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Comment by icelancer | Hacker News Reader

The Bolt is not even close to the Model 3 in terms of power, looks, interior, ICE, etc. Model 3 sold nearly 40k cars through 2018 and the Bolt sold fewer than 9k. To call the Bolt a failure of marketing might be true but it ignores the fact that it is simply worse than the Model 3 in essentially 100% of the areas they overlap.

If the Bolt is "mass-market EV" the definition of "mass-market" needs to be revisited.

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I don't disagree with you that the bolt is inferior.

I was simply explaining why HN was "ignoring the amazing fact that an electric vehicle that can travel 220 miles is 35k."

It's not worthy of awe and amazement if big old lazy GM met those standards years ago.

The iPhone wasn't a massive success because there were no other smart phones out there. It was that it was a much more compelling product than what the competitors were making.

The Bolt is the blackberry of EVs. Sure, on paper it checks the "mass market EV" boxes but no one is geeking out in cult-like fashion about Bolts like they do for iPhones and Teslas.

I mean, the iPhone was kind of the only good smartphone that was actually a "smart phone", when it came out. There was nothing even remotely comparable until they were a few years into Android. I remember even the first few lines of Droids that came out and they were substantially inferior products.

The main reasons to drive a Bolt are environmental and convenience of charging vs. filling up. The Model 3 looks and drives a lot better than most cars and has the added benefit of OTA updates. The downside is service though. Hopefully that's fixed by the time I need to use it.

BTW, Tesla sold a lot more than 40k model 3s in 2018. It was over 130k. Bolt was about 20k.

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