GM reverses plan to retire Chevrolet Bolt as it chases EV target
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This is basically a fringe position. According to wikipedia the Bolt is classed as a "subcompact" car. In the late 2010s basically every car manufacturer exited out of the subcompact segment[1] because of lackluster sales. At least in North America, almost nobody wants subcompact cars.
>We already have people driving trucks around lifted beyond belief with beds that never get used.
Every time this sort of conversation comes up, pickup trucks are always brought up as the problem. Yet, if you look at sales data[2], their market share only rose modestly. Arguably they're just returning to historical trends after fuel prices came back down in the late 2010s. The fastest growing segment is actually crossovers. They come with much of the same concerns you raised about pickup trucks, but I suppose they're way harder to demonize so nobody really talks about them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcompact_car#2000s_to_presen...
[2] https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/research/the-rise-of-th...
Don't you know the outgroup is bad and the cause of our problems? /s
And they wonder why people in flyover states dislike them.
I disagree strongly with that. these are very different vehicles.
Crossovers are regulated like cars, built like cars, and anre often are roughly the same size as equivalent cars. They’re just lifted slightly off the ground (in some cases barely) and given a hatchback.
As an example, compare dimensions of a Toyota Camry to a Toyota RAV4. Most of the exterior dimensions are almost identical. The RAV4 is notably a little bit longer outside of the wheelbase and only about 200 pounds heavier.
It's the body on frame vehicles that end up being heavy and compromised much of the time - its a way of manufacturing a vehicle that stretches back practically to the stone age. I also agree crossovers do not deserve to be compared to body-on-frame construction.
In interests of not upsetting anyone - I also agree there are some limited usecases body on frame is better! But for most private passenger transport, a monocoque construction will have advantages - size, weight, fuel economy (function of weight reduction), driving dynamics, pedestrian safety etc. Body on frame can also make it easier for a commercial vehicle to offer bed customization options, given the car structurally is just a pair of rails on wheels that can be extended or shortened as application demands. A monocoque generally can't change its length as easily.
There are new pickups flirting with monocoque construction - the Honda Ridgeline, Ford Maverick, Hyundai Santa Cruz, famously the Tesla Cybertruck...
14,000 lbs is absolutely within realms of normal/possible for a nearly 20 foot long 6000lb truck - its more or less exactly the same as high-spec Ford trucks.
It's almost a given one of the first things youtube is going do with a production Cybertruck is find something that weighs almost exactly 14000 lbs and try to tow it up and down the steepest inclines they can find.
All that twisting and bending force being applied to a unibody, I can't see it ending well.
So, afaik, historical claims by Tesla on towing capacity are true so there seems to be more reason to believe a future towing claim is accurate based on previous towing claims than believe it's false because previous non-towing claims have been false.
[1]: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-7A684E2...
I think we're going to see Cybertrucks with totally trashed frames if they try to go live with 14k loads.
Another aspect is that repairability of the frame isn’t as important as preventing injury to the occupants.
You know what’s more expensive than a totaled $18,500 vehicle? Hospital bills.
Dealers.
The Chevy Bolt was a great product that owners almost universally loved. However, Chevy dealers would refuse to sell customers one. They certainly wouldn't promote it, and in many cases go out of their way to disparage it.
Maybe this got better with time, but at least when the Bolt was still fairly new, a friend trying to buy one was struggling to get a dealership to even let him test drive one, despite the fact that they were almost certainly available (he still got the test drive, but after much insistence from the dealer that he should test drive another car they had instead).
The Bolt has been a great, no-nonsense option. Other than the battery recall, of course. No giant screen, no fart apps. It was the first and at the time, only reasonably priced EV that looked like a regular car, that you could actually take road trips in, and not trapped in a single city due to an impractically small range (Nissan Leaf Gen 1, BMW i3, etc.)
AFAICT, it's not so much that they love the Bolt, it's that they love the price of the Bolt. So hopefully the new version keeps compelling pricing.
Love ours too, especially now that we've finally had the battery replaced as part of that recall. The supply of batteries to the dealerships was ridiculously slow. Both they and we got tired of asking for when they'd be able to do the recall for our car.
I believe the commenter is referencing things like the Hummer EV at 9000 pounds, or 4.5 tons
Vehicle size is a classic prisoner's dilemma. In a two-car accident, the larger car is likely to fare better. So I totally understand why folks are buying crossover SUVs when they could just as easily fit in a car. Trying to guilt people into buying smaller cars than reason dictates is a losing strategy.
The only solution here is to stop subsidizing cheap oil and get rid of the weird emissions and tax loopholes that make trucks more attractive than they ought to be.
If you've ever heard about the numerous SUV rollovers in the 90s - especially on poorly designed roads (see: reduced-turning-radius cloverleaf intersections) - you would realize that collisions with other vehicles are a mere fraction of the accidents you can have.
People buy big because they can afford it - guess what, economy sucks and the used market is crazy so there is incentive for new smaller cars.
Did you only hear about them in the 90s? because in the 00s sway bars [1] became very popular so perhaps the rollovers stopped happening.
I also don't think people really consider accidents when purchasing cars or Volvo wouldn't've had such a hard time growing.
Part of this may also align with the fact that SUVs are so varied a category that now there are 5+ size categories of SUV [1] as opposed to maybe two from the 90s - dilution of the brand in a marketable way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossover_(automobile)#Size_ca...
Bolt: 3,680 pounds
Model 3: 3,862 to 4,048 lbs
BMW i4: 4,680 to 5,018 lbs
BMW i3: 2,972 to 3,309 lbs
Bolt back then was $35k+ with incentives. Mine was less than $18k with incentives.
