General Motors (GM)

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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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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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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I received a lot of negative comments after I called the Chevy Bolt EV a compliance car following GM’s cancellation of the nationwide availability at launch. My suspicion and some whispers I’d heard pointed toward GM losing thousands of dollars on each Bolt vehicle before accounting for ZEV credits in California and other markets.

Electrek talked off-the-record with a few people familiar with the Bolt EV program, and the figure of $10,000 was thrown around as the anticipated average loss per vehicle before incentive. Now Detroit News is corroborating today with a similar story citing a person familiar with the matter, claiming the anticipated loss on the $37,500 base price is roughly $8,000 to $9,000.
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As GM is starting to deliver the first Chevy Bolt EV shipments to select dealers in California, the company also launched its online design studio for potential customers to “build their own” Bolt EV. It’s our best look yet at all the options and pricing of GM’s first long-range all-electric vehicle.
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While we were disappointed to learn that the Chevy Bolt EV will not have a nationwide rollout until next year, GM is still going to deliver the electric car in California and Oregon by the end of the year and it is likely going to be one of the cheapest ways to get into electric vehicle ownership or leasing.

Yesterday, GM launched the Chevy Bolt EV’s leasing program and in short, you can get the Bolt EV for $309 a month and $0 cash down after incentives.
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Since all of GM’s all-electric cars have so far been compliance cars produced only to comply with ZEV mandates, it wasn’t out-of-bounds for people to doubt them (myself included) when they announced that the Chevy Bolt EV will be available in all 50 states at launch.

It now looks like the doubt was warranted since after months of weakening their language about the launch, GM has now made it clear that only California and Oregon will get the Bolt in 2016, and the rest of the US will see a “slow flow” throughout 2017.
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As of last month, the U.S. is officially half way to the Department of Energy’s goal to have 1 million electric vehicles on U.S. roads. That goal was first set for 2015, but we are now obviously nowhere near the level and a year late.

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz set 2020 as the new goal for the 1 million mark and with the recent sales numbers, it looks like it shouldn’t be a problem.
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GM is still promising to start shipping the Chevy Bolt EV by the end of the year. After some fear of delays, it looks like it is about to keep its promise as dealerships in California and Oregon are reporting being granted their initial allocation for the upcoming all-electric vehicle.
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GM confirmed the base price of the Chevy Bolt EV today. It reiterated that it will start at $37,495 before any EV incentives for the base LT trim. And now, the automaker also confirmed the price for the Canadian version of the car.

Surprisingly, it will be significantly cheaper in Canada and I’m not talking about electric vehicle incentives.
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GM has been slowly trickling down information about the Chevy Bolt EV in the past few weeks ahead of a release in “late 2016”. Last week, the automaker confirmed an impressive range of 238 miles on its 60 kWh battery pack.

Today it continued releasing information by confirming that DC fast-charging will be offered as a $750 option. GM also confirmed that the Bolt EV will be offered in two trims: LT and Premier.
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Now that mostly everyone has had a chance to catch up on GM and Chevy’s recent announcement about their Bolt EV, we thought it would be helpful to roundup some of the initial first impressions about the car from members of the press that were flown to California by Chevy to test the Bolt’s range…

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After only talking about “more than 200 miles” for over a year now, GM finally announced today the expected EPA-rated range of its upcoming all-electric Chevy Bolt EV. The automaker expects the EPA to give the Bolt an impressive range of 238 miles.
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Building on our report from last week about GM confirming that its Chevy Bolt EV is still on track for production in ‘late 2016’ despite prior reports to the contrary, Autonews says that it spotted a ‘production intent’ Bolt EV in Detroit – hinting at the imminent start of production.
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As the first relatively affordable all-electric car with a range of more than 200 miles, the Chevy Bolt EV is a highly anticipated vehicle. Just like with the Tesla Model 3,  any confirmed delay would be big news, which is probably why several readers pointed me to this report from Cleantechnica (update: they have since issued a correction) claiming that pre-orders have been delayed and deliveries have been pushed to January 2017.

But the problem is that it’s not true. We reached out to GM and a spokesperson confirmed to Electrek that deliveries are still planned for “later in 2016”.
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We said it before, but it’s worth pointing out again now that the production is about to start. GM’s Chevy Bolt EV could have just as well been called the LG Bolt EV since the Korea-based electronic giant, LG, is making most of the components that make the Bolt an electric vehicle, including the battery pack, the electric motor and the power electronics.

And now we learn that LG is gearing up to ‘mass-produce parts’ for the car as early as this month – ahead of the official start of production at GM, which is expected in October.
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There are dozens of companies working to bring autonomous driving to market and as many timelines to make a system commercially available. Most aim for the end of the decade or early next decade. Now GM and Lyft have leaked a timeline for their own system, which is currently under development with prototypes in San Francisco and Scottsdale.

It looks like GM, which already confirmed that they want to first use autonomous driving for taxi/ride-sharing with Lyft, plans to have a fleet in operation by January 2019.
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Electrek has learned of yet another important hire at electric car startup Faraday Future (FF). The company has been successful in convincing an impressive number of auto executives to join the effort since its inception only 2 years ago, from Tesla manufacturing leadership to former Ferrari CEO, and now we learn that the company managed to poach electric propulsion expert Peter Savagian from GM.

The General Director of Electric Drive Systems and New Products Development joined FF as Vice President of Propulsion Engineering earlier this week. He will be leading powertrain engineering operations at the California-based startup.
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GM announced today that it surpassed the 100,000 mark for Chevy Volt sales in the US – making the Volt the first plug-in vehicle to achieve the milestone. Interestingly, GM broke down the EV miles vs Gas miles driven by the fleet since its introduction in 2010.

The company says that Volt owners have driven “almost 1.5 billion miles in EV mode of a total 2.5 billion cumulative miles.”
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Update: a GM representative contacted to us to clarify that Lyft will actually get the vehicle later this year and not at the launch of the Express Drive program like the press release seen below led us to believe.

GM has long stated that it plans to start deliveries of the Chevy Bolt EV by the end of 2016. It was since revealed in March that the all-electric vehicle entered pre-production on the Orion Assembly line. We later learned that GM is planning for the start of regular volume production of the 2017 Bolt in October 2016.

Now it looks like the vehicle will be on the road sooner than anticipated and not necessarily in the hands of customers, but through GM’s partnership with Lyft, a popular ride-sharing company.
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Earlier this month, it was revealed that GM and Lyft are partnering to test a fleet of self-driving electric taxis sometime within the next year in an undisclosed city. Now we learn that the city in question is San Francisco as the first few vehicles, Chevy Bolt EVs with a sensor suite on top, have been spotted in the city.
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