I'm sure everyone in North America has grown beyond tired of this winter. It's been brutal and seems to keep going even though everyone on this continent simply wants to put a knife through its heart.
But, exactly how cold is it? Well, I noticed with my Volt that it was exceptionally cold because the range has, well, sucked for months now. With temperatures rarely getting to single digits below zero the poor car has been having trouble hitting 40km of range. In fact, from November onwards I don't recall many days -- if any -- where the generator didn't kick in until last week. Last week was the first time I was able to drive to work and back home purely on electrons. But then this weekend it was back down to -19c. Sigh. But at least the weather folks are telling us that this week will be a bit closer to normal. We might actually have 3 days of 1-3c days! Although the evenings will still be -10c or so. Ugh. For reference, at the moment it's -15c. Sigh.
Anyway, what has the car shown us? It's shown us this as gleaned from our OnStar metrics of use for the Volt in December 2012-March 2013 vs December 2013-March 2014.
2013 2014 Dec 72% 63% Jan 70% 58% Feb 66% 47% Mar 83% 59%
Based on those numbers alone the winter months have been 15-40% colder this winter. Ugh.
I can hardly wait until Spring arrives and I truly hope we have a very pleasant summer. After this winter we all deserve that.