The Chevy Blazer EV Launch Has Gone from Rough to Worse as GM Issues Stop-Sale | Hacker News Reader

The Chevy Blazer EV Launch Has Gone from Rough to Worse as GM Issues Stop-Sale

thedrive.com

55 pointsbastard_op67 comments

Wow, the Edmunds article has a list of the 23 issues the dealership flagged when they brought the car in: https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/2024-chevy-blazer-ev-long-t... (at bottom of article)

It sounds like one or more hardware manufacturing defects and/or full software crashes triggered under normal vehicle operation.

Which sounds like QA was compressed / skipped to hit a launch date.

Cars: The new "release the game and we'll patch it later"

>> Cars: The new "release the game and we'll patch it later"

I knew someone who worked at GM in OTA (over the air updates) and I said not to let them use that capability to slip schedules and fix it later. She said there were definitely teams wanting to use it that way, but she was pushing back. That was several years ago. Maybe they lost that battle.

Should've just kept selling the Bolt. You know, the immensely popular, cheap, established vehicle brand they've been making for years? Oh well.

Yeah right? What was the reason?

Almost certainly: profit margins on different models.

   - Bolt: -$4k to -$9k per vehicle [0]
   - Suburban: +$10k per vehicle [1]

[0] https://www.hotcars.com/gm-admits-bolt-not-profitable/

[1] https://gmauthority.com/blog/2023/06/heres-how-much-profit-g...

This is correct, I believe: Chevy never made the kind of money they wanted to on the Bolt, despite its popularity.

It solely exists for CAFE. Make money with trucks, boost fleet mileage with a low-end EV.

The politics of established ICE execs vs the EV execs and Tesla margin envy.

Or the Volt.

That's the one I really wanted.

50 miles electric, extended range gas at over 40mpg.

Good news for you bud https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a44639082/chevrolet-bolt-e...

No CarPlay and reliability issues have doomed this car out of the gate. Incompetent management will throw their hands up and say "We tried!", ignoring all of the reasons why it failed. It's an electric vehicle, provide reliable electronics (you already figured this out in your gas-powered vehicles) and a decent infotainment system and people will love it. Tesla managed to dominate the market doing little else besides making it fast.

Well Tesla doesn't support CarPlay either. Apparently a lot of consumers don't care much.

Which is why I said decent infotainment. CarPlay became the solution to manufacturers producing garbage head units for a decade. Tesla's isn't bad, which is why you don't hear people deem it a dealbreaker nearly as often.

Tesla had exclusive access to the only real charging network in the US. It used to beat the inconvenience of their craptacular infotainment system.

I've been using Teslas for 10 years, and my next car will likely be Lucid Air when they switch to NACS.

Ouch.

Kinda follows the trend I'm hearing with carmakers of late however.

Just yesterday my BIL was opining that his dad was 'thinking about a Chevy' after being a F150 driver for decades (home improvement type industry.) I warned him that a colleague had a Blazer in the shop for 3 months waiting on a part... i.e. every manufacturer seems to be strugglebussing with meeting ship dates while keeping quality and proper service supply chains in place.

I do think a big challenge is 'overplanning'; Ford did some things right with the Maverick and F150 Lightning (i.e. using as much as what they had on hand in a way to minimize overall risk) but did make some missteps along the way (General supply allocation for the Maverick, poor handling of parts supply chain for known CSPs and other warranty repairs, build quality of some early models being bad enough to somehow lead to wet floormats.)

If you're gonna go out knowing things may have issues, you must have a plan to make it right for the consumer in an orderly fashion. The increasing levels of abstraction/bureaucracy in warranty and defect handling in products over the last 20 years is frankly sad.

If I'm in the place where I still need a truck, and there's a decent used extended warranty option, the Lightning extended-range battery is my current next vehicle to beat.

Backfeeding home power in the event of an outage or running essentially everything in an off-grid scenario is too game changing to ignore.

The F150 hybrid has been able to do this for a few years. It wasn’t new technology developed specifically for the Lightning. So in that sense it’s not surprising that it works well on the Lightning.

A common reply to "how is it working at X?" is that it is only as good as your immediate supervisor. I think this is the same with vehicle brands, except that your experience owning them is only as good as your nearest dealership/maintenance garage. I have had a terrible experience with almost all brands at some point. Most recently, Ford completely refusing to acknowledge widespread issues with their 10-speed transmission- to the point many Ford dealerships in the area quit taking transmission service work completely. I quit fighting them and switched to a Chevy, and I'll just have to wait until it malfunctions to see how bad the nearest service department is.

It's especially hilarious because their official reason for their shitty infotaiment system was "safety".

