You’ve been dying to hear how much energy the Volt has been consuming as we drive it through one of the most frigid weeks of the winter.Single digit temperatures have greeted us each morning of late. Well, as soon as Detroit editor Todd Lassa returned from Chicago, I brought the log book in and crunched the numbers. The Volt spent its first 162 miles commuting in town, then Todd drove it 601 miles to and from Chicago.

We’re presenting the energy-use statistics every which way:

• Consumption, in our new kilowatt-hours/100-miles format, with gasoline energy converted using 33.7 kW-hr/gal (37.1 for diesel).
• Economy, wherein that same factor is used to compute the gasoline-gallon-equivalent of the electrons that went in.
• Cost,  where our per-mile energy cost is based on my home electric bill’s rate of $0.127/kW-hr (including all taxes) and the actual gasoline costs incurred.

Distance Traveled:     763.2 miles (162 city, 601 highway)
Gasoline price/gallon:     $3.37
Diesel price/gallon     $3.48
Electricity price/kW-hr     $0.127

To lend a bit of context, I’ve crunched some numbers for the conventional gasoline-powered Cruze 1.4L turbo, the Toyota Prius, the VW Jetta TDI, and even the Nissan Leaf, assuming each had achieved its ideal EPA city fuel economy for 162 miles and its EPA highway economy for 601 miles. For gasoline pricing, I used our actual average price per gallon paid, for diesel I used the DOE’s average Midwest per-gallon price for the period, and for electricity I used my home rate for all recharges, including the Chicago hotel plug-in. Of course, the Leaf is even more of an academic exercise, as it would have taken days to make the trek to and from Chicago. As you can see below, the statistics from this analysis suggest that electric operation is cheaper than gas operation when plugging in to the Southeast Michigan grid.


Read more inside Motor Trend: 2011 Chevrolet Volt