood working for GM in Pontiac in the area I really want to see the Volt succeed both for the success of the company and the environmental impact.
Still, one year isn’t really too bad. I am impressed you haven’t needed to use that much gas in a year. Perhaps since it churns it some during operation it is one year instead of some months that it needs to turn it over.
I only work 3 miles away from home so that helps and it gets around 35 miles on a charge which is enough to get me to the airport (which has a charging station) or pretty much anywhere else around here.
I only used 6 gallons of gas because I often forgot to charge it. :)
Why don’t you just syphon the gas out? That should reset the sensor. You can then pour it back in. That is, of course, only if you don’t believe that the gas has gone stale. If it truly has somehow, you may be risking getting stranded next time you run out of battery.
Yeah, it’s supposed to turn on the engine once per month for a while, to stir up the gas tank and keep the internal combustion engine lubricated. But that won’t use a full tank if you never go over 40 miles between recharges, and old gas gets thicker and oxidizes over time. The volt’s gas tank is supposed to be sealed, but it’s not completely sealed. Definitely cool tech.
Siphoning it out would be crazysauce. Just let the car handle its maintenance.
My wife and I just bought a Volt last month, and it is also our favorite car of all time. She commutes about 45 miles each day, so it burns 5-10 miles worth of gas daily depending on traffic conditions and external temperature (running the heat or air conditioning noticeably decreases the electric driving distance).
Because of her driving habits, we obviously don’t have to worry about stale gas, but the dealer warned us about it when we bought it and said the Volt would burn it if needed. I guess your dealer didn’t get the memo, Brad :-).
Does the Volt have the same issue as the Tesla where it will be bricked and require a whole new battery (at 40 grand a pop) if you leave it uncharged for too long?
A few Volt owner friends of mine have been using fuel stabilizers for this problem. An additive that apparently you can buy at most auto parts suppliers, etc. You may check with your mechanic or dealer to see what brand they recommend.
You’re annoyed you have to go through one tank of gas per year?
A year is a long time for gas to sit, even in a well sealed container. This isn’t a Volt problem, it’s just the reality of dealing with a highly volatile (and in some cases hydrophilic) substance.
I was wondering about this. Is there a way to force the Volt to burn gas until empty?
I’ve been waiting for a plug-in Prius, but I suppose with the Volt around there’s really no reason to wait any longer. Does anyone here know differently? Is the plug-in Prius expected to be better than the Volt in any particular way?
The Leaf is 100% electric with no supplemental gas engine, which is why we never considered it. Even though its range would barely cover my wife’s commute, a relatively short trip north to see her mother in Orange County (we live in northern San Diego County) would be impossible for the Leaf. It is truly a commuter car, and nothing else.
Gasoline would go bad in a perfectly sealed inert container with no void space for air or the gas’ own vapor. If it were simply a mixture of long chain hydrocarbons it would last much longer. But, there are many oxygenated compounds added to help shift the combustion products further away from CO toward CO2, and unsaturated cyclic chemicals to boost the octane rating and so forth (thankfully MTBE is pretty much gone - it is some nasty stuff).
I’m impressed that they designed the Volt to tell you to burn the old gas. That would royally suck to pay that much for a car and then have the combustion part fail due to “varnish”.
Uhhh… no? He’s complaining that he can’t use a car that’s perfectly fine as an electrical car without having it tell him that he needs to burn some gas, as well as being annoyed with a fact of life for gasoline that he wasn’t aware of.
I do find it interesting that the solution from Chevy was to tell you that it was going to go ahead and burn the gas. It makes sense since, as mentioned above, gas and IC engines shouldn’t be left unused for such long periods of time.
And fuel stabilizers are a monthly solution, not a yearly one. There’s still a lot of debate on whether or not it’s actually useful, but with the introduction of higher levels of ethanol (which fucking loves to absorb moisture) it’s a pretty convincing argument now to use fuel stabilizer for things that are sitting around for weeks without use.
Of course, an internal combustion engine is a bunch of moving parts amidst explosions, so more often than not your engine is still going to run with stale gasoline, until the FI or carb gets clogged with gunk that may have formed.