To me, this sounds like a good old Conway's law. The EV fundamentally changes the architecture of the car: what it's made of, what's the role of each component is and how these are interlinked. In particular, there's a shift from mechanical coponents to software components. This would imply, that the structure of the organization designing the car should also change in fundamental ways. But in absence of an enterprise architect (as in "a person responsible for the architecture of the entire enterprise"), it can be tricky to synchronize organizational change with engineering change due to separation of responsibilities. Also, interaction of physical components is rather straightforward to determine (separate teams for the battery and motors is obvious) whereas software components are intangible.

Recent and related:

GM halts sales of its new Chevy Blazer EV amid reports of software issues - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38748943 - Dec 2023 (85 comments)

Our Chevy Blazer EV Has 23 Problems After Only 2 Months - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38749417 - Dec 2023 (48 comments)

Sometimes it’s hard to believe this is just incompetence.

N'ah. Big auto execs are really that incompetent, they don't need to go out if their way to intentionally fuck up something.

They should dogfood their own products more often instead of being chauffered in Porsches or Aston Martins (I imagine).

You imagine wrong, at least in the case of Ford’s execs.

The burden of corrupt and useless unions and the ancient dealership model are direct contributors to the garbage the big 3 put out. Stifled product and manufacturing innovation, build costs out of control, quality disincentivized, and the ever present spectre of easy Democrat $$bailouts work against designing or building or delivering anything good at a reasonable cost.

Having worked pretty directly with multiple OEMs, I can't say I've seen many issues caused caused by whatever political axe you have to grind. I've lost count of the number of times I saw executives make decisions that had obvious negative repercussions. Things like not paying critical suppliers to get leverage in negotiations, then being surprised when production can't run.

The Union and the dealerships are not the reason for these issues.

Dealerships kind of are

Most businesses will go bankrupt and cease to exist if they are run incompetently. In GM’s case, this almost happened during the GFC but the federal government nationalized it before eventually restructuring it and selling it back to private shareholders. You see, GM—and GM’s supply chain—is “too big to fail” (and accounts for a lot of jobs in Midwestern swing states).

No large company went out of business for good during the GFC, the government bail outs covered most of the ones that would matter in an election.

I don't know about that; I would consider Washington Mutual a "large company" (although perhaps not one that would matter in an election).

It’s cool, we’ll just bail them out again when they tank the company with shit products.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rPDA7dMOT4

Remember when they told Bolt owners to park more than 50 feet away from other vehicles due to the risk of fire?

I really wanted to rent one on Turo and create a youtube video where I pulled into some small business' parking lot and coned off all the spaces in the lot, because apparently it's not safe to park next to a Chevy Bolt.

GM is so outrageous. They should have let them go bankrupt.

Why do I have the feeling that the Kia boys are about to become the Chevy boys…

This is why nobody likes American car brands. The brands that make them cut corners and things like this happen. Teslas are the only American-made cars that are somewhat high-quality.

  >Tesla
  >High quality

Pick one.

Their software quality is best in class, rivaled only by other EV-only brands like Polestar and Rivian. The traditional manufacturers cannot compare at all.

Sure but you can't remotely OTA update chassis cracks or badly fitting body panels. For better or worse, bad SW can always be fixed later. Bad manufacturing can not, and software won't get you from A to B on its own.

I'd rather have bad software and wheels that don't fall off than the other way 'round.

Totally. Every so often the Bluetooth connection on my Scuon FR-S disconnects. I just turn the car off and back on, because its a stick it's easy and I can even do it while driving. No biggie.

Other than that it's been super reliable. The perfect car.

> I just turn the car off and back on, because its a stick it's easy and I can even do it while driving.

Please stop doing this. You don’t need Bluetooth to safely operate your car. You do need power steering and brakes.

You actually don't. Many cars do not have either. In a car that weighs 2700 lbs wet they're not much more than luxuries.

Please name a mass produced passenger car sold in North America in the last 30 years that doesn’t have power brakes. There aren’t “many” cars that fit that constraint and I’d be shocked if there are any at all. There might be a handful that don’t have power steering but even that’s going to be extremely uncommon.

Does your Subaru have a steering lock? A quick search suggests it does. So you better hope you don’t hit a bump with the ignition off.

A car doesn't have to have been made in the last 30 years, that's arbitrary.

Many cars and trucks from the 70s had manual steering and brakes, Ford F series, Jeep CJs, etc.

My technique is to power cycle the car just long enough to reset the radio. Also, the steering lock is easily unlocked quickly using the key, it's not as if I take the key out of the ignition and throw it out the window. There are also 2 positions on my ignition, like most cars. You can turn off the engine while keeping the accessory power on. That matters in my case because my car has fully electric power steering.

