I haven’t driven many EVs, but the bolt was the worst of them all. You literally can’t even tell what your battery percentage is. They give you ten bars and you have to read it like a WiFi signal, except it’s impossible due to how small it is. GM vehicles are absolute trash. Anyway more EVs are better so ignore my rant.
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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My parents have a bolt and it has a gas gauge type bar, but also a range in kilometers overlayed on the bar and it takes up the entire left hand side of the dashboard. It's like an inch wide by 5 inches tall. Very easy to see and read. So they may have learned in later models that people need to see how much range they have left
Or that's the european or canadian version? It was the brand new 2023 Bolt, with less than 1k miles on it, from a car rental. It just had shit software. No overlay or anything. I literally had to google how to tell the battery percent because it's so non-obvious. And it wasn't even on the main cluster, it was in the center display on a different screen. Just absolute shit. Car drove great though.
Canadian version, and the one you drove sounds awful bad
Like Butterbee mentioned, that was probably an older model and they learned their lesson. Bolt is a great city/commuter car. Nothing fancy, but still not terrible. The problem is that the price doesn't reflect that. My friend just test drive one that was one step above the base model and it was $43k. People will just go to the Kia Niro/Hyundai Kona at that price.
It was a brand new car rental. It had less than a thousand miles on it. So no, not old. It wasn't bad by any means, but GM software is just absolutely shit and it showed. The car itself was great.
Weird. I was in a 2023 as well, and just last week. It was the Bolt EUV, but I can't imagine the software is different between the EUV and small Bolts
might be a screen size thing. idk. anyway, the car drove great, but man if it's got the reliability of a gm and the software of a gm then I don't really think it's a good buy.
Yeah, and value of it is not good. They are behind on charging tech quite a bit too. 50kw on a modern car is just so bad. If you do zero road trips it would be fine, but for a lot of people that relegates it to second car status, and at that price it just isn't worth it. Hell my 2 year old ID.4 was 10k cheaper and has better tech.
The bolt has always been a strange car for the sake of being strange. I went to look at one and was turned off by non-symmetric two-toned seats, the generally ugly exterior, and just weird control interface. I’ve had cheap cars including a Chevy Aveo, so barebones functionality doesn’t scare me.
I kind of wish it was just like a Malibu or something with an EV drivetrain. A lot of people don’t want an EV as a status symbol. For those who do, they wouldn’t buy a GM product anyways…
the car drove fine, and I didn't really care about the looks (well the interior looks weren't great, but they weren't horrendous) it was just the software. No reason for it to be that bad. it was like they did it on purpose.
With the federal incentives to produce EVs it's kind of strange they went through the trouble of discontinuing it without a replacement in the first place.
I get suspicious about stuff like this because it reeks of corporate attention engineering, though at least in this case I think there's a possibility that they genuinely screwed up and had to pull back from fully killing off the bolt.
GM for a while has needed to refresh to bolt to a lower cost and more efficient battery and platform architecture, and while it would definitely cost quite a bit to do that its certainly not an unreasonable challenge. But, they could also solve that problem by entirely replacing it with a more efficient (cheaper to make) product offering. But thanks to GM dragging hind leg getting the equinox, blazer, and silverado EVs to market in any meaningful way, plus their inability to adjust to union needs, it's clear that they just don't have it in them to replace the bolt (or really, any of their offerings) with another car right now.
So, what other options do they have? The bolt is great because the manufacturing line exists and parts are mostly tooled, and there's immediate potential for federal rebates. But, again, it needs a refreshed battery and charging architecture. Maybe some knucklehead GM c-suite finally saw the benefit in not chucking the bolt line out the window and just investing in that refresh cost instead of killing the line. Maybe it was just that simple.
But more than anything, I'd make the cynical bet that this is what they planned to do all along, and were just saying "discontinue" to drum up excitement when they announced it'd actually come back to the plate as a refresh.
I think the answer is in the title...