The Chevrolet Bolt EV

GM invited us to come to San Francisco for a new round of test drives of their new flagship all-electric vehicle: the Chevy Bolt EV. Note: The lovely folks at Chevy paid for our travel, hotel and fed us quite nicely. You can find significant discounts on the Chevy Bolt here.

I had mixed feelings when I first got inside the 2017 Chevy Bolt EV more than a year ago at CES 2016 and those mixed feelings persist today. My concerns aren’t about the engineering, technology or even the implementation of the vehicle. The Bolt is unequivocally the best $30,000 EV you can buy today (in some states + Canada) and for my money, the best car of any kind on the roads right now at its price point.  GM/Chevrolet deserve a mountain of praise for delivering the first affordable EV with more range than anyone could hope to use on a daily basis.

But there are still some concerns…

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After a soft launch in California last year, GM’s Chevy Bolt EV is now arriving in Canada – or at least one Bolt EV has arrived in Canada. GM’s Bourgeois Chevrolet dealership in Rawdon, Quebec, announced that it received its first all-electric Bolt EV.
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While reminiscent of the recent claims of unintended sudden accelerations in Tesla’s vehicles, especially after a Model X owner crashed into his own garage, we are not talking about the same thing here. Instead, we are talking about a possible acceleration without anyone being in the car – making a pedal misapplication unlikely.

That’s what a new Chevy Bolt EV owner in California claims happened after having parked his car in his garage earlier this week.
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We finally have a clear idea of when GM is planning to make the new Chevy Bolt EV available everywhere in the US. They announced that the Bolt EV will be available in all 50 states at launch, but they gave up on the idea last year and as we suspected, only made the vehicle available in California at launch. It’s now in both California and Oregon – more ZEV states will follow during the first half of the year.

Now we learn that non-ZEV states will follow in July and the automaker only plans for all-state availability in September – about a year after originally planned.
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It’s being reported this week that the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Ore., sent in a request for information (RFI) to automakers for what could become the biggest electric car order ever: 24,000 vehicles.

The municipalities are currently looking for information about what electric vehicles they could get on what timeline before launching a formal bidding process.
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If GM isn’t going to reach large production volumes with the Chevy Bolt EV, maybe it will with more all-electric models using the same platform. That’s what CEO Mary Barra is suggesting this week by saying that the automaker plans to release a “huge range of vehicles” using the platform.

Barra made the comment this week at the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) and added that the platform will also be used for the company’s autonomous program at the Deutsche Bank Global Auto Industry.
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In the first few months after its launch, GM’s Chevy Bolt EV managed to get away with the Motor Trend 2017 Car of the Year, the Green Car of the Year, and now it became the first all-electric vehicle to win the coveted North American Car of the Year (NACTOY ) as announced at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit today.
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GM released its delivery report for December 2016 yesterday and it represents the whole year 2016 of deliveries for the Chevy Bolt EV since it started shipping only last month. The automaker confirmed that it managed to deliver 579 Chevy Bolt EVs in 2016.
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nice Bolt parking job Woz

In the comment section of a long winded Facebook rant on the trials and tribulations of driving through Arizona’s pothole-laden roads and staying at pet-friendly hotels in Vegas, Apple’s Co-Founder and flip flopping EV enthusiast Steve Wozniak noted that he is now expecting his Chevy Bolt to become his main car.  It will arrive next week as Chevy slowly ramps up deliveries in compliance car states – currently California and Oregon only.

We’ve, for some reason, documented Woz’s plight from Swarming his Supercharger station odysseys and his on again off again love affair with the Chevy Bolt…
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After delivering the first few Chevy Bolt EVs two weeks ago, only a handful more units have been making their way to customers in California, but GM has now reportedly shipped the all-electric car in volume for the first time with a ‘trainload’.
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Another industry analyst is supporting the thesis that GM’s Chevy Bolt EV is a compliance car aimed at accumulating ZEV credits to allow the Michigan-based automaker to continue selling its profitable gas-guzzling vehicles.

After meeting with GM CFO Chuck Stevens last week, JP Morgan analyst Ryan Brinkman released a note to clients claiming that the Bolt EV is part of an “improving array of electric vehicles from automakers which are pricing such vehicles with the aim not to turn a profit but rather to sell in sufficient volume to subsidize the rest of their more lucrative portfolios of internal combustion engine vehicles from a regulatory compliance perspective.”
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Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s introduction to electric vehicle ownership was interesting. The engineer claimed that Tesla CEO Elon Musk reprimanded him in an email exchange for buying a gas-guzzler in 2013 instead of a Tesla Model S.

He has since bought the vehicle and has been often spotted at Tesla Superchargers and talking up Tesla on his various social media accounts, which is why it was surprising when he said that he was looking into trading it for a Chevy Bolt EV earlier this year.