Many "hyper milers" do things like this. There is a almost 10 mile long section of I-70 that is a famous grade. You can coast the whole way down. I used to coast down the whole thing in my civic, others do too.

Really any car that can be flat towed can be safely driven with the ignition off. You see people doing this all the time, towing a car with a tow strap and a person operating the steering and brakes in the under tow car.

The 1970s were 50 years ago. What are you even saying? Just stop doing this insanely dangerous thing. You’re endangering everyone around you. Just stop.

This may be true. But it's a car company.

I think many people would disagree that Tesla are high-quality, even “somewhat”.

> Teslas are the only American-made cars that are somewhat high-quality.

As the owner of one, this is absolutely not the case.

But I don't even think this is the biggest problem. It wouldn't matter so much if they'd just fix them when they break, but they don't. They go out of their way, and do everything possible to avoid fixing them, to the point of being rude. I hate it.

The mustang mach-e is infinitely higher build quality than anything Tesla makes. From body panel alignment to interior squeaks and rattles.

Was gonna say the same. I'm not a Ford fan but out of all the American brands they have the best image of quality here in Europe. GM seems to just be trash everywhere.

Did you see the software update brick a Mach-E?

https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1739387245034139692

That said, I've rented a Mach-E and its "self-driving" module is far, far superior to the Tesla. Hands-free, no wheel nudging, and a bar that watches your face/vision. Reminds me of comma.ai type work.

Did you see the software update brick a Tesla Model 3?

https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/112oqln/new_te...

https://www.topspeed.com/real-story-behind-teslas-failed-ota...

To be fair, Tesla's software updates have been relatively robust, and they have quite a zoo of different car configurations. The article you quoted was a problem with an individual car.

Some people have filed a class action about updates breaking batteries so I doubt it's truly just one car.

https://www.hbsslaw.com/cases/tesla-model-s-model-x-software...

And even with the argument of it's just an individual car, well, so is this Twitter post.

I remember that one. Tesla released an update that more accurately estimates the battery performance, resulting in that 20% correction. It didn't affect the battery itself.

This case will go nowhere.

I’ve got one. I’m stuck waiting on a part for about a month after a dealer screw up.

I got hit by the HVBJB issue. And the early recalls.

I’m getting tired of issues. But I’m not sure there’s a better option for me out there. I’ve been through more than most since I have a very early build. Buy today you’re likely fine.

Overall I still really like it. There’s a reason I didn’t buy a Tesla, and it wasn’t Musk’s behavior around the Twitter acquisition/afterwords (it hadn’t happened yet). The company’s reputation has only gotten worse in my mind as the various customer service exposes have come out.

>I got hit by the HVBJB issue.

Same, but had a solid dealer who gave us a brand-new loaner for 2 weeks while they fixed the issue. It was basically a non-event.

>And the early recalls.

What other early recall put you out of commission? Everything else I experienced was a software update.

>I’m getting tired of issues.

Other than the delays on bluecruise 1.3, and the stupid "5 second rule" - what other issues have you had?

The fact that body panel alignment is something to tout is really damning about Tesla. That's just table stakes.

Still my all time favorite defect. https://www.thedrive.com/news/22951/new-tesla-model-3-with-m...

Wow. I hadn’t seen that one story. That’s amazing.

"Breakdown of faults by car brand: Tesla has replaced Dacia at the bottom" [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38760933

It's actually the exact opposite.

Depends on the era and brand. The 1980’s was defined by corner cutting low quality and “buy American” marketing to compensate by playing on nationalism. In 2023 I think most brands have reversed that, but not all.

They all, though, have rushed a higher margin EV product out hoping that magic happens over night and being surprised it actually takes time to build a new vehicle platform. Teslas advantage is many years of development without meaningful competition.

The result is pretty crummy EVs, articles lamenting EVs are unreliable (rather than car makers are making unreliable EVs), etc. Except for Tesla, which are middle of the pack for reliability.

It would be weird to compare an EV of today to any car of any other Era. It's safe to assume that we would be comparing cars of the same era.

I’m comparing American auto manufacturer build quality in general across eras.

Indeed. And that's weird, because we cannot compare EV build quality across eras. And the parent comment was regarding comparing EVs to non EVs in regards to build quality.

It's like we're comparing top grossing sports teams from 2023 and someone starts talking about how the 2023 Yankees could beat the 1912 Yankees hands down.

Shame - it's quite a sharp looking design.

I don’t think this is surprising to anyone who’s been into cars for any length of time. GM isn’t generally known for quality.

Chassis tuning lately and the LS engines is about it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com