The Chevrolet Bolt EV

Even we were surprised when we heard the news that the Chevy Bolt EV would get 238 miles on a charge according to the EPA on a 60kWh battery. The “SubCompact Crossover”, as Chevy likes to call it, gets about 30 more miles of EPA range than Tesla’s huge, 7 seat Model S on the same battery capacity but without the low drag coefficient that the Tesla enjoys.

Read our Chevy Bolt EV review

But some new Bolt EV drivers are finding they can really stretch out that mileage, especially in California where the weather is in the 60s or higher year round.

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Korea-based electronic giant LG is making most of the components that make the Chevy Bolt EV an electric vehicle, including the battery pack, electric motor, and power electronics, and the battery packs for the Volt. Therefore, its production capacity will determine GM’s total output for what is currently its only all-electric vehicle in production.

In what could be a good sign for the Bolt EV and the Volt, LG announced this week an expansion of its production facility in Holland, Michigan.
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GM announced today an expansion of Maven, its car-sharing and ridesharing service, in Los Angeles with the introduction of the all-electric Chevy Bolt EV in the fleet.

Once fully deployed, this new initiative will add over 100 Bolt EVs to the Los Angeles fleet.
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Things are moving fast these days at Opel, GM’s European brand. Both GM and the PSA Group, Peugeot-Citroën, have confirmed that they are in talks to further their collaboration and that it could lead to the sale of Opel to PSA.

At the same time, the company’s top management has been working on a strategy to completely transition the brand to only sell all-electric vehicles.
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Last week, Cruise Automation, GM’s startup working on self-driving technology, released a video of its Bolt EV prototype driving autonomously in San Francisco. Even though the company claimed it was driving autonomously, it was quite boring since it was from a dashcam and looked exactly like a video of someone driving around for a few minutes.

The company learned from its mistake and with a simple in-video feed from inside the vehicle, they released a much more impressive video this week showcasing their latest self-driving progress.
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When GM first introduced the Chevy Bolt EV, the automaker said that they didn’t plan for the all-electric car to replace the Chevy Spark EV, but things have changed. Now two years later and after the Bolt has hit a few markets, the company confirmed that its first all-electric vehicle program in a decade is now dead. 
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Today, GM released its delivery report for the month of January and confirmed that it delivered 1,162 Chevy Bolt EVs so far this year. It sounds like the vehicle is still production constrained since the company claims that it has “the fastest days to turn in the industry at 7 days.”
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In this week’s top stories: Tesla quietly completes its new 80 MWh Powerpack station, Elon Musk meets with President Trump and joins his new manufacturing council, Seth takes the 2017 Chevy Bolt EV for a spin, Model 3 gets a slight rebranding and new teaser video, and much more.

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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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