Now that the Bolt EV is actually available in California, where the Woz lives, he didn’t actually end up buying one; instead, he bought another Tesla – and highlighted the vehicle’s main advantage on the Bolt in the process.
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Following GM’s acquisition of autonomous driving startup Cruise Automation, the company launched autonomous vehicle testing programs using the all-electric Chevy Botl EV in San Francisco and Arizona. Today, the company announced that it is bringing the program home in Michigan after the state passed a new law approving self-driving vehicles for testing and even sales after an evaluation process.
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GM has been revealing its rollout plan for the Chevy Bolt EV in more detail over the last few weeks since giving up on the ambitious “50 state availability at launch.” The automaker has now delivered the first few units in California and will move to other states from early to mid-2017.

Now the company has confirmed its plan for the European version of the vehicle, the ‘Opel Ampera E’.
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While it shouldn’t necessarily be seen as a swipe at Tesla for delivering the first sub-$40,000 long-range electric vehicle before them, it wouldn’t be the first time that GM tries to subtly, or more directly, take a shot at Tesla with the Chevy Bolt EV. Like when it sent out press pictures with a Bolt prototype driving in front of Tesla’ HQ or when they criticized the company for its reservation process.

Today, GM announced that it delivered the first Bolt EVs to 3 customers in Fremont, California – just a few blocks from Tesla’s factory.
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So there’s been a very important question about the Chevy Bolt that we’ve been following closely since its specs started trickling out earlier this year. How fast can it charge? We’re not talking about Level 2/Home charging which was clarified this week at 7.68 kW.

The Chevy Bolt Owner’s Manual which is now online (PDF) confirms that the Bolt will charge at 32 amps at 240 volts = 7.68 kW – giving the car 25 miles of charge per hour. This week, AeroVironment also announced that they would be providing the optional Chevy-branded home charging stations (vs. the included 110V plug adapter) to Chevy by upping their 30A EVSE-RS Charging stations 2 more amps to reach this level. As we’ve discussed before, this is a solid speed for home and destination charging but trails Tesla’s 48A chargers. The real world difference here in charging 100 miles is 3 hours for Tesla and 4 hours for the Bolt. Not a huge difference really when most of this will be done overnight.

But the real question when we are talking about charging speed is DC fast-charging for long distance travel. There are a bunch of differing statements out there which say Chevy is going to include either 50kW or 80kW depending who and when you ask.

While this might seem trivial on the surface, it is actually quite a big deal. The difference between 50kW and 80kW is a significant 60% increase. To put that into a real world scenario, imagine you want to fill up 2/3rds (40 kWh or 158 miles range) of the Bolt’s 60 kWh, 238-mile battery pack:

• 80kW, that takes 30 minutes
• 50kW, that takes 48 minutes

So we’re getting mixed messages from Chevy. Let’s run down the data points.

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The Chevy Bolt EV is finally about to hit the road, and it seems to be a great car.  It’s already winning lots of awards, including Motor Trend’s Car of the Year and the Green Car of the Year award.  But GM, via their European subsidiary Opel, is already showing signs of the same tone-deaf sales strategy that has relegated their Volt to second-or-third place in sales behind much more expensive (Model S) or range-limited (Leaf) models.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY_juEthb-8

Their new ad for the Ampera-e, the European version of the Bolt EV, depicts some cockroaches trying to cross a road in the countryside, thinking that they will be safe because they’ll hear any cars coming and that they’re far enough from the city that they won’t have to worry about a quiet EV sneaking up on them, as no EV has the range to get that far.  Then one of the cockroaches is squished by a fast-moving Bolt EV’s tire.

So the idea was to highlight the Bolt’s class-leading range and smooth, quiet operation.  But the problem is that, in doing so, they put a negative light on both aspects of the car, rather than a positive one.

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Battery capacity degradation is to be expected with any battery-powered electric vehicle. The questions are how much degradation, how fast, and what is covered under the warranty. GM released the owner’s manual for the Chevy Bolt EV this week and in it, the automaker warns of potential battery degradation of up to 40% during the 8-year warranty period or within 100,000 miles.
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There seems to be an unlikely rivalry brewing amongst charging networks, and while at first it could have been seen as a good thing since competition is generally good for customers, it now seems to have reached a point of weird misinformation that is becoming detrimental to EV customers.

It started back in September after GM launched its marketing efforts for the Chevy Bolt EV and partnered up with ChargePoint for charging. Forbes immediately tried to make a pageview-grabbing war, ‘Tesla Supercharger vs ChargePoints’, but I think we shut that down quickly. (TL;DR: Tesla owners can use ChargePoint’s DC stations, and do often, but not as often – see below – as ChargePoint asserts)

It didn’t end there, as GM is now using CHAdeMO and Tesla Superchargers in its advertising of its new all-electric car, even though the vehicle doesn’t have the capability to use either of those two types of charging stations. 
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While the Chevy Bolt EV is currently only available in California and Oregon, it will soon make its way to the east coast thanks to a deal between GM and the city of New York. The de Blasio administration is ordering 50 all-electric Chevy Bolt with the first ones set to arrive in the spring and the order is expected to go up to 80 vehicles by the end of the fiscal year.

After a discount from GM and federal incentives, the city of New York is getting the vehicles at a very attractive price.
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In this week’s top stories: Tesla Enhanced Autopilot gets a release date, Audi’s first all-electric vehicle heads to the moon with SpaceX, countries make bids for Tesla Gigafactory 2, the latest Chevy Bolt EV news, and much more.

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