GM opens Chevy Bolt EV orders nationwide for deliveries in August

While deliveries of GM’s all-electric Chevy Bolt EV remain slow throughout the rollout, the automaker has announced that it accelerated its plans for nationwide availability by one month.

All authorized dealerships nationwide can now order the $37,500 all-electric car for deliveries in August instead of September.

GM’s Chevy Bolt EV US sales increased to new high of 1,566 units last month. While it was a significant increase, it still lags behind the expected 25,000 to 30,000 deliveries during its first full year of production.

As per GM’s own distribution plan, the Bolt EV is supposedly in dealerships in California, Oregon, Massachusetts, Maryland,  and Virginia since the beginning of the year.

New York, New Jersey and Washington were added throughout the first quarter and deliveries in Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire and Colorado started in May.

The automaker planned to keep adding more states until September, but the plans have changed. Here’s the original rollout plan versus deliveries in the US:

Steve Majoros, Chevrolet’s marketing director for cars and crossovers, said that they are ahead of schedule for the rollout (via Automotive News):

“We were waiting for the training to be done, we were waiting for the right tools to be in place. We are kind of ahead of schedule on implementing all of those things as well as making sure we have enough sufficient inventory.”

Interestingly, he also said that they plan a national ad campaign in the coming weeks, which is somewhat rare for electric vehicles as highlighted in an interesting report on automaker spending (or lack thereof) on advertising for electric cars.

Hopefully, it will be better than their ad for the European version of the car which played up on electric car falsehood.

It will be especially interesting to see if it will have an impact on overall US deliveries as it will have to start competing with the Tesla Model 3 around the same time. Though Tesla’s current backlog of orders is reportedly pushing new reservations into 2019 and therefore, they would be competing for new orders more than deliveries.

While it’s already in almost all of the US’ most populous states, now all authorized dealers can order the all-electric car. You can always check with your local dealers for inventory and see if you can find a deal.

It’s not easy to find everywhere. It took a while for our publisher Seth Weintraub to get his in New York, but he is so far pleasantly surprised by the vehicle. He even found 10 points that he prefers on the Bolt EV over his Tesla Model S.