The First Good 2016 Chevrolet Volt Teaser Looks Remarkable

While I am more of a fan of muscle cars and full size trucks, I really like the Chevrolet Volt. I like the exterior design, I like the look and feel of the interior and I love the functionality of the extended range electric drivetrain. The Volt is really the best of both worlds in terms of a super-efficient vehicle, offering impressive all-electric range and unlimited driving range thanks to the gasoline engine. You can make your 35 mile round trip drive to work every day without burning a drop of gasoline, but if you need to leave work one day and drive 150 miles into Northern Michigan to buy a Larry Foote autographed football, you can do that, too.

The current Chevrolet Volt is very good, but the next generation model is expected to be better in every way and based on this first teaser image of the front end – the Volt’s exterior design is really getting kicked up a notch for 2016.

The New Face of the 2016 Volt
At a recent gathering of Chevy Volt fans in Los Angeles, General Motors showed off just a bit of the next generation Volt that will arrive for the 2016 model year, after a formal debut in January at the 2015 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. GM had previously shown a teaser of the rear badge, but that really didn’t answer any questions about the next gen Volt. This teaser of the front end, on the other hand, shows us pretty much the entire front end. Sure, we cannot see the passenger’s side corner of the front end, but we can bet that the Volt’s face will be perfectly symmetrical so in seeing half of the front end, we know what the whole front end will look like.

First and foremost, the whole attitude of the 2016 Chevrolet Volt changed with a hood line that dips down to the nose more, while the headlights are more sharply angled and stretched back to create a far more aggressive face. The big split upper grille is gone, replaced by a much smaller opening that is almost entirely filled in with a solid silver panel for improved aero properties. Across the bottom of the front end, the 2016 Volt has a much larger lower opening with more of the solid silver paneling and flanking each side of this lower opening is a molded splitter that protrudes just below the LED fog lights.

This new front end gives the Volt a far more conventional look while also being a whole lot sportier and honestly, I love it. While the original Volt had an exterior design that was far more aesthetically pleasing than some of the other EVs on the market today, the new 2016 Volt looks like it could look very much like a “normal car:”, while still offering the advantages of a super-efficient EV.

With the 2016 Chevrolet Volt set to debut in Detroit, we will have to wait about two months for the full debut, but what I can see so far looks to be a big step in the right direction. For comparison, I have included a gallery of the current Volt, which you can check out by clicking any of the thumbnails at the top of the page.