The Chevrolet Bolt was one of the earliest electric vehicles to offer well over 200 miles (321 km) of range at a competitive price. For Ars, it was love at first drive, and that remained true from model year 2017 through MY2023. On the right tires, it could show a VW Golf GTI a thing or two, and while it might have been slow-charging, it could still be a decent road-tripper.
All of this helped the Bolt become General Motors’ best-selling EV, at least until its used-to-be-called Ultium platform got up and running. And that’s despite a costly recall that required replacing batteries in tens of thousands of Bolts because of some badly folded cells. But GM had other plans for the Bolt’s factory, and in 2023, it announced its impending death.
The reaction from EV enthusiasts, and Bolt owners in particular, was so overwhelmingly negative that just a few months later, GM CEO Mary Barra backtracked, promising to bring the Bolt back, this time with a don’t-call-it-Ultium-anymore battery.
All the other specifics have been scarce until now.
When the Bolt goes back on sale later next year for MY2027, it will have some bold new colors and a new trim level, but it will look substantially the same as before. The new stuff is under the skin, like a 65 kWh battery pack that uses lithium iron phosphate prismatic cells instead of the nickel cobalt aluminum cells of old.
The new pack charges more quickly—it will accept up to 150 kW through its NACS port, and 10–80 percent should take 26 minutes, Chevy says. It’s even capable of bidirectional charging, including vehicle-to-home, with the right wallbox. Range should be 255 miles (410 km), a few miles less than the MY2023 version.
Enlarge/ A GM Ultium battery pack like that found in the Lyriq.
Santa Fabio for General Motors
General Motors ended 2023 as the number one automaker in the United States, selling 2.6 million new vehicles during those 12 months. That’s a 14.1 percent increase from its performance in 2022, and comfortably eclipses the 2.3 million cars that Toyota sold during the same period. It had a strong year in terms of electric vehicle sales too—up 93 percent year-on-year.
But a quick look at the data reveals a somewhat less rosy picture. Yes, it was a banner year for GM EVs, with 75,883 deliveries in 2023. But only because of the Chevrolet Bolt EV and Bolt EUV. Chevy delivered 62,045 Bolts in 2023, a 62.8 percent increase on the 38,120 Bolts it sold in 2022.
But as Ars has detailed in the past, the Bolt is no more. Production ended at the Orion Assembly plant in Michigan on December 18, and GM is laying off 945 workers at the plant as it retools the factory to make electric trucks like the Chevy Silverado EV and GMC Sierra EV.
GM CEO Mary Barra has promised a new Bolt EV, this time using GM’s newer battery platform, known as Ultium. But the second-generation Bolt isn’t scheduled to appear until 2025 at the earliest.
Cheap, mass-produced cells?
GM has bet big on Ultium. In 2020 it revealed the new battery platform and told us that the new cells, developed together with LG Chem (which also produced the packs for Bolt) would drop below the $100/kWh barrier “early in the platform’s life.” $100/kWh is the point at which an EV powertrain reaches price parity with an internal combustion engine powertrain, at which point an EV should no longer cost several thousand dollars more than an equivalent conventionally fueled vehicle.
A spokesperson for GM told Ars that “cell production is going great, but the automation we use to pack cells into modules was not able to keep up,” and that “things are definitely improving.”
During the automaker’s Q2 2023 call with investors, it said that it had “deployed teams from GM manufacturing engineering to work on site with our automation supplier to improve delivery times,” and that it had added manual module assembly lines and was installing “more module capacity at all of our North America EV plants, beginning with Factory ZERO and Spring Hill this summer, Ramos Arizpe in the fall, and CAMI in the second quarter of next year.”
Three months later, GM told investors that “our battery module constraint is getting better, which helped us more than double Ultium Platform production in the third quarter compared to the second quarter. We are now in the process of installing and testing our high-capacity module assembly lines, which will continue into the first part of next year.”
GM also said that it believes the production constraint will have been overcome by mid-2024.
Software is hard
Unfortunately for GM, a lack of Ultium cells isn’t its only headache where new EVs are concerned. Last year the automaker revealed that it was dropping support for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, the extremely popular phone-casting apps, from its EVs from model year 2024. Instead, its Ultium-based EVs would ship with a new infotainment system called Ultifi, built using Google’s Android Automotive OS (not to be confused with the phone-casting Android Auto).
Enlarge/ The infotainment system crashed more than once during our drive of the Blazer EV, and the problem is serious enough that GM issued a stop sale for the SUV as a result.
A spokesperson for the company told Ars that “GM is working quickly to address these issues and to implement a fix. Customers will be able to bring their Blazer EVs to Chevrolet dealers once they are notified that the related software update is available. Our engineering teams are working around the clock toward a solution.”