Range sucked on my FF (good enough to get me to work + back + leftover) but a) it cost half the Bolt b) had fast charging and c) I didn't have to go far to get one in stock.
I probably would have liked both of them - roomy enough to fit 5 + fast enough to enjoy the drive part. Ford discontinued the Focus, but honestly Bolt/Focus are decent EVs for a lot of people.
Certainly the stock performance (-3.87% over 5Y vs -2.12% for Ford, wouldn't be fair to bring Tesla into the conversation) doesn't help to justify her position.
In fact, an investor in January 2014 would only have to lock up their money for 5 months in Treasuries to generate the return Barra has delivered to her investors in ten years [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Barra
[2] https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPY/chart?p=SPY#eyJpbnRlcnZh...
[4] https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/monthly-yield-curve-tab...
The S&P 500 isn't a fair comparison, but the Treasury one is. That's the risk-free rate.
The ten-year yield was closer to 6% when Barra took the helm. That's much worse!
The point of the comparison is that the return she delivered over her ten-year term was analogous to that which an investor demanded to lend to the U.S. government for a grand total of five months. It's driving home the terribleness of the return within the context of her hiring: she has failed to return anything close to GM's cost of capital.
> you are comparing with the benefit of hindsight which is not viable for any financial analysis
It's totally valid for evaluating a manager!
its hard to find a reliable used car for that price, let alone a new ev! i don't know what gm was thinking when they killed it.
https://cleanvehiclerebate.org/en/savings-calculator https://driveclean.ca.gov/node/919765
Selling only 49 of a vehicle in a 6-month period seems... shockingly low. Can't even imagine what kind of bottlenecks they're running into with building them.
This is an embarrassingly low number of vehicles on the Ultium platform. It inspires zero confidence that GM will be good at managing their supply chain and manufacturing electric vehicles. GM's forecasts are borderline fraud at this point. They need to come forward with a realistic roadmap ending with significant production of electric vehicles.
I don't really care how great their new stereo head is, cars last a long time and there's 0% chance they'll keep up with the phone over the long term.
Now I'm right there with you on the mechanicals and exteriors.
However, the display often ends up too low on the dash in older vehicles with a retrofit, modern cars typically place it higher on the dash almost level with the instrument cluster to make it easier to check for navigation etc, most modern cars can even sync carplay directions to a secondary display in the instrument cluster. The siri mic solution can be compromised too, depending on the vehicle and how you fit the mic. It's livable of course, but often not optimal.
I have CarPlay on my Subaru and use the Model 3 in the Bay Area. (Borrowed car [a].) Tesla's UX is unrivaled. But it still can't match Apple's seamlessness. Shitty as Siri is, it can dial my next conference call, pull up the place I was just searching for on my Mac and respond to texts, consistently and hands free.
[a] Funny enough, I had suggested a Bolt to the owner. They got uncomfortable with the thought of buying a discontinued model, and so gave Tesla their money.
No, because you will still have parts and trained technicians for it.
A car manufacturer integration fails on two counts:
1) I don't trust them to make good software. I dread to think what permissions I'd have to grant the GM app in order for it to read and write text messages but I'd fear data leaks, voice transcription errors, etc etc. and I don't want to have to choose a music/podcast service based on what they do and do not support.
2) They'd make you pay extra. You know they would. Maybe not to start but they'd introduce monthly fees for it all once they've got you locked in.
Edit: Tesla might be the exception here, but do you imagine GM is going to be shipping OS updates for a 10 year old car? I think not.
They have to, because in order to drive these features natively in your infotainment system they need active LTE/5G service.
Which is a total waste for the consumer, who likely already pays for such service for their smartphone, which has built in software designed to provide all these features to your infotainment system.
My iPhone...on my dashboard. There's far more to CarPlay than just Apple Music, and Tesla's offering isn't even close.
If automakers just can't get their act together to make a proper internet stereo/navigation system, they should develop an open standard allowing third parties to provide it instead. Not halfheartedly farm it out to the tech giants.
That's frustrating but tolerable on a $300 device. But on a $30,000 car?
We did upgrade the central computer a few years ago to get 4g support, but $1500 felt very cheap for a whole new center screen, a new higher resolution instrument cluster, and a new computer making the whole car run faster.
The beauty of CarPlay and Android Auto is that it turns your infotainment system into a dumb terminal for your smartphone. As long as it can decode the video and audio streams, there is no reason it will not continue to get new features indefinitely via phone upgrades and new versions of iOS or Android.
Our phones are perfectly capable of doing all the things these car companies want us to pay extra for.
CarPlay gives it to you for free, using the data plan you already pay for on your phone to fetch maps and stream music.
My car does not need it's own internet connection to do these things, my phone can do them just fine. And as CarPlay and Android Auto have shown, it is borderline trivial to turn the giant touchscreen in my car into a dumb terminal for my smartphone.
It's one thing to charge me a subscription for something I use regularly, it's another entirely to make me pay a subscription for something I already get somewhere else, just so I can have it in my car.
Fuck GM.
It was one of only 2 vehicles in it's class (EV with a range extender), which was what I wanted, but being Canadian I wouldn't get the benefits half the year.
The other was the BMW i3 REx, I nearly bought one until I found out AC problems can somehow cost 5 figures to repair, effectively totalling the car.
I just gave up and bought a full EV.
The only thing I wish is more capacity for the battery. Went for a road trip from SF to Monterey, and the battery almost drained by the time we arrived.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/25/gm-isnt-going-to-kill-off-...
I suspect that the development of their more high-end/profitable EVs is going slower than anticipated and some bean counter somewhere determined that this is the best use of the batteries they have on hand.
...
Yet production of cars and trucks powered by Ultium batteries have been hampered by delays at a supplier that have limited GM’s capacity to build battery modules."