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Comment by technofiend | Hacker News Reader

For whatever reason GM also ended sale of their popular Chevy Bolt platform. It wasn't an amazing car and I'm sure suffered from its own faults as well, but at least from reading reports about the car nothing like what the Ultim-based vehicles are seeing now! Also it was cheaper than the Blazer, so I'm sure less profitable for GM but that made it popular to consumers. Not to mention it still qualified for an EV tax credit.

You'd think GM would have continued sale and guaranteed profit from the Bolt while they worked out the kinks of the next-generation.

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Clearly personal preference… but I would say the Bolt is a very strong commuter option. I originally thought I would buy an Kia EV6, then a Genesis GV60. In the end I bought a Bolt and I absolutely love it.

It is 85% of the car I wanted for 40% of the price of the others. It isn’t plush, but it has every modern safety system and everything is where you expect it (vs the toys / Tesla)

Highly recommend it for an around town / commuter car.

This is exactly my experience. Very happy with my Bolt as well.

I also wouldn’t buy another car without CarPlay

The Chevy Bolt isn't dead. They're just taking a pause while they redesign it for the Ultium battery architecture. In the meantime, the Orion Assembly plant lines where the bolt was built are being used for electric light trucks.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a44639082/chevrolet-bolt-e...

There's something missing from this narrative that GM is not disclosing. It's very rare for a manufacturer to pause sales of a product that works well, is well received and in demand. GM has hyped their EV strategy and the Bolt is the one thing that's real and good.

Automakers redesign cars all the time without pausing sales. Automakers work on the new design in parallel, then switch over and call it a new model year.

Maybe a supplier raised prices and GM's gross margin tanked, or maybe they were always losing money on every car made and they need to stop the bleeding.

The story I heard is that they needed to retool an existing factory for new ultium vehicles, and they were prioritizing production of more profitable vehicles (which I guess they consider the Cadillac Lyriq, Blazer, and Hummer to be). Supposedly they will be producing Bolts before the end of 2024. So a gap of about one year, with a much better specced platform... If only they can get the reliability of the platform right. Chevy insists these issues aren't ultium related, but I have doubts.

Reliability problems are mostly related to wiring and systems integration. Going to be hard to fix problems too expensive to fix actually

Isn’t it well known they had major issues with the battery design and 2 or 3 recalls related to it. If i remember correctly one of them include a warning not to park inside due to the risk of a fire.

Yes, and allegedly the issue was root caused and fixed. The cost to investigate and recall has been sunk.

And the root cause was LG, not GM.

You're right: the current incarnation is dead and at least right now basing it on Ultium seems like a regression. Perhaps they'll work out all the issues in the Ultium Blazer? Even so, there's a reason general consensus is to never buy the first model year of a new oe revised car.

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