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.
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.